In each hand, she held a fish by the gills. One was a small shark, the other some sort of fish with a white chin and fangs.
I swallowed a couple of times before I could speak. “Been fishing?”
“My deckhands have been and they know he's my favourite.” She held up the fanged fish.
“What is that?” I asked. Don't tell me it's a vampire fish, and that's why you like it. My little sisters would.
She laughed, a pleasant sound. “He's a baldchin groper, possibly one of the tastiest fish in the sea, after tuna and wahoo, of course.” – Joe Fisher, Ocean's Gift

This bloke is a baldchin groper (Choerodon rubescens) and he's only found in Western Australian waters. Yes, I do know he's a bloke because he was huge.

Now…the transgender bit is true. Baldies are all mature females at 3-4 years old, when they're just under 30cm long. They do their female breeding thing for 4-8 years before they change sex when they're around 50cm long. Female fish that turn male. The big boys can grow to be up to 70cm long and 7kg. Oh, now those would be some absolutely delicious fillets.

And, yes, I have eaten them, so I can attest to how tasty a baldie is.

Baldchin gropers spawn at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, where Ocean's Gift is set, so these carnivorous fish are pretty common in and around the reefs.

Now, if you're wondering about what a wahoo (Acanthocybium solandri) is, it's the fish pictured below, which was caught off Coral Bay in Western Australia. The other fish alongside it in the ice were deep-sea pink, goldband and crimson snapper – all at least a 30 cm long – making him almost a metre long. Delicious, too, but as a deep water sport fish, they're hard to catch and well worth it. Actually, the fillets from these iced fish are still in my freezer, including that wahoo. I think I know what I'll be cooking for dinner tomorrow.

Charles Darwin never made it to the Abrolhos. He left the Beagle to go write some books about coral reefs, evolution and the origin of species. So it was John Lort Stokes in the HMS Beagle who made the initial survey of Rat Island in 1840. His notes are quite descriptive:

“As we threaded our way among the patches of coral, the view from the masthead of the submarine forests through the still pellucid water was very striking. The dark blue of the deep portions of the lagoon contrasted beautifully with the various patches of light colours interspersed.
The centre island we named Rat Island, from the quantity of that vermin with which it was infested. We also saw here a few seals, and numbers of a very pretty lizard with its tail covered in spines…”

Joe Fisher is hardly the first bloke to go visit the Abrolhos or even Rat Island for a holiday. In the 1930s, Rat Island was considered a holiday resort.
In the Geraldton Guardian and Express Saturday 26 February 1938:

“Further testimony to the attractions of the Abrolhos Islands as a holiday resort was made last week by two young city men, who had spent a week on the islands. Both were loud in their praises of the islands and expressed appreciation of the recreation to be had there in fishing and swimming, and of the wonders of bird life and the coral formations. The latter, they described as marvellous. Thanks to the skipper the trip had been splendid. Rat Island was used as a base, from where they spent a good deal of time in cruising round the islands…”

It's also the island where you can see Giuseppe's grave. Giuseppe drowned in mysterious circumstances after the Columbia sank in February, 1921.

The island was infested with rats, but they have since been eradicated, and the birds have moved back in force. At last count, I think there were at least 100,000 seabirds on Rat Island. From little peeping terns right up to soaring sea-eagles.

Rat Island is home to a number of rock lobster fishers like Skipper, Joe and Vanessa from Ocean's Gift. There are around thirty fishing camps and a research station on Rat Island, too.

There are a couple of little beaches, but you'll be sharing them with a sleepy sea lion or two.

It has one of only three airstrips on the 122 islands at the Houtman Abrolhos, but the air strip is at the southern end of the island near the water, so landing always feels like you're about to go for a swim.

Most people would probably say sharks. I mean, there’s the teeth, the sheer size of a shark…as well as the uncertainty as to whether sirens or mermaids exist.

The sirens in the Ocean’s Gift series can live in water or on land, their song capable of controlling both humans and animals. Including sharks.

A recurring theme in the Ocean’s Gift series, sharks play a significant part in the story. Dangerous, yes, but useful, too, as the sirens show.

Of course, mermaids aren’t real. And they’ll kill me if I tell you otherwise.

This is a background video for Ocean’s Gift, a story which takes place at the Abrolhos in modern times. Why didn’t I put more of the Batavia story in Ocean’s Gift? Main character Joe Fisher, pure and simple. He was more worried about his possible next door neighbour than a historic shipwreck. Of course, he doesn't know that he'll be living next door to Vanessa, nor that wrecking a boat at the Abrolhos is easier than he thinks…

“Welcome to the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, girls. They may be cursed, but for a time they will also be home.” – Sirena, Ocean's Gift

Fractured moonlight on the water was the only sign of the reefs on the surface, part of the islands’ curse. Amid all the contrasts, this remained unchanged. – Sirena, Ocean's Gift

122 islands formed from the shallow coral reefs that are some of the furthest from the Equator anywhere in the world. They’re more than 60 km off the coast of Western Australia, so you don’t often see them from the mainland.

Home to millions of sea birds and some amazing fish, as well as land species found nowhere else in the world, the girls of the Ocean’s Gift picked a pretty special place to come ashore.

“I got a cousin who does some charter fishing out at the Abrolhos. Best fishing of your life, mate. I’ll give him a call, see if I can set you up.” – Dean, Ocean’s Gift

Charter fishing is when you charter a boat and go fishing on it. They provide the gear and the bait; clean, gut and fillet the fish – plus they help you take photos of you and your catch. No wonder it’s a pretty popular activity in Western Australia – and have you seen the fish?

There’s sharks that you’re not allowed to catch, but no one told them they can’t eat us.

There are pink snapper.

There’s a fish with fangs called a baldchin groper – but he’s delicious if you can catch him.

There are samsonfish – huge things that’ll eat your lunch if you drop it over the side. They took off with my chicken wrap once – faster than seagulls, those things.

“A week on a free fishing charter and possibly getting paid to fish for weeks after it. What’s the worst that can happen?” – Joe, Ocean’s Gift

Sharks seem to be the flavour of the month lately, and not just at the fish and chip shop down the road. The media have tagged my home town of Perth as the “shark attack capital of the world” because of the number of fatal shark attacks off the Western Australian coast in the last year. It's come to the point where researchers have a huge amount of money to tag the sharks themselves. Yes, we've got sharks on Facebook and Twitter.

There are lots of sharks in the ocean and lots of shark species off the Western Australian coast. From records of past shark attacks, there's only three out of 160 species who tend to snack on humans – great white sharks, bull sharks and tiger sharks, all of which swim up and down the WA coast.

Bull and tiger sharks are part of the group of sharks known as “whalers” and they are fair game for recreational fishers in most Western Australian waters, provided they meet the legal size limits. Bull sharks even swim up the Swan River – there's a bull shark nursery in the Swan River, east of the Narrows Bridge. Tiger sharks are commonly seen up at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands and Ningaloo Reef, both off the Western Australian coast. When they get older, the stripes tend to fade, so they're not as recognisable as tiger sharks. A shark attack at the Abrolhos in 2005 was blamed on a great white shark, but the length was given as 6 m. Tiger sharks get that big, but whites tend to only get up to 5 m, plus they don't visit the Abrolhos as much.

The size limit on catching whaler sharks is 1.8 m, because sharks bigger than 1.8 m may have high levels of heavy metals. Someone should tell Vanessa how lucky she is that the Fisheries staff weren't around when she caught herself a tiger shark. The fines for catching fish outside the rules is huge – numbered in the thousands of dollars. Plus, Vanessa could have lost the Siren and her fishing licence.

Great white sharks are protected under Australian Commonwealth law. That means no white shark fillets. Humans in Australia aren't allowed to catch white sharks. No one's told the sharks that they aren't allowed to catch humans, though, and it doesn't look like it's high on anyone's to do list. Whites are considered to be the sharks responsible for the recent fatal shark attacks off the WA coast.

There is another side, though. The sharks have been swimming in the oceans since before there were humans. I understand they prefer sea lions to humans and attacks on humans tend to be a case of mistaken identity. After all, Joe was swimming with sea lions when he had a close encounter with a tiger shark at the Abrolhos. He was also swimming in the evening – the time sharks hunt. Sharks hunt on cloudy days, too, because the light's similar to dawn and dusk. Ask any photographer. So, all in all, swimming at night in deep water with sea lions is not the brightest thing to do, but that's Joe for you.

Yes, I've willingly been swimming with sharks. I even sought one out at Cocos for the photo at the top of this post.

Reef sharks are little, with the one in the photograph above perhaps a metre long. I've heard of a small number of shark attacks by reef sharks, but none of these were fatal. I'm not even sure if they drew blood.

If a large shark is about to seriously injure or kill a human, I believe there is some justification for killing that shark in defence of the human. But I do know that catching a shark big enough to kill a human is no mean feat.

Unless, of course, the person catching the shark is Vanessa. Then all bets are off –  the question is whether Vanessa lets the shark swim away or carves it up for supper.

More than 40, 000 humpback whales travel from Antarctica to Australia every year. They swim up the coast, blowing air out of their blowholes, breaching, breeding and birthing their calves. They even sing – I’ve heard them both above and below the water. Whale song is as eerie in person as it sounds recorded.

The Australian humpback population isn’t as even as you might expect. I took it for granted that humpback whales would flock in their thousands to holiday off the Queensland coast, in the Great Barrier Reef, like so many human tourists. They do – at least 10,000 whales, known as “Population E”, migrate in winter up the eastern coast of Australia to the largest barrier reef in the world.

The remaining 30,000 (possibly more) swim from Antarctica up the Western Australian coast, all the way to Camden Sound, near Broome. This is the largest humpback whale population in the world.

Encountering a whale in the Geelvink Channel between the Houtman Abrolhos Islands and Geraldton isn’t a rare occurrence in winter and spring, when at least 30,000 Population D whales are headed north for the winter and south again for the summer. I’ve seen whales breaching, flying over this Channel in a charter plane from the Abrolhos in July.

Whales travel to Australia’s northern coasts to mate and, the following year, to give birth to the resulting babies. During their long swim, humpback whales rest in areas like Exmouth Gulf and the waters to the north of Rottnest Island. In these resting areas, the baby whales play and learn some of the behaviours they will need to know as adults, like breaching.

Back in 1999, Populations D and E were estimated to be no bigger than 14,000 and 4,000, respectively. In the intervening thirteen years, both populations have more than doubled. It's likely that bans on commercial whaling and other human conservation measures have helped whale populations to recover.

Or could it really be because a mermaid midwife has been assisting in whale births for that time? For the answer to that, I suggest you ask Belinda.

The photos below and above I took last week, on the 1st and the 3rd October 2012.