A Dingo's Life

After about five minutes of talking to Jarad “Dingo” Boshammer, you realize he is one of those extra-fishy guys who likes to fish more than you do. And he’s better at it, and probably always will be.

Born in Hervey Bay, in Queensland, Australia, in 1982 to Sid Boshammer, a liveaboard charter captain, and his wife, Kerri, Dingo had fishing in his DNA. “Fishing was always in my veins,” he says. “I didn’t have a choice. I grew up on a sailboat. I was catching fish before I could walk.”

His father noticed right away that his son was a bit more focused than most kids his age. “One of my first impressions was that even as a 3-year-old, Jarad had an amazing amount of patience,” Sid says. When Dingo was about 6, his father bought the charter boat Time N Tide, a 38-foot Peter Bracken-built flybridge design and one of the original hardwood game boats that fished out of Cairns, the legendary black marlin town known as the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. “Capt. Bob Oliver, one of the early guys in the big-game era, owned the boat, and to this day there is still the bill of a 1,000-pound marlin that broke off in the anchor locker — they basically sanded it, painted over it, and left it in there,” Dingo says.

In the early days, a young Dingo would jump aboard Time N Tide whenever a spot opened up. “We did three-day charters around Fraser Island. We cruised at 8 knots, so we always trolled lures during daylight hours,” Sid says. “On the five-hour steam home, we would clean the catch with Jarad steering the boat, as we didn’t have a reliable autopilot.”

It didn’t take long for Dingo to develop his fishing skills. “At 6 years old, he’d tie hooks, rig live baits and basically show [clients] how to catch fish,” Sid says. “He was an encyclopedia of knowledge, and the guests loved him.”

He was also allowed to fish. “I remember one particular trip when we struck a huge school of mahi,” Sid recalls. “We were using frozen pilchards for bait, and Jarad had already caught five mahi while some guests hadn’t caught any. I asked Jarad to wait until everyone had caught one before he caught any more. He sat inside the cabin with baited rod in hand watching and waiting until the last client landed one, and then he shot straight out to start catching them again.”

Sid chartered 308 days during his busiest year, running three-day liveaboard trips. Dingo fished the long weekends, crewing for his dad when he could. If he wasn’t on board, he’d be lucky to see his dad a couple of hours each week during changeovers when they’d stock up on fuel and provisions before heading back out. It was the perfect education for what Dingo wanted to do with his life.

When he was around 11, Dingo and his father attended a freshwater tournament where they met Rod Harrison, an Australian fishing celebrity who would impact both of their lives. Harrison was conducting fly-casting demonstrations, showing how far he could cast with one back cast. “He was casting the whole fly line with half a rod and making the fly line do right-hand turns around obstacles to hit targets,” Dingo says. “We got to talking to him, and he said he wanted to come and explore the fishery my father was developing up on Fraser Island. Dad said he could come, but in return, he had to give me fly-casting and knot-tying lessons.”

Dingo learned to cast from one of Lefty Kreh’s closest friends. Harrison enjoyed himself so much with the Boshammers on Fraser Island that he told his friend Dean Butler to fish with them. Butler, another pioneering big-game Australian fisherman, was also an ambassador for fly-fishing. “Dean came down for a couple of weeks and explored the freshwater and offshore fishing with my dad,” Dingo says. “At one point, he asked Dad if there was any flats fishing. Fraser Island is actually the largest sand island in the Southern Hemisphere. My dad said that he knew of a couple of places where golden trevally come up and eat ghost shrimp in knee-deep water.”

Butler and Sid spotted 100 golden trevallies tailing on a sand flat. This opened the door to Australia’s first flats fishery and set the angling community abuzz. Sid, who was still spending many nights at sea, saw the potential of fly-fishing. “He could guide on a 19-foot boat, come home and sleep in his own bed every night and pioneer this unique fishery,” Dingo says. “And I was there for it.”

For the obsessed, young angler, school took a back seat to fishing. “School was just a meeting place for me and my friends to discuss tides,” Dingo says. “We all had push bikes with trailers filled with coolers, rods, six-tray Plano tackle boxes and live-bait tanks. We would ride to a shore-based fishing spot or get on the ferry to Fraser Island.”

A NEW PARADIGM

While he was happy creating adventures near shore, Dingo’s focus began to shift offshore thanks to a photo of Butler that altered the course of his fishing life. “Dean showed me a picture of a fish that he had hooked off of Linden Bank while trying to set the black marlin, 50-pound [line class] record,” Dingo says. Sharks had ravaged the giant fish during the struggle on the light gear and devoured the entire marlin to the pectoral fins. In the picture, Butler stood next to the enormous head of the marlin in the corner of the cockpit.

“The pecs were on the deck, and the bill was nearly as tall as he was,” Dingo says. “When I saw that picture, I knew right then and there what I wanted to do with my life — chase dinosaurs.” That day, he told his parents he wanted to fish for giant marlin. His parents did not dissuade the young man but said he’d have to earn his high-school certificate and wait until he was 17 to travel internationally.

In Australia, you can graduate at 15 and keep studying for college or gain work experience in a trade. Dingo got his certificate and started looking for apprenticeship opportunities in sport fishing. With the Boshammers’ long list of fishing friends, it wasn’t long before Peter Morse told him that Capt. Kim Andersen was looking for a second mate on New Moon II, working under first mate Brendan Rolt, for the light-tackle black marlin season, which kicks into gear in July before the giant marlin arrive in September. “Kim was offering $20 a week,” Dingo says. “That was my first real sportfishing job.”

Andersen and the crew on New Moon II “had been teasing fish up and catching them on fly,” Dingo says. “They figured out that if they could tease marlin up behind the boat and make them eat a pile of feathers and a couple of hooks, then they should be very successful doing this with live baits and circle hooks. They were winning just about all the light-tackle tournaments on 12-pound. These guys were years ahead of many people.”

Andersen knew talent when he saw it and found a way to get Dingo to stay on for part of the heavy-tackle season. The captain pushed the other mate back a month to let Dingo fish for the reef’s famed granders — black marlin weighing more than 1,000 pounds. “My pay went from $20 a week to $100, and I got to go to Lizard Island and fish for giant black marlin,” he says.

With his month of heavy-tackle fishing about to end, Dingo wasn’t sure what to do for the rest of the year. “One day, as we were headed into port, Andersen yells down from the tower, ‘Hey Jarad, Ross McCubbin’s mate got a staph infection in his knee, and he needs a replacement second mate, would you be interested?’ ” he says. “I stepped off New Moon II and onto Lucky Strike. I got to be second deckhand with Justin Reed, known as ‘Flash.’ He was an experienced, world-traveling deckhand that had fished in Kona and other big-fish places around the world. He taught me wiring and leadering techniques, including the backward wrap, which not many people knew about at the time.”

When the season ended, Reed had plans to run his own boat, and McCubbin needed a new number one. “He hired me for the job,” Dingo says. “At the age of 17, I was the number one deckhand on Lucky Strike, having only wired one fish. I was stepping right off the deep end.”

It was about this time that he picked up the nickname Dingo. “Capt. John Batterton gave me the nickname while I was crewing for him in New Zealand,” he says. “Since I’m Australian and grew up around Fraser Island, where the last purebred dingos are found, the New Zealand fellas started calling me Dingo.” It stuck.

Thus began one of the most impressive big-game resumes in fishing. “I did a couple of seasons with Ross, then with Simon Carosi on Brilliant Company for one season before Luke Fallon on Assegai offered me a job,” Dingo says. “This was my dream boat and dream job. Luke was one of the captains that I really wanted to fish with and learn from. I spent the next five years with Luke.”

Luke and Kelly Fallon are the rare husband-and-wife team fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and they share fond memories of their time with Dingo. “He’s more than capable in any type of fishing,” Luke Fallon says. “He had a big desire to be the best, so he worked at it. He used to wire marlin in his sleep. He woke me up multiple times.”

Kelly Fallon shares her husband’s admiration. “For me, he’s in a class of his own,” she says. “I’ve never seen a crewman so dedicated. Every morning when he got up, he was stripping line off reels and checking for damage, as he didn’t want his work to be the reason for any failures. If we had a chop-off, he would handline every bait in, feeling the line on the feed out again to make sure there was no damage — every time. No one else has ever done that in my 19 years on the reef.”

Dingo also fished with Capt. Laurie Wright, one of the most respected heavy-tackle captains in the world. “He was a natural fisherman who instinctively knew what to do in all situations,” Wright says. “There were no loud voices or over-the-top yelling, just professionalism at its best. He was an exceptional wireman with natural talent and instinct, making my job at the wheel a lot easier.”

Dingo made his way to Kona, where he crewed for Capt. Chip Van Mols. “Chip is one of the most particular captains I had ever fished with,” he says. “Lure-fishing is an art, and there are none better at fine-tuning lures to run in calm waters than Hawaiian crews.”

In a 20-year span, Dingo crewed 15 seasons on the Great Barrier Reef, fished in 20 countries and played a role in catching 150 marlin weighing more than 700 pounds, and 25 over 1,000.

SIDE GIGS

Dingo was always looking for a challenge and found a few that would keep him occupied both in Australia and beyond. He considers his short time on the 58-foot Jarrett Bay Southern Exposure as one of his top accomplishments. “In 2005, we took the boat from Cape Hatteras to Bermuda to fish in the Bermuda Triple Crown series of tournaments,” he says. “We were the first U.S. vessel to weigh a grander in Bermuda, with a 1,023-pound blue. We ended up winning the Bermuda Big Game Classic and the Bermuda Triple Crown.”

Dingo teamed up with his old fly-fishing buddy Dean Butler and angler Tom Evans to rewrite the billfish-on-fly record books. Butler was the heart, brains and organizer behind the operation, as well as the main guy on the gaff — one of the hardest jobs when catching billfish on fly because you have to use a straight gaff. The team — Capt. Darren “Biggles” Haydon on the wheel, mates Dingo and Bo Jenyns, with Evans as the angler and Butler as the gaffman — set four billfish world records on fly: 12-pound black marlin, 12-pound striped marlin, 20-pound spearfish and 8-pound black marlin.

While Dingo was traveling the world, his dad was still guiding out of Fraser Island. Dingo would come home for two weeks at Christmas to run some trips for his dad to give him a break.

“It was no secret that juvenile black marlin would migrate through Hervey Bay, and some would end up running the flats,” Dingo says. “It was like a daydream seeing them free-jump in the shallow water. I wondered if it was possible to catch a juvenile black marlin in skinny water like they catch tarpon in the Florida Keys.”

In 2007 he and friend John Haenke went out with a camera to see if they could film something that had never been done: sight-casting to black marlin in skinny water.

“We saw nine blacks on the day, cruising in 6 to 12 feet of crystal-clear water over silica-white sand. We got three to bite, jumped one off on a spinning rod, got one to eat a fly before coming off, and caught one on a dead ballyhoo with a spinning rod,” Dingo says.

They managed to get a photo of the marlin they caught in the shallows, and the picture made the cover of Australian magazine Modern Fishing.

A WORLD AWAY

After stints in Hawaii, Brazil and Papau New Guinea, Dingo was looking forward to a bit of fun at his friend Bo Jenyn’s wedding, where he met his future wife, Beth. They married in Hawaii one year later, and in 2010, they settled in Jupiter, Florida. “I still traveled and fished for a couple of years chasing marlin, and then I transitioned onto a private boat where I could earn a steady salary,” Dingo says.

Once they became parents to Jack, Charlie and Henry, it was time for Dingo to think about his next chapter. He did some research on the Jupiter area to see if he could guide for snook, tarpon and other species. “This is a great area because if things get slow around here, I can fish the Everglades or head north and target giant redfish,” he says. “It’s also great for all the Australian guys who want to catch a tarpon.”

Unsurprisingly, Dingo excelled as a snook and tarpon guide right out of the gate. He discovered a population of giant snook in places they weren’t expected and consistently put clients on trophy-sized fish, with many surpassing the 40-inch mark. Dingo’s demeanor, hard work and willingness to help when called upon ingratiated himself to a host of guides from Jupiter to the Everglades.

Capt. Steve Huff, known as one the best fly-fishing guides in the world, only has good things to say about Dingo. “Some people are just fishy; they have a feel for it,” he says. “They can take a quick look at an area and decipher where the most likely places the fish might be for a variety of different reasons. I think Dingo can go anywhere and, within a very short period of time, be out-fishing anyone.”

These days, Dingo guides out of an 18-foot Chittum flats skiff about 200 days a year. He’s built a reputation for landing giant snook on artificial gear, but tarpon are his favorite target. “Every part of trying to catch tarpon is a challenge,” he says. “I like a challenge — from finding them, getting them to eat, getting a good hook set and keeping them on through all their acrobatics and head shaking. Trying to break the spirit of tarpon is about as hard as it gets. It takes a lot of experience to beat a tarpon on any tackle.”

Dingo has that experience in spades, and he’s only 41.