Brazilian grabs a big one off Mahia - hook, drone and snapper

Brazilian national, Napier carpenter and recreational fisherman Felipe Fiuza Zanelatto speaks with some disbelief at landing one of the biggest snapper ever caught on the Hawke's Bay and Gisborne coast – in the dark and using a drone.

When it hooked up about 8.30pm on June 1, after a drone took the 24kg-strain line out 460 metres off Oraka Beach, on the northern side of Mahia Peninsula, Zanelatto thought he had a shark.

"I had no idea till I had it on the sand," he said, revealing that even then, despite his digital scales recording the weight at 14.8kg moments later, the significance of its size escaped him, other than it was a meal for much more than one.

In old school fishing parlance, the snapper weighed 32.6 pounds - not bad given most fishers celebrate if they hit the "10lb" mark.

Felipe Zanelatto and the 14.8kg snapper soon after it was caught on the night of June 1. Photo/ Supplied

Apart from being able to deposit his bait nearly half a kilometre from shore, there were no great secrets to the success of the boy from Brazil.

The bait was standard salted bonito – available at most petrol stations.

Zanelatto also fishes a well-used Shimano rod and TLG50 reel he puts into the car every time he goes up and down the coast, which he does regularly in his job as a carpenter.

"I'm just looking to go fishing in my free time," he says.

Gutted, cleaned and weighed again, the snapper's first fillet was in the pan by midnight back at the digs where he was staying for the week while working in the area.

For Zanelatto, it was yet another beach, and some time to spend fishing by SH2, or, as he says, "living the dream".

It was only after satisfying the culinary needs that friends got him fishing the internet for tales of great snapper catches around the globe, and ultimately deciding it was worth telling the world.

Searches of Google and NZME files revealed it's well short of the acknowledged world record of 17.2kg.

But so has almost everything else been in the almost 30 years since that snapper was caught on a 10kg line by Mount Maunganui fisherman Mark Hemingway off Motiti Island, Bay of Plenty, on November 2, 1992.

The women's record is credited to a Dawn Irvine, with a 16.35kg specimen off Slipper Island, just east of the Coromandel Coast, and caught in 1998.

The biggest officially recorded around Hawke's Bay is not far behind, weighing 16.59kg and landed by the late Thomas Kane, of Nuhaka, on the Black's Beach side of the Nuhaka River mouth.

It wasn't a competition fish but was weighed by the Mahia Boating and Fishing Club, which records the event in its 50th anniversary booklet, published in 2009.

It doesn't record the date, but it does mention it was just a small hook and the bait was local pipi.

The Hawke's Bay Sports Fishing Club record for a snapper is 14.645kg.

There've been others not too far away, such as Napier man Scott Dallimore's 14kg catch off the Bay View-Whirinaki beach in October 2004, a Pania club competition catch weighing-in at 13.4kg in 2013, and veterans Bruce Ryan, 76, and Michael Lange, 64, catching a 12.2kg snapper on a 20-hook kontiki line, also north of Wairoa, in 2018.

Zanelatto's use of a drone follows a similar catch in February this year when Taranaki man Brent Davies claimed a 14.5kg catch from the deck of his coastal Taranaki home, after flying the line out about 500 metres.