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The Whangarei Deep Sea Anglers Club is having its best billfish season ever.
Marlin have been prolific about 5km northeast of the Poor Knights for the past few weeks and the Tutukaka club will register its highest number of billfish, said club president Harvie Ferguson.
Eighty-five boats registered for the annual one-base contest and 86 marlin were caught. "We've never had those sorts of numbers," Ferguson said.
But while others were prospering, angler Scott Tindale had a long and frustrating wait for his first billfish of the year.
Tindale and wife Sue hold New Zealand fishing records and Sue has two world records pending approval from the International Game Fishing Association, so expertise was not the problem.
They fished 19 days on their boat Orokawa, recording details of strikes and hook-ups for the national plotting of marlin movement.
The information was to be passed on to Blue Water Marine Research. They had 41 strikes and losses before finally nailing a striped marlin. And that came by accident, tail-wrapped.
"We saw fish pretty well every day but we lost them at the boat, we had a blue marlin fall off the trace after a half-hour fight, we had one dancing at the back of the boat for ages and got lots of photos then when we went to tag it, it fell off," said Tindale.
"We were changing lures, changing techniques - we got very good at clearing the gear."
So for last weekend's Combined Trades contest at Tutukaka, Tindale and crew turned up with a possum gin trap with a marlin lure skirt as their "mascot".
"We dropped two fish on the first day of the contest and three on the second day before we finally got that one," he said.
The marlin drowned and had to be planed up for retrieval but at 109.6kg it was big enough to win top prize, a reward for perseverance.
The Mercury Bay Gamefish Club is also having a good season, though not quite as hot as last year, but elsewhere the marlin catch has been low.
Water temperature around the Aldermans and Mercury Islands remains between 19C and 21C and club manager Tony Fox is optimistic the good fishing will continue.
Large kingfish have been prolific on the Alderman pins, Fox said, and anglers have been taking 20-30kg fish on long "knife" jigs, the fish hitting on the drop then heading for the reef.
So it is best to fish the rises in anything from 130m to 70m.
The billfish seem to have headed north in recent days, as more regular catches are being reported off the Ninepin in the Bay of Islands and out from Whangaroa, where earlier in the season there were lots of strikes and runs from small fish but few hook-ups.
The easterly blow has pushed warm water closer in, but the down-side is getting to it through the dirty water and debris washed offshore after last week's storm.
Snapper fishing has finally taken off from the Bay of Plenty to North Cape, perhaps sparked by the big blow and the food it tossed up. Jigging works well in depths out to 40m. Closer in, straylining cut baits is best. Using whole pilchards guarantees frustrating hits and misses.
Some of the best snapper fishing around Auckland continues to be in the upper harbour, and in the Firth of Thames, in water as shallow as 2m. Use lots of berley, and try soft baits, working them with short, sharp movement of the rod.
The soft bait technique will work when nothing else does, primarily because of the movement. The right gear is required - - many anglers have reported poor returns but are using monofilament instead of braid, thus not enjoying the same degree of "touch". Others jerk the line too hard in jigging style when 20-30cm of movement is best.
