Fishing: Marlin encounters would have pleased Hemingway

By Geoff Thomas

Gone fishing

Ernest Hemingway would have been proud of the struggles between anglers in small boats and huge marlin which took place around the North Island last weekend.

Three Auckland men with little gamefishing experience struggled with two marlin while travelling from the Bay of Islands to Auckland on Sunday.

Dennis Kendall, his 68-year-old father, Jack, and Rob Spicer were off the Pinnacles, near the Poor Knights Islands, in Kendall's 1912 displacement hull 11m launch when they hooked up.

"I had two old 6/0 reels and had bought two tuna lures and a gaff, thinking we might catch a tuna on the way down," said Kendall. "I do a lot of yachting, but we have never tried gamefishing from my boat and dad had never caught a marlin in 40 years of fishing at Te Kaha.

"It was fairly lumpy so we went wide, looking for better water, and the other two were asleep when I looked out the back and bang - I saw a marlin hit one of the lures.

"It didn't hook up and I thought that was it. But it came back a second time, and didn't stick. Then a third time, and it took off. I hit the throttle, and the other rod took off.

"We had one harness between us, and young Rob was trying to work out how to put it on dad, because he had never done any fishing at all. The lines crossed over, and I kept turning the boat and lifting one rod over the other.

"After 50 minutes dad got his fish in but it looked a bit green so I motored away from it to try and wear it out. We had one pair of dive gloves so dad put them on and grabbed the trace.

"I gave my rod to Rob and gaffed it and dragged it in. It's a tiny cockpit and the marlin went right through into the saloon," said Kendall.

After another 20 minutes, they got the second marlin to the boat, gaffed it and put a tail rope on it.

"I put it on the duckboard at the back but it's only a narrow boat and it stuck out too far on each side and the back of the boat was getting swamped - so we dragged it in and put it on top of the other one. The GPS wasn't working so I tried to figure out on the chart where we had drifted to, and we motored into to Tutukaka and weighed them."

Kendall said the striped marlin weighed 94.4kg and 100.2kg.

"We were hoping to perhaps catch a tuna, and never thought we might get a marlin. Then we got two of them! It was quite interesting, with no room in the tiny cockpit and the lack of people. But dad is over the moon with his first marlin," said Kendall.

When the Tutukaka small-boats tournament scheduled for the long weekend was postponed because of bad weather, Auckland anglers Don Haddon, Mathew Grace and
Peter Jackson towed Jackson's 7m runabout to Waihau Bay in the eastern Bay of Plenty, which has been fishing well all summer.

Haddon said: "Only two boats went out on the Sunday, because the conditions were pretty rough. We were fishing off Raukokore when we hooked a big blue marlin on a lumo sprocket.

"It was Mathew's first marlin and he got it to the boat in 70 minutes on 37kg stand-up tackle, but we couldn't get it on board."

A crew member from the second boat, which had also hooked a marlin, jumped on board and helped to pull in the massive fish, which at 227kg is the biggest marlin ever weighed at Waihau Bay.

Six anglers who did a 530-nautical mile voyage off the west coast on a 15m charter boat from Onehunga took six marlin over two days. They were fishing on the converted commercial vessel Koru, skippered by Richard Orchard, and went out wide off the Manukau bar on Friday night and hooked up in 300m of water.

"But then we went south looking for good water and found the fish off Albatross Point, near Kawhia," said one of the six, Paul Jackson. "There were huge patches of baitfish 20-30 metres thick on the sounder, and we had a total of 18 hits."

The marlin were only about three miles off the coast in 52m of water and they went into Kawhia Harbour to weigh the catch.

"The Koru is a great boat for long-range trips, and Richard Orchard knows where the fish are," he said.

The team of anglers included Jackison, Richard Harries, Joe and Mathew Sheehan, Craig Livermore and Tony Michaels.