Squid hunter is an apt description of Tasmanian owner-operator Daniel Mayne who is based at Mornington near Hobart.
Mayne, 32, runs Tas-X Contracting and I saw him parked behind the Ampol Mood Food Roadhouse at Kempton.
He was checking out the load on his 2007 Western Star Constellation.
“I have a Komatsu excavator to take to Oatlands and have had the business for the past five years,” he said.
Like other operators, Mayne said rising fuel prices were hurting him and pointed out that diesel that day was $2.29 a litre.
“It is garbage and our biggest expense. It wasn’t too bad when the prices eased a while back,” he said.
He likes stopping at the Mood Food because it has plenty of parking and good food.
Mayne said that he found Acton Road in Hobart as challenging to drive on but added the large number of roadworks along the Midlands Highway caused delays.
Outside work Mayne enjoys spending time with family and his children aged three and five are his pride and joy.
An avid squid fisherman, he recently had luck off Maria Island where he caught 16 squids, including one monster which was 410mm down the hood.
“The rings which came off it were like fan belts and it made good eating,” he said.
I told Mayne that I had caught many squid off Magnetic Island in the tropics over the years but nothing anywhere near as big as that one.
This friendly truckie sent me a picture, see above, of him holding the giant squid to prove it was not a “fishy story”.
Mayne then walked into the roadhouse to get a copy of the latest Big Rigs and gave me a warm wave as he drove away.
Coincidentally, I later saw Mayne at a Lavender Farm eatery at Port Arthur which is 100km from Hobart along the Arthur Highway.
I had stopped there and again yarned to Mayne who said he was going camping with his family.