2008 Mercury Bay Open Competition
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
The Mercury Bay Open is a well-established competition that for many signals the end of the spearfishing competition season. Being at the end of the season the weather can often be a bit of a lottery. Not so this year! I arrived in Whitianga from New Plymouth to blue skies and zero wind, even better there was no swell. I had a day before the competition to remember how to dive, and how to spear fish after a lengthy layoff. A shore dive at Opito Bay beckoned.
The water looked great from the top of the hill, but once in the water, the visibility was only 5 or so metres. A good long swim blew out the cobwebs and I returned to shore with crayfish, butterfish and John Dory, and a full unopened bottle of pinot gris spotted on the bottom near some moorings! It went well with the fish that night.
Sunday dawned just as clear, and around 50 divers crowded into the Gamefishing Club for the briefing. It was great to see a number of new faces. With a benign forecast the decision was made to head the 50km out to Cuvier Island, to find clear water and hopefully plenty of fish.
I was diving this competition with Blair Herbert from the Bluefins Club. We jumped into beautiful 15 metres or more of visibility. As the whole of the island was the zone, we had to decide whether or not to go east or west. We opted for west, reasoning that the more accessible weed edges would provide better fishing.
First stop was a pinnacle out from the boats that rose to about 8 metres straight out of 30 metres. In the past I has speared some good snapper there, and it was usually a good spot for pinkies and tarakihi. Not this time – no tide meant no fish. We headed west and very soon we were picking up fish – well, Blair was, I couldn’t hit a thing! We soon had porae, butterfish and trevally, followed by blue moki. We spotted a float further out and headed out to it. Dwane and Julian were fishing a great bommie coming up out of 40 metres. There was a huge cloud of blue maomao on top, and we soon had two of them. Big koheru were also an easy target. Diving onto the rock and peering over the edge I saw a big school of pink maomao stacked up against the reef wall. Two of them were soon dispatched to the plat. Despite a good search that was all we could find. Time to head back towards the boats.
On the way back we picked up another trevally. Blair came up from a dive to say he thought he had seen a tarakihi nestled in a ray hole out on the sand. I was skeptical – I thought maybe a porae, but not a tarakihi. Diving down to the sand at 20 metres I spotted the fish, and at once saw the tell tale black saddle. The fish didn’t want to play ball though and I had to squeeze off a long shot - I wasn’t confident, but the fish rolled over dead - great! We headed back to the boat, the 5 hours had passed quickly.
Back at the weigh-in we listened to the usual hard luck stories, but in the end veterans Peter Herbert and Ian Warnock had won with 21 fish, Dwane Herbert and Julian Hansford were one fish behind in 2nd, followed by John Ross and Pete Symons with 17 fish. Blair and I were 4th with the same number of fish. Top juniors were Jackson Shields and Karl Bottema who finished 9th overall in the Open event, and top woman was Monique Schectnick.
Biggest kingfish 15.4 kg speared by Pete Symons Biggest snapper 3.6 kg speared by Julian Hansford
The fish were sold by auction to raise money for the local Lions Club.
Well done to the Mercury Bay Spearfishing Club for a great, well organised competition.
Report by Pat Swanson
A special thanks to our competition sponsors:
