Day 16 – King?

Day 16 and it’s the day of the King of the Harbour Fishing Competition, a local Whangarei competition, a friend of mine, Paul (Technical) came down from Auckland on Saturday night to join me, so could either of us be crowned King of the Harbour?

The day started at 4:00am when the alarm clock went off, dragged myself out of bed, a quick breakfast and then we hit the road, sure glad we packed the cars the night before…

We drove to our launch spot at Urquharts Bay, took just under and hour from Ngunguru, in the dark and unloaded, and readied the kayaks for action, all done and ready to go by 5:50, perfect timing as the comp started at 6:00am!

We paddled out and headed into the channel, high tide was 9:13am so we were paddling against the current but it wasn’t too bad, and we had a 5 knot wind in our backs so didn’t really feel the current.

We paddled down to number five buoy and started our drift slowly down towards number three buoy, 6:30am and I catch the first fish! Not a huge fish so the first fish goes back…

Nothing much else happened after that for a while even though I’d paddled back and re-drifted across the same spot. Then the sun decided to join us and brightened up the place no end.

We had to get out of the center of the channel for a while so the bigger boat could get though… He wasn’t exactly gonna go around us was he…

Time for more fish please, it was hard to get the jig head weight right, the current was still running and we were getting blown around, the depth was 60 feet / 20 meters, the 1/2oz JigStar was too light, the 2 oz JigStar with a 7 inch Gulp Pink Shine was getting down nice and quick but not getting any bites, so I tried a 5/8 oz JigStar jighead along with the 7 inch Pink Shine and that seemed to be the perfect match – I picked these two up within ten minutes of each other.

Hitchhiker – I found this guy on my boot at 8:20am, now I’m over 2km from shore, I’m sure this guy didn’t swim to me, so must have been aboard since we launched! Although after posing for the photo, he promptly jumped in the drink…

8:40am and a new species for the 30 day challenge, a Gurnard, this one went in the back and will be dinner one night this week!

Earlier in the morning I dropped a nice Snapper when my Jighead and leader parted just above the jighead, can only assume the leader got nicked by the fish or one of the earlier fish, so when this better fish turned up, out came the gaff!

That turned out to be my best fish of the day, was the fish I lost bigger..? Paul seemed to think so, but hey, we’ll never know…

By this time we had drifted down to number one buoy, at this point we split up and Paul headed towards the coast while I continued to drift down to the entrance buoy, I picked up two more Snapper, kept one, released one, and two more more Gurnard, both released.

I look over to where Paul is fishing, about 1.5km away, and I see something jump out the water, must be an Orca or Dolphin I think, then a few seconds later Paul gets me on the VHF – “Did you see that jump?”, “Yea, what was that a Dolphin or something?”, “No it was a 2m Mako shark!”. Seems it had grabbed his Rapala, took it for a run, then turned back towards the kayak, went over to check him / the kayak out, then did the standard Mako move, went down deep, then came up fast, and jumped out the water, at which point Paul cut his line, that was enough jumping shark for him today!

Now it’s time to start heading back, we wanted to be back at Urquharts Bay by 12:00pm so we’d have plenty of time to pack up and drive around to Marsden Marina where the comp was based. The tide was now heading out and the wind had crept up on me to about 15 knots, those two together made for a very very hard and long paddle back to Urquharts Bay, I couldn’t get above one and a half knots at times, in total it took me an hour and half of solid non stop paddling to get back! It’s days like this that a StealthDrive or other kayak motor on a kayak starts to appeal, if only assist your paddling when the going gets tough.

The arms and shoulders were burning, I had cramp in my hands, to be honest I was rapidly approaching exhaustion, even the brain wasn’t performing, the time on my Humminbird is three hours fast, it was reading 14:30 and I came up with it being 1:30pm, I did the calc several times and even radioed Paul to tell him too, I was convinced we weren’t gonna make the weigh in, the penny did drop of course when I got back to the car and looked at my watch, crazy…

We get the kayaks unloaded, back on top the the cars, and head to Marsden Marina to the competition headquarters, I wasn’t gonna weigh anything in but then got told the heaviest weighed so far was only 2kg, hmm my big one must be around there somewhere… 1.90kg to be exact… ah well, just goes to show you shouldn’t always right off your chances…

That was early on though and several more fish came in and the biggest boat Snapper ended up at 2.9kg, so no monster but enough to score first place for the angler, the biggest Snapper was actually caught off the rocks, it weighed in at 7.6kg.

So home to process the catch of the day, before processing

After processing…

So all up a long and tiring day but all worth while, and thanks for the company Paul! I’ll definitely be back for this come next year!