But Greenwell Point fisherman Matt Gray has new bragging rights after snagging Shoalhaven City Council’s water quality testing buoy that went missing from the Shoalhaven River 12 miles out to sea.

The buoy had been in place at the junction of the Shoalhaven River and Berry’s Canal at Numbaa for a couple of weeks.

At the height of the flood drama Shoalhaven City Council senior environmental health officer Andrew Gibbes was monitoring the buoy and noticed a dramatic rise in salinity readings.

“I thought it had been washed out to sea somewhere but had no idea where,” he said.

“It was still working, transmitting data back to us and the salinity readings were off the scale.

“Then the readings changed, it was no longer in salt water and we thought it must have been washed ashore somewhere.”

Little did he know that the device had actually been picked up by local fisherman Matt Gray on his trawler, the Anne Marie V, on the Continental Shelf, some 12 miles out to sea.

“We were out there trawling and just saw this buoy float past,” he said.

“It looked pretty special and expensive with all its solar panels and other stuff and when we finished our run north we steamed back about 25 minutes to find it. We managed to hook it and winch it aboard.”

He said it wasn’t until he got back to Greenwell Point that a friend told him about Shoalhaven City Council’s callout on Facebook for the missing buoy.

“I assume it flowed out when Shoalhaven Heads was opened,” he said.

The buoy wasn’t the only strange object Mr Gray saw out to sea after the floods. There was lots of rubbish, big logs, trees, a couple of chest freezers, dead cows and even two fully inflated tractor tyres.

Council had recently obtained three of the buoys from Botany Bay where they were used by the Australian Laboratory Service.