On The Up: 11-year-old sharing his spoils after catching large kingfish on Mahia beach

An 11-year-old boy from Nūhaka is making sure as many people as possible can try one of the 32 fillets carved from a large kingfish he reeled on to the beach last weekend.

Clancy Ryan was fishing at Oraka Beach on the northern side of the Mahia Peninsula on Saturday with his nana Shirin Wood, papa Lee Somervell and 7-year-old brother Jimmy Ryan.

At 3.30pm, about an hour before high tide, Clancy baited his rod, put it in his chair, and went for a walk along the beach.

Grandfather Lee Somervell (left) with grandsons Clancy and Jimmy Ryan.

Wood said he was about 30m down the beach when he had to turn around.

“I saw his rod flip over, and it caught in the chair, and it was off into the water - I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, he’s got something big’.”

Wood said Clancy ran back to his rod and started to reel it in, and was guided by his papa through a 20-minute battle with the fish.

The pair almost got to the end of the 200m of fishing line and worked to get it on to the shore without snapping the line.

“I don’t think he realised the power of the fish.”

She said Clancy was overwhelmed and excited when he realised he had caught a kingfish, which they then weighed on overhead weighing scales at an impressive 24.6kg.

The fish measured around 97cm in length, she said.

Wood said a combination of the tide rising and the kahawai swimming into the estuary could have helped Clancy with the catch.

She said her grandson was “so stoked”.

With 10kg of fillets to go around (32 portions worth), Clancy had asked his mum to make a fish pie, which he’s sharing with his family.

He’d even sent some home with his grandparents so they could share it with Wood’s friends in Napier, who hadn’t tasted kingfish.

“Clancy is a generous young fella, and he has been giving it away, so people can try it.”

Wood described her grandson as kind, patient and helpful, and said the experience could not have happened to a better person.

“No one deserved something like this to happen to them more than Clancy.”

She said that due to the cost, the family didn’t usually eat a lot of fish.

“We have had three meals already with the fish - it’s a lot of fish that is going to provide a lot of meals that [people] would not have otherwise been able to afford.”

Recreationally caught kingfish average 10kg but can weigh more than 30kg. It’s unusual to catch such large ones from the beach.

In 2019, Napier man Tareq Assa’d made headlines for catching a 25.29kg kingfish while surfcasting at Awatoto Beach.

Michaela Gower joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2023 and is based out of the Hastings newsroom. She covers Dannevirke and Hawke’s Bay news and loves sharing stories about farming and rural communities.