Victoria's Great Lobster Fishers. Part III

Dayle Pranskunas

Deckhand, Queenscliff

When Dayle Pranskunas was a three-year-old girl she watched her mother head off to sea to work on a scallop boat. “I just wanted to be like her,” says Dayle. “It seemed like the most adventurous way of making a living.” When Dayle was 20 she landed a job as a deckhand on a scallop boat working out of Port Welshpool in South Gippsland. “It was brilliant. It is one of the most beautiful parts of the world,” she says. She would spend five days at sea, packing scallops in bins and putting them into the hold. “I would a eat a few too. Cooked in garlic butter. Delicious. They are also sensational raw. Like an oyster,” she says with a smile. After four years a friend introduced her to a fisher working out of Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula. “They said to me, ‘I’ll get you on a better boat’,” she says. She started working with one of the most experienced lobster fishers in Victoria. “We go out and fish in The Rip,” says Dayle, referring to the dangerous and notorious waters off Port Philip Heads. “The window to safely fish on the slack tide is very narrow,” she says. “When the tide changes the flow of water is so strong that the buoys are submerged.”

Twenty years on and Dayle is still working on the same boat as a deckhand, working out of Queenscliff on the Bellarine Peninsula. When they are not fishing for lobster they are long lining for snapper or shark or catching wrasse in special fish traps. She loves the way the season gets busy towards Christmas. “We will go out on Christmas Day sometimes,” she says. “We get back in time for Christmas lunch and we, naturally, have lobster. Fresh lobster. I love it boiled and chilled but sometimes just cut the tail into medallions. To me, it is the flavour of Christmas.”