Norfolk Islanders, descendants of the Bounty Mutineers, were transplanted from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island in 1856 when they wrote to Queen Vic asking for a bigger island to avoid killing each other all over again—John Adams being the only remaining mutineer after violent squabbles over women (how I met my wife). When Adams was eventually granted amnesty for his part in the mutiny, he finally divulged the story of Fletcher Christian and his comrades after they torched the boat in Pitcairn’s Bounty Harbour—ending an enduring mystery that fascinates the world to this day.

A quirky feature of island life is the locals juggle several jobs to survive. This multitasking life is made manifest when the tough-as-teak Liz McCoy serves us beers as manager of the RSL club, turns up in an ankle-length dress as our guide for the ghost tour (my son’s favourite activity where you are led around convict ruins in the moonlight after a scrumptious roast dinner) only to don a straw hat and thongs as our fishing charter skipper. Tropical Groundhog Day.

Fishing on Norfolk is beyond spectacular and really why I am here (psst! Don’t tell the wife, who thinks it’s a family holiday). It is fascinating to hear Liz chatter in Pitcairn with her cousin at the wheel of our charter. She only learned English at school as they were forbidden from speaking their native tongue in class, all but wiping it out. Pitcairn is a queer amalgam of 18th Century English and Tahitian. “Duu de thing yu laik”. Do the thing you like.

Able to decipher every fourth word or so, I strangely understand the Pacific brogue as it’s exactly how everyone speaks on Friday nights at my local fishing club after ten schooners.

Getting in and out of the water is not for the faint hearted on Norfolk Island. Our boat is hauled from the pier by a crude derrick where Liz’s cousin hitches a cable to a truck and casually reverses, fag bobbing at chapped lips. After about 35 nautical miles towards $%&*ing South America, Liz cranks up the boat’s stereo. I am none too keen on her choice of music. As I contemplate the fragility of our existence in the immense expanse of the pacific (no Coast Guard on Norfolk), I hear Bruce Springsteen’s I’m Going Down, Down, Down. Note to Liz: I don’t want to hear this song, the theme from Titanic or anything by the group Not Drowning Waving.

Too deep to anchor, she floats a drogue and we drop our lines into the bluest water I’ve seen. We instantly hit the mother load: a piscatorial metropolis. On first cast my son hauls four sweetlip emperor—a fine table fish—on one line! My mate does much the same. Suddenly I’m on! Liz grins like a Cheshire cat as we whoop and holler, jagging more emperors than a Roman bathhouse.

Closing in on the island, Liz rather fancies a kingfish for tea so she perfunctorily drops a troll and heads for a small cathedral window-shaped aperture in the rock at breakneck speed. Graham (my fishing chum) and my son and I all look at each other wide-eyed and grit our teeth, holding out floppy hats as we slam through the blooming swell and in and out of the hole just big enough for the boat. And sure enough, Lizzie hooks a whopping kingy!

At charter’s end, Liz unexpectedly invites us back to Kingston wharf for a fry up. The Norfolk Fish Fry is an island tradition. Cheap booze, fried food, God, I love these people. We buy a slab, crack it open and drink at the edge of the sparkling water while Liz heats the frypan. Graham and I ask each other if we have not indeed fallen from the sky directly into heaven. I press her for a brochure to spruik her services. She lights a smoke and passes me a beer coaster advertising her charter.

“All the information you need is there.”

I’ll never allow a blonde joke at my local fishing club again as this pint-sized single mum, with her saddle-brown cheeks and rugby nose, is the toughest little rooster I’ve ever met. When I speak of her fearlessness at sea back on the island, locals reply in reverent tones, “She’s a McCoy”. I discover the original McCoys distilled a native plant on Pitcairn and made the alcohol on the island and were a wild old bunch.

The following day we fish Cascade Wharf on the north-eastern side of the island, hooking an array of exotic fish. I toss some bread into the cerulean blue water only to see it devoured by a moving beachball of baitfish. Suddenly the sea boils with fish. It’s as if the water is charged with electricity.

On another evening I watch a local hook fish after fish at Kingston Pier. Like all fishos I strike up a conversation. He talks of shark fishing with buoys attached to chains and shows me the triangle of teeth around his neck, saying the other day he caught an 18ft tiger shark. He invites me shark fishing in his tinny but I tell him I am rearranging my sock drawer that evening (yikes!).

Do check out the coral when you go. We stay at Governors Lodge Resort and they offer free snorkelling gear for you to poke around the coral masterpiece romantically named Slaughter Bay—protected from said sharks by a finger of reef. Snorkelling on Norfolk is breathtaking (pun intended). The multifarious coral and electric colours of the fish enthral the kids. Feeding the fish by hand with bread dampens the sunset fly-fishing plans. I do have bread flies with me but fishing Slaughter Bay is poor etiquette according to locals. However, they are happy for you to fish Cemetery Bay. (Who named this place? Dr $%&*ing Crippen?)As the island grows small in the window of the 737, I vow to return to this ocean Eden one day and clog more arteries with fried sweetlip emperor. Fishing, cheap booze and fried food, these are my kind of people.