JONO SHALES Being a barman meant he only started late in the afternoon. That meant for most of the day he literally could do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do was fish. “I literally, disappeared off the face of Australian fly fishing. The Swoffa thing had been wrapped up, I wasn’t posting or promoting anything, I pulled all the stickers off the car and just disappeared. I had staff accommodation in the bar, a single little shitty room at the back, everything stunk like piss and dustbins, but I stayed there for eight months, worked in the bar in the evenings and in the day I would fish. I was balls deep in fishing five/six days a week, going everywhere, logging up the hours, figuring out different species, how to catch fish and land them on my own. I was learning the ebb and flow of the tides, when to be there and when not to be there, what those fish like and what these fish don’t like. Suddenly my ability to fish, my skillset and what I was learning was going from average to getting really good. It was the foundation to becoming a guide. I now knew stuff about this fishery. All the while in the background, the Ozzie guides won’t talk to me, I’m not on any forums, I have literally disappeared out of the public view.” While he fished, he got to work on the admin and paperwork required to set up a commercial business in Western Australia. If you think Home Affairs in South Africa is bad, they have nothing on this bunch. Pinned down by Australia’s highly complex bureaucratic red tape, Jono spent two years bouncing back and forth in a labyrinthine three-way game of inter-departmental pingpong between the Departments of Fisheries, Transport, Parks and Environment, doing what needed to be done in order to work. That included having a boat built from
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scratch (even the resin on the boat needs to be a specific thickness) and getting multiple licenses. It was a long ride, but approximately 15000 pints poured, AUS$70 000 (R700 000) spent and two years of his life later, Jono was now a fully licensed guide. “There was no Plan B. My whole life had been Plan Bs. I knew that it was not going to fail, because in the background I’ve got emails from every corner of the earth from guys wanting to come fish with me and
“I’VE DONE MANY THINGS, BECAUSE I NEVER KNEW WHAT IT WAS THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR. THE THING THAT I WAS SEARCHING FOR WAS ALWAYS IN FRONT OF ME.” hang out. Whereas the other guides are often just guides who have to pay for advertising and web work, I knew I had the advantage of being able to design my own website, register my own business, do my own logos, take my own photographs - all stuff I am good at, because I’d been training for years and I can run a business. At the beginning of 2012 when I had the first guy standing in my boat, I was profiting.” He hit the ground running as if he had been guiding in Exmouth for decades. Six years of full time back-
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to-back operation later and Jono is still dominating. The bad-mouthing he experienced, turned in to positive PR, because when you search for Exmouth and fly fishing these days, Jono Shales is the name that pops up (something that drives his detractors nuts). All the groundwork he had laid with SWOFFA, the two years he spent plotting his entry into the market, combined with the experience he had in web design and business meant that Exmouth Fly Fishing cooked from the get go. The skateboarding skollie shaped by the Navy had out-lasted, out-thought and out-maneuvered an arbitrary alliance of territorial dickheads. “Doing it all on my own has inspired me to keep doing it on my own and not rely on other people. That’s that skating element of just being selfdependent coming back. If I fall over, I’ll pick myself up and keep going. I don’t want other people telling me that they got me there, that they did that for me. The only people who ever did anything for me were my folks and Jack Charlton.” His competition in Exmouth still gives Jono the bird whenever he drives past. Jono smiles, the very embodiment of Australian comedian Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson’s favorite anagram - DILLIGAF (Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck?). He has every reason to not care. He’s booked up way into next year, his Russian fiancée is moving to Exmouth, he’s added a guesthouse to the business and is a trusted ambassador for a string of top brands. Best of all, he did it his way. Jono Shales. Ex-Navy. Former fitness instructor. Retired House DJ. Fly fishing guide. Exmouth local. South African. Australian (sort of). Orvis ambassador. Mako ambassador. Wooer of Russians. Catcher of permit. Braaier of permit. Extender of a middle finger to the haters.