A rarely caught shortbill spearfish caught on the Wahoo boat during Your Solutions Megafish competition. Photo / Supplied
A rarely caught shortbill spearfish caught on the Wahoo boat during Your Solutions Megafish competition. Photo / Supplied
The region's largest fishing competition has produced some rare catches, as the more than 150 extra entries make hay while the sun shines.
Hawke's Bay Sports Fishing Club President Neil Price said the Your Solutions Megafish contest, which saw a total of 438 anglers and 124 boats enter, had gone"pretty smoothly" in its fourth year under its modern guise.
"Our numbers are high," he said. "We continued to take entries throughout the week.
"It has surpassed last year's entries by about 150 - it is getting back to its heyday."
The contest peaked in the early 1980s with 754 rods registered before the format changed, with anglers now chasing the $10,000 prize.
"A lot of people choose not to tell you what they've got though until they come into shore too."
From left Oversear crew Jeremy Ross (with son George), marlin-catcher Doug Cushing, Craig Bidlake and Sean Kent. Photo/Doug Laing
Price added: "We're bound to not have the big fish come in yet – lots of boats wait right up until the last day. We've got the rest of today and tomorrow for them to come in."
Albacore was the predominant species being weighed in at the competition, with 49 recorded by the first day weigh-in deadline of 6pm Wednesday.
It was a special Waitangi Day for Napier angler Colin O'Brien, with the weighing of the tournament's biggest kingfish to late-afternoon Thursday.
The 17.695kg specimen, almost 5kg bigger than the first-day best for the species, was boated barely a few hundred metres from the inner harbour entrance as he and Kaos crewmate John Andrews headed for shore on Thursday morning after a night at sea.
In the money but not quite the biggest snapper by late Thursday afternoon was this 7.535kg whopper caught by Russell Chapman. Photo/Doug Laing
The biggest snapper, at 8.39kg, had been caught by Zeke Nunez, fishing from Dream and holding-off Napier fisherman Russell Chapman's late-afternoon weigh of a 7.535kg fish hooked from the boat Hustler.
The tournament ends on Saturday afternoon evening with a prize giving ceremony that will include an entrants prize draw with a $45,000 boat at stake.
The Your Solutions tournament is in its fourth year and succeeds the long-running Coruba tournament which ran annually for more than 35 years, being last held in 2013.
Price said the number of youths have been using Nelson Quay as a swimming spot has significantly grown in the last week, with some jumping into the water "dangerously close to boats", causing him to call police on three occasions.
"The only issue we've had is the kids that are jumping into the water near boats, over boats, on boats, to have a swim," he said.
"All they want to do is swim, which we don't have a problem with.
"There are council signs that say you can't swim, but they got quite confrontational when you tell them to get out the way."
Price said it could end in disaster if things didn't change.
"These boats' propeller blades are a lot sharper than a lawnmower and can do a lot more damage."
