KEY POINTS:
The extended gamefishing season shows no sign of closing off just yet - it looks like there will be a shortage of anglers chasing billfish.
Marlin continue to be caught regularly in the trenches off the Poor Knights, most big and in good condition.
And whereas earlier in the season the fish were prone to picking up lures and running then dropping them, they are now hammering them hard.
There have been few boats out but some have been reporting multiple strikes, the White Witch tagging two and Steve Tyler Whiteman on runabout Giddy Up'n Go scoring a 152.2kg striped marlin, about as big as they get.
Water temperature is just 18C, normally too low for billfish, but the abundance of skipjack tuna and saury in the area is keeping them feeding.
John Batterton on the Amokura reported plenty of billfish in the North Cape area, anglers landing one fish of 90kg and another of 98kg on 6kg line.
The strange thing is that the King and Middlesex Banks off the Three Kings Islands, which have been cold, have suddenly started producing fish. Rick Pollock's Pursuit will be the last charter boat in the area and he predicts a bonanza that everyone will miss.
Pollock has his last charter trip up there now, the gamefishing usually done by June. "We are getting regular strikes - they're not thick and fast but you have to think that all those fish off Tutukaka and North Cape have to head north. It could really fire and no one will be here."
Bass are starting to move in for spawning and his best up north this week was 64kg. There have been good schools of kingfish off the Cape, to 30kg.
The marlin satellite tagging programme sponsored by the Marine Research Foundation has successfully planted six tags and all have sent data. Fish have been tracked to Tahiti, New Caledonia and east past Pitcairn Island.
The researchers are trying to find where the fish that visit New Zealand waters spend the winter and where they breed. Tim Sippel of Blue Water Marine Research said the fish now proceeding east of Pitcairn was tagged at Waihau Bay in February and it had been tracked for further and longer than any other in four years of study.
Further south, Doubtless Bay is producing easy limit bags for anglers working Fairway Reef, behind the surf at Tokerau and the rocky coastline.
The bigger fish are being taken on the open coast. An 18kg kingie was landed on Mangonui wharf during the week and many people have been busted off. John dory and kahawai have been prevalent, all chasing big schools of baitfish - all end-of-summer stuff running late.
In the Bay of Islands Geoff Stone on the Major Tom II reports barracouta moving in, hapuku fishing patchy and the snapper fishing best close in on the rocks.
The fishing has been poorer the further south you go. Several people, including charter operator Eugyn de Bruyn on Sea Genie and Manukau expert John Moran, suggested this was because of the new moon this week. De Bruyn found snapper around the Ahas and Noises but said it wasn't a patch on the fishing under work-ups further out the week before. Big, fresh baits were getting best results.
Moran said several experienced anglers had come home empty-handed or with a couple of kahawai after putting in plenty of effort on the Manukau.
The Court of Appeal in Wellington has set February 15 as the date for hearing the kahawai quota case. The Minister of Fisheries is due to release this year's quota proposal any day now and recreational interests fear it will include a quota cut as he attempts to stall any further action by industry.
Meanwhile catch figures for the SNA8 quota area off Auckland's west coast released on Wednesday show that the total allowable catch has again been exceeded, 134 tonnes over the 1300-tonne limit, making it 15 of the past 18 years that has happened. The industry has paid a "deemed value" penalty of $600,000, which is clearly insufficient to deter the over-fishing. The west coast snapper stock is already proved to be depleted.
