FOR Vicky Macdonald, fishing has never really been about the fish.
The 71-year-old Macleay Island resident says the true value of fishing lies in the memories it creates.
Moments shared with family that endure long after the lines are wound in and the esky is packed away.
“Fishing was my family’s first sport,” Ms Macdonald said, recalling childhood trips from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains to the NSW South Coast.
“We would drive the 1947 green Chevie down Brown Mountain and pitch camp with the old army tent at Wallaga Lake.”
Those early trips were less about technique and more about togetherness.
Her brother would head to the rocks to fish with local Indigenous people using spears, while others caught crabs and netted prawns.
“My father would patiently cast over and over, and we’d cook the fish on a camp fire,” she said.
One moment has never left her.
“I remember one time my sister running out of the water with a large crab attached to her toe,” she said.
Fishing also shaped quieter, more reflective family moments.
Her father was a keen trout fly fisherman at Lake Eucumbene and other inland lakes, while Ms Macdonald and her mother found their own ways to engage with the landscape.
“I wouldn’t fish, but I would crawl around the rocks finding dragonfly wings, and my mother would sit on the rocks and sketch,” she said.
“It’s a lovely vignette.”
By the time she was six or seven, her sister was casting for rainbow and brown trout on the Murrumbidgee River, while Ms Macdonald made toys from grass along the riverbank.
Decades later, the tradition continued into the next generations.
One of her most cherished recent memories is watching her brother teach his grandchild how to fish at Cleveland Point.
“I saw a flash of silver as the grandchild hoisted the fish onto shore, landing a big bream in less than 30 seconds,” she said.
“These are the memories we cherish – that proud grandfather moment and the joyous photo that stays forever in your mind.”
Fishing also played an unexpected role in Ms Macdonald’s own love story.
She met her husband at Redland Bay, where he lived a few houses down and regularly walked past her home with his sons, fishing rods in hand.
“One day he asked if I’d like to come along, and said he had an extra rod just for me,” she said.
“We might have had a few wines afterwards.
Her husband’s connection to fishing runs deep, as he spent his childhood on fishing trawlers in his native New Zealand.
