Landing the big one

Matt Watson, the host of television's ITM Fishing Show. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

Matt Watson's nerves settled when his mind sank back into the Gutter. It had been an exhausting week, and despite all the calls, emails and the airline ticket in his pocket, he still wondered if a mistake had been made. Over and over he'd asked: "Are they sure they want me?

An ex-tiler, brickie and fencer who makes a fishing show in his shed?" But after an ITM Fishing Show clip of him leaping from a helicopter into the sea to wrestle a marlin went viral - it was getting 7000 hits a minute on Watson's television show website when its server crashed - it seemed like everyone wanted him; David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and The Today Show, among others.

Letterman was the first on the phone to him, and Watson is a fan, so he flew to New York. The day his appearance was confirmed he stayed up to watch the show and see who was on. Normally the sight of Will Smith loping out, swapping high fives with the band and then riffing casually with the host would be entertaining, but that night it made him sick. The next night it was Al Pacino. Then Robert De Niro. Then Jessica Simpson. "I had to stop watching, it made my stomach churn just thinking about it. How could I follow those people? What if I froze?"

The nausea was still there as he wandered through the Koru Lounge at Auckland International Airport awaiting his flight and looking for somewhere to plug in his laptop. Then he stopped pacing and looked out the window.

"The Manukau looked as huge as it did when I was little, I thought it was the ocean. I could see the LPG terminal, a bit of a landmark when I was a kid, and behind that again was Weymouth. I was like 'wow, that's where all this started.' Then I looked around at the Gutter, it's one of my favourite fishing spots, and I couldn't help wondering what fish might be down there - don't ask, I'm not telling you where it is. Thinking about all that stuff was a great kind of moment for me... I don't like to reflect too much on what I've done, for me it's always about the next thing, but for that little moment I just let myself enjoy it and my guts stopped churning."

He's still smiling at the memory when his phone rings: "Sorry mate, I'll have to get this, it's work... 'Hello... Really?... Cool, cheers for that.' Well, that was a monumental occasion. That was my, ummm, attorney? He's been representing me in negotiations with the Discovery Channel and he says I've finally got a contract to sign."

"Right," says Bill, the sales and marketing bloke for Tightlines Television, the team behind TV3's ITM Fishing Show, "That calls for a bottle of Marque Vue." And that's as heady as the celebrations got. This deal could set the 33-year-old father of two on the path to stardom - the standard comparison is Steve Irwin - but they're dinkum Kiwis up in Northland's Takou Bay, a place where sheds aren't for whooping it up in. That sort of carry-on is left for the important stuff: fishing.

So Bill turns back to his computer, Kate, the production assistant, sips on her water, and the dog wanders in for a scratch. The office is so small they could probably all reach him without leaving their chairs. It's just another milestone in a life teeming with them.

I came across Watson's show through my dad. Almost nothing can drag him away from the telly when it's on, so all plans have to be built around it. The host's fish ravings have Dad gazing out to sea and sighing, while the all-action underwater shots of fish taking the bait bring out the woohoos. These moments, filmed using a modified torch casing containing a pencil camera, have become the show's signature, but they are also 5-year-old Matt Watson saying: "See? I told you I caught it."

He grew up in Weymouth. In 1975 it was still a quiet seaside community, perfect for a fishing family, so he was pretty much raised on the Manukau Harbour in the family's 15-footer. If he wasn't out with his granddad, dad or uncle, he was at the wharf with Mum - until he turned 5. Then Watson was allowed to go to the wharf alone.

When the tide was right he'd be there by 7am to set his baitcatcher and then use the sprats to catch kahawai on his hand line. He'd often have a few by the time the locals began turning up. "I remember being pissed off that no one would believe me that I'd caught them by myself. All fishermen love to tell the story of the catch, so that really bummed me out. I'd get pretty wild."

The Manukau was soon his personal playground, and he wanted to know how it worked. He started a fishing journal, each page ruled up so he could record every detail he thought important and cross-referenceable: location, air and sea temperature, moon, tide, current direction, weather and sea conditions, bait, fish caught, as well as a comments section that evolved from technical ideas to flowery prose on the emotions he felt landing the big ones. He was a fishing tragic. Even while at James Cook High School he'd spend weekends and holidays working on Uncle Ian's mulleting boat.

Initially he got a tenner for his efforts, but it wasn't long before he was being invited on as a crewman with a share in the catch. They'd leave on Friday night, collect a load, pack it down, and return. If the fish were still running, they'd head straight out again. He might get back to school on Monday morning having had only five or six hours sleep all weekend. But he didn't care, he was fishing.

Come 1992 and Watson's parents were set on him going to university, maybe to follow up his bursary level accounting. All very prudent, but schooling brought him no joy and, besides, he'd only read one book in his life: Zane Grey's Angler's El Dorado. Then Uncle Ian offered him a job on his floundering boat so everything was Christmas until Christmas arrived and the whanau assembled for a day of sport. With the volleyball and touch rugby squared, the honours came down to the cricket match, an epic that came down to the final ball.

Watson clutched the tennis ball as Uncle Ian prodded the grass with his bat. "I tried to rip one in with extra pace," says Watson, "and I sconed him on the head. He didn't get the run, so we won and we were laughing. Then I saw him running at me out of corner of my eye. I thought he was joking, but he smacked me with the bat. So I was lying on the ground with a cut lip, then Dad smacked him, then another uncle jumped in and all the women got upset because they were fighting in front of the kids while I was sitting there, dejected. All I could think was that I might have to go to university after all..."

Luckily another uncle stepped forward with a bricklaying job and Watson began tossing bricks during the week while tiling roofs and playing rugby on the weekends. Fishing filled the in-between times. Tiling was supposed to be a sideline, but it went so well he started his own company, which allowed him to buy a house at 21 and pay it off when he was 24. "I was throwing the big hours at work, but I didn't mind. I had this dream to work really hard for 10 or 15 years, then move to the Bay of Islands, buy a game-fishing boat and drive around on that for the rest of my days."

Watson's big on goals, like the quest for his first marlin, one of his most memorable catches. Hooking marlin is usually a team affair - the fish are enormous, they fight like hell and landing them is knackering - but he would regularly head out to the Manukau Bar on his own to hunt.

One Sunday he'd managed to hook and then lose 12 marlin in every way possible before heading home, disppointed yet again. But the next day he was back out and live trawling, something he'd never attempted with marlin. He was rigging a second line when a marlin leaped up with his hook in its mouth. They battled for more than an hour and a half before he draped it across the back of his runabout, recrossed the bar and headed for Huia. It weighed in at 109.8kg, he remembers, only a little lighter than Jonah Lomu at his peak.

By now it was dark and the tide was going out, so he rang ahead and set off for home. "I pushed the boat the last 100m with this marlin hanging out the back and there were Mum and Dad, and a few of the guys who had been working for me that day, waiting for me. That was quite cool, my first marlin came back to the Weymouth boat ramp."

Life was going to plan until 2000 and another big moment. It was another Sunday at work and he was on a roof struggling to free some netting from a valley tray when the net broke and he slipped, groin-first onto a sharp, metal edge. Watson gives his trademark deadpan account: "A bit of sackage got sliced, it wasn't serious, but it bled like hell. So I got myself down and was in the car with my feet up on the dashboard, adjusting the mirror so I could have a look and figure out how I was going to get a Bandaid on it. Then my phone went. It was a mate out off the West Coast. He said they'd already caught three or four tuna, and I could hear a reel going in the background. All I could think was, 'those bastards are out there catching fish and I'm sitting here bleeding from my balls'."

Watson began to wonder if he was "wasting [his] best years" in the tiling business. So he cleaned himself up, zipped home, sat his girlfriend (now wife) Kaylee down, and told her he was selling the house, selling the business and asked what she thought of living in the Bay of Islands. She can't have taken him too seriously because two days later she was on the phone asking why there was a For Sale sign on the front fence.

Too late, Watson was on a roll. He signed up for his skipper's licence and started looking for a new job, both of which were sorted within six months. As a bonus, his new job didn't start until January so there was time to squeeze in a quick OE. Kaylee couldn't go, so Watson embarked on a full-on mancation which went drunkenly well until he found himself on a table at the Munich beerfest giving a random bloke a wedgie for breaking some arcane drinking rule.

One hey-ho-hup later and Watson was crumpled on the ground, clutching what was later diagnosed as a torn AC ligament. The next day, after scheduling an operation in Auckland, he did a runner from hospital on borrowed crutches and arrived home two months early to find his prized job was no longer available. Bugger.

Actually, the timing was perfect because a mate mentioned his name to a first-time skipper who was building a new boat and needed crew. The pair hit it off and Prime Time went on to catch more gamefish than any boat in the country in its first year. "Talk about your twists of fate," says Watson, "and it was all down to cutting my balls and falling off a table." Then his skipper decided everyone should learn of their good fortune. Let's start a diary they could run in the club journal, he said, and how about getting NZ Fishing News to print it as well? And why shouldn't the bloke who's only read one book in his life write it? Well, why not? thought Watson.

NZ Fishing News editor Grant Dixon is a fan despite Watson's lack of any formal training. "I mean he's a roofer really, but he inspires people around him. Matt always leads the charge, and that gets the best out of people."

For his part, Watson says it never registers that something might be beyond him - he broke 11 bones during his rugby days as a prop-smashing halfback - but there is one job he may never finish: turning his wife into a fishing fan. "My wife couldn't give an arse about any of it," he says. "I've tried to get across how cool all this stuff is, describe all these amazing things we do. I used to show Kaylee my articles and she'd pretend to look, then push it away and read her Woman's Day."

It was after an trip away on Ultimate Lady, an enormous cruiser he also crewed for, that Watson realised where his love of fishing could take him. He had been in heaven, the Wanganella Bank about 560km off the top of New Zealand, where they averaged 12 marlin caught and released a day - numbers that were previously unheard of. He asked for a copy of a video from the trip and was watching it in his living room when Kaylee walked past: "Holy crap, look at the size of that fish... oh my God, that's you."

Watson rewound the tape and played it to her again. "That's when it clicked," he says. "This is the way to tell the story." Despite the breakthrough, there is still not one scrap of anything fishing-related inside the Watsons' home. By now he'd also met his offsider, Kerren Packer, then a graphic designer with Yellow Pages Group, at a fishing competition in Whakatane. "You know, when you shake someone's hand and you know immediately that there's going to be something special about this relationship?" says Packer. "We've been great mates ever since."

A few beers convinced them that shooting a television show about their fishing exploits would be a most excellent idea. Their first attempt was for a fishing video competition run by now-defunct television show Sports Cafe. Victory encouraged Watson to borrow some cash for a proper camera and they shot enough film to make a pilot show using software a mate picked up in Thailand for $5. Watson was also experimenting with underwater shots - he tied bait to his camera to attract fish - and was successful enough to win an interview at Sky TV. It was cloaked in secrecy.

As Watson puts it: "We didn't want anyone to say 'what dicks, you can't make a TV show'." They treated the meeting as a practice run - wasn't it obvious that they didn't know what they were doing? An hour later and they walked out, pale-faced. Packer looked at his mate: "We'd better start making some shows then." The order was for 26 episodes in three months, at no cost to Sky, which they whittled down to 10 in 11 months. "We had no idea what to do," says Watson, "so we decided we'd just do what we did with the pilot, only we'd do everything a lot more times."

Closing credits were a problem until he caught the end of an episode of The Young and the Restless and scribbled down all the jobs that were listed. They divvied these up between them, using their friends' names for whatever was left. All up, the 10 episodes cost them $60,000 to put together. They managed to attract about $35,000 in sponsorship, so the whole exercise still ended up costing them $25,000.

Sponsorship and merchandising are still their only source of income, so hopes are high that the Discovery Channel deal might see their fortunes improve.

The key to this opportunity was Watson's invention of stunt fishing in 2006. His on-water antics, such as his gannet-imitating leap from a helicopter and swimming with sharks while covered in meat, may not impress some of the old salts or those who reckon it's faked, but they're lapped up in America. His original intention wasn't to create Back To The Y on water - he wanted to show that game fishing, a sport that has always invoked images of rich guys in their gin palaces, was accessible to anyone. So he set out to catch a marlin in the Bay of Islands for only $25. All he needed was his motorised canoe, a hand line using an electric fence reel he found behind the shed, and several mates who could take the time off to help.

On the first day he motored 16km offshore, caught his bait, then hooked and successfully landed a mako shark. Hopes were high for a marlin the next day, and each of the subsequent three days. That's four days, from 6am to 9pm, and not a single bite. His mates were getting tetchy. So the plan changed, he'd chug off alone early and the boat, Prime Time, would catch his bait and follow along. Watson reached the 16km mark, but the sea was wrong, so he kept going, eventually getting beyond line-of-sight radio range.

Too bad, he was obsessed and maybe the boat had been jinxing him anyway. He put a line over and caught some bait. By now his fuel was running low and the batteries on his radio were fading, but not before he spotted a few boats cruising nearby, so he radioed over and asked them to relay his position to his chase boat.

One hook was in the water and he'd taken off his heavy fishing gloves to rig another when his first line took off. Watson fed out as much slack as he could to give himself time to put on his gloves and yelled "I'm hooked up" into his radio, which promptly died. Then the line stopped running. He was sure whatever he'd caught was still there and was still reeling it in when the marlin jumped up so close to his canoe he was wet by the splash. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Prime Time steaming in, with the guys on deck filming everything. The next one and three quarter hours were spent fighting, talking to the camera, trying to direct his crew, and then landing the beast; not your typical canoeing experience, but it opened his adventures up to a new audience of non-fishing types. But all this adrenaline had a cost.

Watson used to head out hoping the most exciting thing in the world would happen. Now, if he doesn't have a camera, he hopes for the quietest day imaginable so they won't miss the chance for footage. No matter, he has a another way to get his kicks - pig hunting - and he rejects any accusations of bloodthirsty cruelty.

To his mind, people have lost touch with where their food comes from and the life farming gives to animals. "Look, I always feel sorry for the animal after I've killed it, but if you gave a pig a choice when he's being lined up to die between living in a pen and only meeting other pigs or running around the bush, rooting and being a pig before getting the chance to fight for its life, which do you think it'd choose?"

It all sounds exciting and even a little risky, but it doesn't really explain Watson's drive to hunt. "You know I've been trying to put a finger on that for years," he says. "In the end, I believe there's something primal about it, it's meant to be rewarding. Way back when, you couldn't get a job then head to the supermarket, you had to get out and hunt your food.

So I reckon we're programmed to feel good about getting what we need to stay alive. And I've always got a buzz out of providing for my family. I remember going out and getting a bag of cockles as a kid, and my dad was never a fan of them, but he'd slap me on the back and say, 'good on you son, we'll have those for dinner tonight'. That was the best feeling in the world and I think that's what keeps you going out again and again."