Being a fishing guide on Australia’s remote Cape York Peninsula I tend to see some amazing things while being on the water.  Sharks smashing into the back of the boat chewing on the prop and stalling the outboard, massive crocodiles eating smaller crocodiles, dolphins teaching their young on the shallow flats how to hunt permit, miles upon miles of tuna smashing bait on the surface creating such a roar that it is deafening, these are some of things I get to witness. With each day on the water bringing new and bizarre eye candy one would wonder what I may see next. Well Mother Nature has a funny way with things and while guiding my American client John Berzins the other day we observed another bizarre example of her at work.
The day started like every other guiding day. Having coffee on the back deck of the “Tropic Paradise” discussing the days fishing options with John as the sun was just rising. He mentioned that he would like to catch a Saratoga. “No worries John, we’ll go up to the freshwater reaches of the river and I know exactly the place” I said to him. With that we had the day planed so we loaded the boat and headed off up river. The freshwater reaches of most Cape York rivers are stunning with the Doughboy being no exception. Paper barks, Golden Banksias and Nepa Palms line both banks. The vines of the carnivorous Pitcher plant and Cape York orchids hang draped over the water. Casting up here takes considerable skill as flicking flies under overhanging brush, short casts to sunken timber and dropping flies into water lily patches are the norm for this area. Your back casts are also forever being threatened by the trees on the opposite bank but this day John was placing the fly in all the right places. After a couple of hours of slowly making our way up the river John had landed a nice Barramundi and had one big Saratoga come out to the fly. The river now was changing the further we went upstream. Here the water was crystal clear, the creek was narrow and shallow connecting deep pools that looked really fishy. It was at one of these pools that I said to John“ Cast up against the bank in the slower moving water”. He put in the perfect cast , striped once and was hooked up to his first Saratoga.

I netted his fish and then John reached into the net to unhook it. As he was trying to work the hook out of the fish’s lip I noticed something in it’s mouth. “ Hold on John there’s something in its mouth” John opened the Togas mouth. “ Holy Shit!!! there’s a skink in there” I said. “ Is it alive? ” John asked. “ No its eyes are glazed over, looks like it’s dead. Lets get a couple of photos of that” I snapped off a couple of photos of the skink in the fishes mouth and then removed the fly and took a few more shots of John with his prize. “ Let me hold the fish so I can get a couple of more close-ups of the skink” I said. As I was looking through the lens of the camera I noticed that the once glazed over eyes of the skink were now black. “ Hey John it's alive” John looked at the skink. “ Wow man, it just blinked at me and look it’s breathing.” The lizard that we thought was dead was very much alive!! I snapped a few more shots off as it tried to crawl out of the saratogas mouth. We were witnessing a creatures ultimate will to survive. The skink had probably slowed down it’s heart rate in order to survive the length of time it would  have been underwater without air. “Well John, we’ll have to pull the skink out.” John gently grasped the reptile and slowly pulled it out of the saratoga's mouth. John being a physician and surgeon says to me “ I’m use to helping out people giving birth  but this is like some crazy rebirth.” Once out of the fishes mouth the only obvious damage to the skink was where the tail had been digested by the stomach acid and a few teeth marks on it’s back. John released the saratoga back into the water and I beached the boat so he could release the skink back on land. The lizard hopped happily out of John’s hand and scurried off under the leaf litter probably felling pretty good about being back home. I turned to John who still had a look of disbelief and said “ You know John, that was pretty crazy. We’ll probably never see anything like that again.” “Your right about that Al. We just rescued that skink from a certain death.” I jokingly said “ We can call it the International Skink Rescue or I.S.R. Seeing that you’re from the US and I’m from Canada.”  
John tried to control his laughter saying “ That’s excellent, seeing that it was a joint effort.” I turned the boat around and started heading back downstream to the “Paradise” for lunch, smiling and thinking of skink fly patterns that I’ll tie up when I get home.