Most of Australia spent New Year's Eve 2025 in a backyard. The Arnolds family — the husband-and-wife duo behind Arnolds Around Oz, with their two young kids Reef and Rocky — towed their plate boat across the Moreton Bay run, anchored up off Moreton Island and turned the entire transition into 2026 into a live-aboard fishing trip with weather thrown in.
The video opens with the format change framed clearly.
"This is our first episode of 2026, and we're back doing things a little different," the narration runs. "Instead of travelling Australia the usual way, we're towing our plate boat along the coast, chasing islands, reefs, and the kind of adventures you can only reach from the water."
The boat, nicknamed the Blue Eddie, had spent its early life being shifted in and out of the family's tow vehicle every trip. Heading into a multi-night offshore mission, it was permanently mounted with a Blue Eddie 2 DC-DC charger, a fresh battery placement and a quick-disconnect hub designed to push 12 volt power outside the car door for camp use — a deliberately simple build aimed at the kind of family who fishes hard for two days and then needs the boat back on the road.
The fishing itself centred on the quieter bommies south of Tangalooma, with the Arnolds anchoring the first night and then running out the next morning while New Year's Eve still had a workable wind window.
"Three ones for mama," husband Luke said over the rod bend. "If mom gets another big one, I'm letting her have her beer."
The fish in question turned out to be a solid emperor — a heavy reef species that runs a different fight to the snapper the family had been hooking either side of it.
"That's a big emperor," Luke called as the fish came over the side. "Mommy loves them."
The rest of the family scoreboard ticked over inside an hour. Multiple snapper to a respectable size came on the heavier outfits, the kids took turns winding fish in, and dad Luke locked his own snapper soon after Zoe's emperor.
"Now we have three fish for dinner," the dialogue runs.
The small-grassy run that followed pushed them off the bite and around to the western side of the island, where the wind was supposed to be lighter but turned out colder than the Arnolds had planned for.
"That is way colder than I thought it would be. That's actually freezing," Luke said over a crew swim during the afternoon.
The quieter back-of-island anchorage gave the family the kind of calm shoreline that doesn't get filmed often — clear water, sand flats and a constant dolphin cycle around the boat. Zoe, who had grown up with a dolphin-themed bedroom, framed it neatly.
"We see dolphins all the time on the water, but it never gets old."
The weather turned overnight. By the time the kids were in bed, a southeast system had pushed across the bay and the Arnolds were double-anchoring the plate boat against incoming squall lines. Fireworks on the mainland came through the dark as a brief glimmer before the rain hit fully.
"Well, the storm has finally hit us. We got both kids down and we're bunkering down," Luke said into the camera.
Dinner that night was the day's catch — a quick lemon-pepper-and-sea-salt cook on a small portable cooker, with the boat already rocking enough to make plating a job.
What the trip captured, beyond the fish, is a window onto the hard-trending segment of Australian fishing content for 2026 — the move from caravan-towing tour content to fully-mounted plate-boat live-aboards. The Blue Eddie 2 setup the Arnolds detailed at the start of the video is a non-trivial signal that the family-fishing market is buying into 12 volt offshore-capable rigs at scale, and that NYE long weekends on Moreton, Fraser and Hinchinbrook are now a credible alternative to mainland resorts for anglers willing to travel by hull rather than highway.