Episode Transcript
It's all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of too many fish for the net. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. When my children were younger, we lived in Tasmania and I loved boating and I had a friend who was a professional fisherman and he had quite a large fishing boat.
And one school holidays May, school holidays. We plan to take our children on a boat trip over to Bruni island, which is off the east coast of Tasmania, for the holidays. Now, we'd planned this quite early in the year to do this and that particular year the weather in Tasmania had been really bad.
The winds were just continually very, very strong. And as a result the main fishing fleet based around Hobart couldn't get out around the west coast. It was too dangerous.
And so my friend, he had not been really able to get out and go fishing. And so he used an altern employment. He would cut firewood and other things like this to earn an income at that particular time.
Well, when May came, the weekend that we'd planned, the first weekend of the school holidays, we'd planned to take the children away. The weather broke, but my friend still agreed that we would all go out. So he had taken myself and two of my children, himself and two or three of his children and another friend that we had.
And I remember we went away on the Friday and as we went over to Bruny island and dropped anchor in this beautiful little bay with a lovely little beach, we could see all the fishing boats going down the channel heading out to the west coast. And I could see that my friend was quite a little bit disappointed that he wasn't going out with the fleet because the first boats out got the best spots to set out their nets and pots and so forth, and that was their source of income. And I can remember as we.
I shared the cabin with my friend and as we had worship on the Friday evening together, trying to assure him, well, you know, sort of thing, we're spending time with our children, we're making all these really great memories with our children and this sort of thing. And then I thought, well, that was a bit patronising for me to say that I had a steady government job with a steady income and, you know, he had a business with overheads and expenses and had to provide income. And I remember feeling really bad about that.
And he mentioned to me that on the Sunday he would probably put the net out in Barnes Bay. He had a big sea net and we'd take the children, show them some seine net fishing. And so I remember wishing or praying that he would be really blessed, that things would really work out, that he'd catch a lot of fish.
And so we had a wonderful day on the Saturday with the children in nature, exploring around and seeing the little fish swimming around in the shallow water. And then early on the Sunday morning we set off, motored up to Barnes Bay and we couldn't go all the way into Barnes Bay because it was a big fishing boat and it drew too much water. So we put, he dropped anchor at the entrance to the bay and we took a dinghy with the sea net out.
Now, with a sea net, it's a net where you drop it in on, say on one shore and you take it around in a big loop across, say, a bay on the other shore, and then you have people pulling the net in from both ends, pulling it into shore, and it traps all the fish in that shallow water. And so that's what we did. So using the children, they would be pulling on the net with a couple of the adults and the bigger children.
And then there were some of the children and no adult in the boat organising the net. Well, as we began pulling the net in, it began to boil with fish. I'd never seen so many fish.
It was absolutely amazing, the huge quantity of fish. Now where we pulled this net in was near where the cars parked to line up to catch the ferry, the Bruny island ferry. And there were people here coming down the shore and you could see the look of their amazement.
And so what my friend was doing had a special net type shovel which he would shovel the fish out into the dinghy, take 16 foot dinghy, run out to the fishing boat, shovel it in. And he had a well in the boat. Well, there were so many fish, fish that he not only filled the well in his boat, but he had bulwarks on the side of his boat that would probably be, you know, almost a metre high running around, because being a west coaster boat to stop gear being washed off the deck and this sort of thing.
And it was a stern wheelhouse boat. And he filled all the front of the boat from the front of the wheelhouse all the way up to the, to the bow of the boat, except where he had different fish cages stacked with fish to the height of the bulwarks and there was still fish in the net. And so he was saying, as the crowds came down, just come in, help yourself.
People were just picking fish up with their hands it was a huge school of mackerel that he caught that day. And as we finished and we pulled the net in and untangled and let the rest of the fish go, I can remember he. We got back to the boat and the net and everything on board.
And some men in a big game fishing boat had anchored nearby. And as the stern of their boat swung with the tide round closer to the house, one of the guys said, oh, you've had a bit of luck there today. And my friend leant over the boat and said, well, we've picked up about $10,000 worth of fish today.
And of course, that was back in the mid-1980s, so a lot of. Worth a lot of money. More, more money today.
And I think that was an amazing answer to prayer. That reminded me of the story of when Jesus said to Peter to throw your net out on the other side of the boat and there were so many fish that the net broke. I praise the Lord that I was able to experience that answer to prayer for my friend at that time.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. May God bless.
