Ben Jones (GT Buster): Chasing Giant Trevally in Remote Australia

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 714 with Ben Jones, also known as GT Buster, talking about fishing the Great Barrier Reef and the remote adventure of driving up to Cape York, Australia.

Meeting GT Buster and Comparing Notes on Cape York

Tom Rowland: Alright, we are live with Ben Jones, GT Buster. What time is it over there?

Ben Jones: 6:30 in the morning. My first coffee of the morning is up and rolling.

Tom Rowland: Right on, man. Well, thanks for doing this. I've been following you on Instagram for a pretty good while, and then I had Mick Guthrie on the podcast and he introduced us. So I'm really excited to get to talk to you, man.

Ben Jones: Yeah, I can't wait to dive in.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So you live in a fishing wonderland. When I look at what you do, it's truly incredible. I've talked about the trip that I took to Australia on this podcast a few times, and my trip was in a similar area, or the same area, that you're in. Basically it would be like fishing the Gulf Coast of Florida versus the ocean side of Florida. I was on the — I guess what would you call that — the Gulf side of Cape York, or Carpentaria?

Ben Jones: You're up in Cape York, I think, but you're on the western side. We usually venture up to the eastern side. So where you guys went was probably a little different — not so much reef. I don't think I've been on that side yet, so it's still on the bucket list. I just get so addicted to that east coast.

Tom Rowland: Well, what you do is really incredible, and you've got the Great Barrier Reef over there. I was able to go snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef out of Cairns — just took a tourist boat out there. It wasn't anything crazy, I just had half a day and thought, man, I've got to get in the water somehow. So I took the first tourist boat I could find, and as soon as I got in the water I saw one of those giant Napoleon wrasse — I guess it's like the pet that comes to visit the dive boats. I went down the ladder, turned around, and there was this giant thing right behind me. It scared me to death, but it was also one of the coolest experiences ever. The Great Barrier Reef is one of the wonders of the world. That place is unbelievable.

Ben Jones: Yeah, it is an unbelievable place. I've been going up there since I was probably sixteen or seventeen. I live in Brisbane now, which is the capital city of Queensland, on the eastern side of Australia. To get up to the Great Barrier Reef from here — there's some southern reef closer to the coastline that's about a day's drive — but to get to the really remote, nice parts of the reef up in Cape York, right at the top of Australia, it takes a good two days of driving, and depending on conditions and the roads, that can be longer. You really need to take the time to do it. We set aside time out of our schedule to plug in, get on the road, and pack the truck full of gear. It's so remote you've got to pack so much.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's what Mick and I were talking about — the challenges of that trip. When I flew over that area, it was getting dark, we flew in in the late afternoon, and there wasn't a light bulb anywhere. It was just black down there. So walk us through what it looks like driving up that area. What are the roads like, and what are the challenges? How do you even have enough fuel to drive for two days? Are there places to fill up? Those are serious logistical challenges going into such a remote area.

The Two-Day Drive Into Cape York

Ben Jones: Well, the main trip we've been doing up to Cape York, we've been doing since 2004, and a lot's changed in that time, Tom. The first trip we ever did took us three full days of driving — the last hundred kilometers, maybe sixty or seventy miles, took a full day because we kept getting bogged over and over. For the first day and a half you're on the highway up the coastline, and it's only one lane each way. Compared to you guys — I've been on your highways, and let me tell you, that's a death trap driving on what feels like the wrong side of the road.

Tom Rowland: Depending on what city you go to, it's worse. Which one did you have the pleasure of experiencing?

Ben Jones: Me and Mick did a trip over there a couple of years ago, driving around Florida. I'm a bit of a control freak, so I had to be at the wheel — Mick was asleep most of the time — but the highway was wild. People going from the far lane all the way across to the exit lane, and I don't know how they got through.

Tom Rowland: I'll tell you what you experienced — some of the craziest driving in all of the United States. There are several cities that have really noticeably crazy drivers. Atlanta is one — everything's fine, and then you hit the outskirts of Atlanta and all of a sudden everybody's doing crazy stuff, the average speed picks up, people are shooting in front of you. Miami's another one — everything's fine and then, whoa, it's on the other side of the road too, in a sense. Whenever we go to the Bahamas I've had to drive on the other side of the road, and it's a challenge — just about the time you think you've got it, you pull out somewhere and you're going the wrong way. But I'm glad you got to experience the best of American drivers.

Ben Jones: Yeah, driving on the right is a lot different. The highway up the coast is only one lane each way, so that in itself is a challenge — you've got to keep your wits about you with trucks coming the other way. You keep to the coastline the first day, and on the second day you head inland to come up over the range and then back down to the coastline. That's when you get into the more remote country feel — the land's a lot more vast, a lot further between towns, and things start to get drier. You go up the range and there's rainforest, beautiful — you can hear bellbirds — and then you come out into vast, dry country. Eventually you come back to the coastline and pull up at our last town, called Laura, a small, mostly indigenous community. That's the end of the sealed road, and then you're on the dirt.

Back in 2004, on our first trip, we really didn't know what we were in for. It's famous for red dirt up there — it's almost as red as your shirt — and it gets into every crevice of your car and boat. You can clean your car and four years later you'll still find red dirt. And it hits what we call corrugated road, with these little ridges. It rattles every bit of your car and your boat. If you've got sinkers on board with the hole through the center, a corrugated road will rattle them against each other until the hole closes right over. It's crazy. You can't have cans of beer either — they rub together and split. There's a sweet spot, somewhere between 40 and 70 miles an hour — go too fast and you start bouncing across the road, too slow and you'll bog.

Then you hit sections of what we call bulldust — it's not quite sand and not quite dust, it's a combination, and it's like powder. You step out of the car and your foot just goes, and you get this cloud of dust coming up. You've got to hit those narrow tracks fast with the trailer on the back, hitting bumps and tree roots, and things flying everywhere. You get bogged, you winch yourself out, go another five yards, and bog again.

Tom Rowland: So in those bogs, is that a wet area? You just said you were going through the dry — are there mud holes up there?

Ben Jones: No, it's all mainly dry — we always go up in the dry season. They basically shut the whole area off in the wet season, kind of like Florida conditions where it builds up hot and humid, then pours rain and everything floods. You can't get up there in the wet unless you go by boat or helicopter. So you go in the dry, though if there's been a long wet you'll still find some mud holes. But most of those boggy sections are more of that dusty, sandy stuff — like quicksand. If you don't hit it hard enough, you're going down.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And you travel through that for a good ways. On that first trip, did you question whether you were even going to make it to launch the boat? It sounds like a pretty big adventure in itself just making it up there.

Ben Jones: It's funny, because we got to the last bit and we didn't even know where we were — we didn't realize how far we'd come because we didn't have GPS then. You've got no service — you're eight hours of driving from any radio coverage, nothing on your phone. I love that, being totally off the grid. But we got bogged up to the axles at one point and I was thinking, this is it, we're stuck, we're not going any further. Luckily we had a friend with us who wasn't carrying anything on the back, so he winched off the front of us and pulled us through the last bit. When we finally got through, it was a massive celebration. We usually stay at that location for a two-week stretch — we unload the boat and set up camp under these big shade trees, a Savannah-type tree with a lot of spread, so you've got shade to get out of the elements. Then we fish for two weeks straight.

Tom Rowland: And how do you manage your fuel consumption?

Ben Jones: To get to that location you don't have to go too far on the boat, but you'll do some big runs out for a few days of the trip. We take all the fuel in — it's hard for me to convert liters to gallons, but we bring in about 400 liters, all in jerry cans sitting up in the boat. All the camping gear is packed in between the car and the boat — that's half the battle, carrying so much weight between fuel, camping gear, food, and a generator to run the fridges, plus your beer of course. Usually something goes wrong on the trailer — you'll snap a spring or bend an axle.

Tom Rowland: Do you take spares with you now?

Ben Jones: Yeah, we always take spares. A couple of times we've snapped springs and only had one spare, so we've snapped two. When that happens you pull up on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere, someone stays with the boat and trailer with fuel, water, and a beer, and you unhitch the trailer and drive all the way back to town — another eight hours — to pick up a spring, then come all the way back, jack up the trailer, and fit it. It's a full-on trip.

Tom Rowland: How have things changed as you've kept doing this? If you were planning one now, what would you change — two trucks, extra vehicles, extra springs? What lessons have you learned being so remote?

Ben Jones: It's just typing up an extra gear log every year — you learn something new each time, even after all these years. There's still lessons every trip, some little thing you didn't think to bring a spare of. It's bad luck — you just roll with the punches and learn as you go. The roads have gotten a lot better since we started, and it's mixed emotions about that, because easier roads mean more people can access it. Plus with social media, idiots like myself love posting and entertaining people, so it gets a lot busier up there now, which is fine — you want to be out there by yourself, but you also want other people to enjoy it and get as much out of it as you have. That's made it easier to access, but it also means you don't get that alone feeling as much anymore. Over the last five years that's made me rethink where I go — I've stopped going as much to the same location and started venturing to new spots in Cape York, even doing solo adventures. I just love the challenge.

Solo Adventures and Staying Off the Grid

Tom Rowland: A solo adventure up there — what happens if something goes wrong? It seems like there's nobody to help. How would you even get help? Do you carry a satellite phone?

Ben Jones: This year was the first time we carried something called a Zoleo — it connects to your iPhone and basically turns it into a satellite phone. It doesn't let you make calls, but you can press SOS if you're in danger, or send text messages to people who have the same app — easy to set up with family or friends — and get weather updates. Pretty handy. A couple of years ago I didn't have that device yet — I carried a satellite phone and did a solo venture but didn't really need it. I went out to a little island for a five-day trip up in Cape York and sat there alone for five days. It was amazing.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. On that solo trip, was that an area you'd been to before, or somewhere new?

Ben Jones: I'd done one trip up there before with a mate, so I knew what it was about, but I'd only been there once. Each time you go, you learn so much more. It's really off the grid — there are a couple of communities around there and you've got to be careful with your vehicle. You get to the boat ramp, launch the boat, and then you've got to leave your car and trailer somewhere. We get mud crabs over here — I don't know if you have them differently — but in the mangroves there are professional crabbers, guys who make their livelihood catching crabs, and they live in these little shanties out there. You've got to bribe him — not really bribe, but take a case of beer and a loaf of bread and say, look after my car for the next five days. You leave it with him and then you're offshore, forty or fifty miles out to a little island, taking everything you need for those five days, four hours from anyone, out on the Great Barrier — one of the best places in the world.

Tom Rowland: That's unbelievable. And is a loaf of bread and a case of beer enough?

Ben Jones: Yeah — I don't think they get offered that very often. It's hard to explain — like a little village with these shanties out in the middle of the mangroves, sand flies, leeches, crocodiles, wide open, and he's out there spraying himself down with who-knows-what all day. It's the roughest setup you could imagine, but I've seen how happy they get over a case of beer.

Tom Rowland: They'd probably like to sit inside that car and get away from whatever's biting them. That sounds like the most awesome adventure. And when you get out there, the water's crystal clear on the Great Barrier Reef — how many species of fish do you think are available to you on a trip like that?

Ninety Species in Two Weeks on the Great Barrier Reef

Ben Jones: On one of the first trips we did, over two weeks, we came up to something like 80 or 90 different species of fish. You can go from reef fishing the bottom for snapper — what we call nannygai here — to chasing topwater. I just love the topwater stuff, especially the reef-flat fishing where it's shallow, maybe ten feet deep, and you can see the bommies, sight-cast to fish, and catch everything from Napoleon wrasse to sweetlips and coral trout.

Tom Rowland: Coral trout kind of resembles one of our grouper, right? Super aggressive, and they crash stuff on the surface. I was looking through your Instagram and that looked like one of your favorites — incredibly beautiful fish, and super aggressive.

Ben Jones: Yeah, it's a bit of a prize fish out there. A lot of the bottom fishermen love catching them because they're great to eat, similar to your grouper. But one thing about them — they'll absolutely crush topwater.

Tom Rowland: How deep are they coming out of when you're finding a good spot for those — ten feet, twenty feet?

Ben Jones: You can get them from anything — six feet of water, even three feet around the bommies — and they're very hard to stop in that shallow water. If you get a good one, you're basically hand on the spool, leaning back with maybe a hundred and fifty pound leader, and you're not giving them an inch, because the second you do they're straight under the coral, into their own little caves, and it's over. So it ranges from three feet of water right through to — well, my first two really big coral trout, which I call dino trout, as in dinosaurs of the ocean, came out of 190 feet of water to hit topwater.

Tom Rowland: What? These are bottom-dwelling fish, coming out of 180 feet of water?

Ben Jones: I was casting to a school of yellowfin up top, popping a topwater lure, when I got crunched — I thought, that's not quite a yellowfin, the fight was different, more of a heavy, dogged pull instead of the yellowfin's speed. I figured I must have hooked it sideways, and then this big dino trout came up. My mates were like, what do I do, help me! It's not something you expect out of 180 feet of water.

Tom Rowland: That seems like it would actually be an advantage, though — if they'll respond to a lure in deeper water, that's got to make it a lot more possible to land them than trying it in three feet of water, if they give you fifty, eighty, a hundred feet to work with.

Ben Jones: Yeah, a hundred percent. Out of that depth it's a lot easier to land them — that first hookup is when they're most powerful, so once you're bringing them up it's not as crazy as getting one out of three, six, or ten feet of water. It's still wild to see, though — you're looking down expecting a yellowfin and this big brown-red shape comes up from 180 feet. Whether they were already sitting up with the school or they see a wounded baitfish and just come up to crunch it, I don't know.

Tom Rowland: One of the techniques we use all over Florida is casting live pilchards out into deep water — you might have tuna or amberjack schools 200 feet down, you start chumming with live bait, and they come up and start busting on the surface, and then you can throw lures or flies right on top. It takes a few pilchards to really get their attention and pull them up, but it's always amazed me how far away those fish can see five, ten, twenty pilchards and come all the way up for it. If those dino trout are seeing your lure from that kind of depth, that speaks to the clarity of the water — you'd have to have visibility of a hundred feet or more. What do you think the visibility is like on the Great Barrier Reef under good conditions?

Ben Jones: Sometimes it's forever. On the inner reef you might get ninety feet on a good day — it can range from thirty feet to ninety to a hundred and twenty feet. But step out over the outer reef and it's a different story — it goes from three feet of water to a straight drop into thirty feet, then within half a mile it's suddenly three thousand feet, and the water's not blue anymore, it's almost purple. It's crazy water. And that's where you've got dogtooth tuna, massive black marlin, yellowfin tuna, big-eye tuna, dolphin fish, wahoo — and then you can be casting the flats and within half a mile you're into coral trout and Napoleon wrasse. The place is insane. You just never have enough time to fish it.

Tom Rowland: Man, that sounds like a fisherman's dream — the greatest place you could ever go. Do you ever get out there — Mick was explaining the boats you guys fish, basically seventeen-footers. I see one out your window there with a trolling motor — is that your boat?

Ben Jones: Yeah, this one. It's pretty unassuming, really.

Tom Rowland: It basically looks like something between a bay boat and a skiff, not a high-sided boat. So when you're out on that outer reef, do you ever hook something and think, man, I probably shouldn't have done this? Hooking a massive black marlin out there is like Old Man and the Sea — and combine that with being out on the edge of the earth, where if anything goes wrong nobody's coming to help, and now you've hooked something bigger than your boat. That's extreme fishing.

Sharks, Storms, and Life on the Edge

Ben Jones: There's a — we haven't had it happen yet, but we've hooked a massive black marlin busting on top while we were trying to pull up on a tuna school, and it's always in the back of your mind — what's going to happen, how are we going to land this? We're not cutting it off. You look at that black wall of a fish, five hundred pounds or more, and you're in a seventeen-foot boat. There's no way you should be landing that fish, and there's no way you're cutting it off either — you're going to do everything you can to get it to the side of the boat, make do with what you've got. And then there are the sharks — we get a lot of big sharks come up alongside. We've had times where they get in a feeding frenzy, eating what you're catching, and then when there's nothing left to eat, they start hitting the prop. If you've got a stainless prop slowly turning in the water and flashing in the sun, they'll go mad over it — it's like a sensory trigger they can't stop reacting to. You're in a small boat with that going on and you really do feel alive. I suppose that's what I go there for.

Even when you get a bad tropical storm, or end up stuck on a sandbank for five or six hours in the middle of nowhere — I told this story before, where the boys were looking at me like, turn the EPIRB on. They had death in their eyes, like they were about to kill me. It took me to the last minute before I finally set it off, but that's what I go there for — even in a life-or-death moment, you're thinking, this is actually what I came for, to get that thrill. You're on the edge, like I said, the edge of the earth.

Tom Rowland: You're on the edge, man — you were on the edge when you put the boat in the water, and now you're out so far away, and you're dealing with the wildlife too, the sharks. Is it mostly tiger sharks, or other sharks that are the problem out there?

Ben Jones: Every single kind — the only shark you won't get there is a great white, the water's too warm that far north. Closer to Brisbane, definitely great whites, but up there it's every other shark — big tiger sharks, massive hammerheads. The one that's probably the most dangerous, from what I hear from divers, is the oceanic whitetip — really aggressive and they get pretty large. Your small blacktip reef sharks are all through the middle, and mostly your bull sharks on the inner reefs too — a lot of big, super aggressive bull sharks that'll hit your boat and nail anything in the water.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's incredible. And crocodiles?

Ben Jones: That's a different story altogether.

Tom Rowland: There are so many things in Australia that can hurt you. Even coming from Florida, where we've got plenty of aggressive sharks too and people still wade, when I went to Australia I asked, do we wade? And the guy who booked the trip said, you don't go very far from the boat — there are too many bitey things in the water. I said, understood, copy, I won't go far. You don't need to tell me twice. But the crocodiles — we all watched Steve Irwin handle those things — they're the biggest animals I've ever seen.

Ben Jones: You'll see them right next to you, and they'll show no interaction with humans at all, and then all of a sudden they wake up, get spooked, and take off. You get dingoes coming into camp looking for scraps too, and you just have to shoo them off. The first year we went up, our camp and the next camp down the beach were the only two camps within thirty miles, in the middle of nowhere in Cape York. On the last day of that trip, we woke up at four in the morning packing up in the dark, and we saw a spotlight from down the beach at their camp, flashing at us — we figured they were up early doing some spotlight hunting. We didn't think much of it.

Little did we know, a crocodile had come up the beach to the front of their tent, grabbed the man out of it, and started dragging him down the beach while he tried to fight it off and the rest of the family came running out. One of the guys had a nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun — highly illegal to carry over there — and it's lucky he had it. He put his knee over the crocodile's head and put four shots into it, killing it on the spot. When we stopped to say goodbye, there was this four-meter, roughly twenty-foot crocodile lying dead right in front of me. What had also happened is the man's grandmother, who was first to see the attack, jumped on the crocodile's head to try to help, and it flung her around, nearly took her arm off — it was hanging on by the skin — and broke her nose. They had to rush her out straight away because she was bleeding so badly, even though the man himself was conscious and stable with a broken leg and arm. It was twelve hours of driving to get her to a hospital in time to save her arm.

Tom Rowland: And they couldn't take him too?

Ben Jones: No — she was bleeding to death, so they had to get her out with a tourniquet on her arm straight away. He had puncture wounds but wasn't bleeding as severely, so he stayed at camp with the rest of the group while we set off an EPIRB the next morning and a helicopter came in with a paramedic. Between the paramedic and our own first-aid kit, we splinted his leg and put his arm in a sling, patched him up as best we could, and loaded him into the chopper. I've got the full story on my YouTube channel — it's a crazy thing, that this crocodile came all the way up the beach to the front of a lit-up tent. His wife heard a rustle and figured it was a dingo, something they'd heard all week, and then she saw the silhouette of the crocodile at the base of the tent and shouted out that there was a croc. He woke up and it was already coming straight through the tent at him.

Tom Rowland: Oh my gosh. That's the craziest story I've ever heard.

Ben Jones: If any listeners want to look into it and don't believe the story, you can search for it — it's a crocodile attack story I've covered in full on my YouTube channel, with footage of the dead crocodile and the man being treated. It's your worst nightmare, honestly.

Tom Rowland: That is a crocodile. In the United States, the closest thing we'd have is maybe a grizzly bear or a mountain lion. We do have crocodiles, but they're much smaller and don't seem nearly as aggressive as yours — although I'm sure I'll get emails about American crocodile attacks. I don't think ours are quite as aggressive as what you're describing. But that is the worst nightmare — a crocodile attack at night.

Are Sharks Getting Smarter — and More Numerous?

Tom Rowland: You mentioned you've seen an increase in sharks up in that area. Is that consistent with other places you fish closer to home? Do you hear about a shark increase across Australia generally?

Ben Jones: I definitely think so. At home here in Brisbane, once upon a time you'd barely see a shark, and over probably the last ten years I've really noticed an increase — there's rarely a trip offshore now where I don't see one. It's exploded so much that a mate of mine who makes soft plastic lures and fishes the river systems is now losing fish to sharks in the mangroves and even hooking sharks on his soft plastics inshore. Offshore we lose a lot of our topwater lures to sharks too. It's gotten to the point where almost every second fish gets chased down if you're trying to catch mackerel, GTs, or any topwater species.

Tom Rowland: Did anything change with commercial fishing regulations on sharks, or did they become protected in certain areas?

Ben Jones: I think it's become pretty frowned upon now — I'm not sure exactly how the commercial regulations have changed, but as far as I know there's basically no shark fishing allowed. I could be wrong, but it's just generally frowned upon to target or kill a shark now.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it became that way here too. Even out in international waters, there used to be a lot more shark fishing than there is now, so they've become somewhat protected and our shark population has completely exploded. I don't know if it's because of the fishing regulations or some other reason, but we have more sharks in Florida — the Keys, both coasts — than ever. Going over to the Bahamas, you'll catch a yellowfin tuna and then have to move, because that's it, you're not getting another one before the sharks show up. Somebody who's been there before knows this is going to be an athletic event — you hook a fish, you'd better be on it immediately, heaviest tackle you've got, and you might get one, maybe two, but once one gets hit by a shark, that spot's done, you've got to move. And even when you move, they seem to follow. You hear so much about sharks being endangered, and in some parts of the world that's probably true, where they're targeted heavily, but in areas like yours and mine, the population is higher than I've ever seen. I think every guide who comes on here says the same thing — nobody's telling me they haven't seen a shark in months. It's the opposite; there are tons of sharks, every species. I don't have anything against sharks, I like having them around, but they make it hard to actually land a fish. It's interesting to hear that you're seeing the same increase on the Great Barrier Reef, probably one of the best fishing ecosystems on the planet.

Ben Jones: A hundred percent on the increase. Especially back in Cape York — in 2004 we hardly lost a fish to a shark on the inshore reefs. Now you go fish those same reefs and you can barely land a fish before it gets cleaned up by a shark. You can't keep doing that kind of damage to the fish population, so you've got to keep moving — you might move a mile or two thinking that's plenty, but that only buys you a couple of minutes before the sharks are right back on you.

Tom Rowland: I know. And you'd think that with all the fishing pressure we have in Florida and the Bahamas, the sharks would become conditioned to boats — they hear the outboard, think I got a meal there last time, and follow that sound. But what's different about the areas you're talking about is that virtually nobody fishes there. By our standards, no one's there — maybe you see a boat every couple of days. What would it even look like if you thought an area was crowded, out where you're fishing?

Ben Jones: Maybe two boats and a dive charter or something like that.

Tom Rowland: That's still way out there.

Ben Jones: It's an interesting theory. We talk about evolution of species, and I wonder whether it's something passed down through their genetics — I'm no scientist, so I don't know if that's even possible — that the sound of a boat motor becomes part of what they know as a source of food, passed down generation to generation, rather than something they have to learn firsthand. Because you go to these remote places where you barely see a boat, and the moment you pull up to the outer reef and look under the boat before you've even started fishing, there are already two sharks circling. Immediately, as soon as you arrive. So to me that says the sharks already know a boat means food, even without having been conditioned by boats themselves — it's just built into them now.

Tom Rowland: Well, I've heard crazier theories, and I'm no scientist either, but I've heard other theories about this kind of thing happening with other animals. There was a really fascinating episode — one of Joe Rogan's early podcasts — with a guest talking about what he called morphic resonance. He talked about blackbirds that learned how to get into the cream on top of milk bottles left on doorsteps — there'd be a thin foil cap, and these birds figured out how to peck through it and get the cream. Then birds in other areas, far away, with no migratory connection, started doing the exact same thing. It's documented — kind of like what you're describing with the sharks. We haven't even talked about bass fishing, but you see something similar there — a lure like a chatterbait comes out, and the first time you throw it, fish can't stay away from it, you're catching more and bigger bass. Then it stops working in that lake, but eventually it stops working everywhere, even in completely unconnected bodies of water with no possible communication between them. I don't know what that is exactly — maybe anglers just lose confidence in it once it stops producing in one place — but it's a strange thing. That episode was with a guy named Rupert Sheldrake, and he called it morphic resonance — the idea that dogs sense their owner's car coming home minutes before they could possibly hear it, some kind of sense we don't understand. I've seen that with my own dog. It sounds a lot like what you're describing with the sharks.

Ben Jones: Yeah. A hundred percent, they're definitely doing it.

Living on the Edge — and Where to Find GT Buster

Tom Rowland: Well, listen man, you're living an awesome life down there, and I've got to get down and fish with you and Mick sometime — that would be a dream come true. You guys get after it, I can see it on your Instagram, a bunch of animals down there — that's exactly the kind of people I want to fish with. This whole adventure sounds incredible. I'd probably just stay in the car, honestly, since I don't know much about crocodiles or what snakes and spiders to avoid down there — I'm afraid I'd take a wrong step — but I would love to do it. That sounds like the greatest trip ever.

Ben Jones: Yeah, but you do have to live it. Whenever we head out on those trips I always think, life's not worth living unless you're living on the edge — that's the whole reason I go, because everything gets tested: your body, your mind, your boat, your car, your gear, every bit of it. If you're out on the outer reef for three or four days, by the end every part of you is aching, especially if you're throwing topwater, because you're in the heat and the humidity the whole time, and then you throw in a few storms along the way. The first night of our last trip, a tropical storm rolled through — fifty-knot winds at two in the morning, lightning bolts coming in. I hate lightning, absolutely hate it. We were out there holding down a little marquee we'd set up, trying to keep it standing for two hours. You're on the edge of it the whole time.

Tom Rowland: What would happen if a crocodile decided to come visit during something like that? You're thinking it can't get any worse, and then there's a twenty-foot crocodile there to say hello.

Ben Jones: That's honestly what it felt like at two in the morning — like it can't get any worse than starting a trip off with a tropical storm in the dark, tents down. But you wake up in the morning, dust yourself off, you're covered in sand from head to toe, and you think, what just happened? And then you realize, this is exactly what I came here for — to push myself to the limit.

Tom Rowland: Man, you'd have to be extra careful about losing the boat, too — with fifty-knot winds, extra anchors, extra lines, every single night. Because if the boat had gotten away, that could be it — you're living on a sand island out there for not very long after that.

Ben Jones: That's the whole point — living on the edge, mate. We're really living out there, and everything that comes with it is possible — you could get stung by a stonefish, bitten by a shark, stung by a box jellyfish. But you're not going to get any of that sitting on the couch watching TV. So you might as well be out there doing it. I love it.

Tom Rowland: I love it too. That's a great way to end this one, and it won't be the last one — I really enjoyed talking with you and I'd love to have you on again. So tell everyone how they can follow you — and we didn't even get to talk about Cast, and you're a co-owner there, though we did cover that pretty extensively with Mick. Tell people how they can follow you and learn more about what you do with Cast, and where they can find you.

Ben Jones: If you're on Instagram, just search GT Buster and you'll find me — GT, as in Giant Trevally, Buster. You'll also find me at castmate.co, which is our Australian handle, or castfishing.co, which is our American handle — that's our small startup, we're kicking a few goals but still working hard in the background. If you want to check out any of the trips, I've put up over a hundred videos on YouTube — it's been a slow slog, but I love doing it, putting all my trips up there in full. Search GT Buster on YouTube and you'll find the crocodile attack story there too — you don't actually see the attack itself, but you get the full half-hour explanation of exactly what happened and how, including footage of the dead crocodile and the man who was attacked. It's crazy footage.

Tom Rowland: We'll put that link in the show notes so people can go watch it. But anyway, awesome talking with you, man. Thanks for doing this — definitely go follow Ben for some really good content. His GT Buster account is one of my favorite Instagrams, and it'll be one of your favorites too. You guys catch some crazy stuff out there.

Ben Jones: Crazy stuff in Australia. But anyway, thanks so much, man.

Tom Rowland: Nice to talk with you — we'll have you on again.

Ben Jones: Thanks very much, Tom. Really appreciate it, man. It was awesome.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Thanks.