Gisborne enjoys “best season ever”
Gisborne Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club couldn't have asked for a better start to 2024,
The Gisborne area has experienced a hot start to the game-fishing season, with Gisborne Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club president Roger Faber saying it’s been the best season ever since records began.
“We've got records back 70 years and we’ve never seen it as good as this,” he tells The Adventurer.
“We saw big eye tuna turn up just before Christmas, around the middle of December, which is very early for us to be getting game-fish. We’ve seen really good numbers and some really good fish.”
The heaviest one weighed so far is 138kg, with more than a dozen weighing in over the 100kg mark.
“A lot of fish haven’t been weighed, especially some of the smaller fish, but we'd be thinking there'd be probably 50 or 60 big eye tuna being caught,” Roger says.
Roger says this is vastly different from previous years, where some seasons the club doesn’t see any.
“Last year we did get a few but nowhere near the same numbers and nowhere near the same size,” he says.
“And it's been a number of years previous that we haven't had any at all. Going back probably six years, we did have a spate of them and, but they were all smaller fish in the sort of 30-50kg range, whereas this season there has been a lot of bigger fish.”
Roger says warmer waters at this time of year would be playing a big part in the increase in catches.
“The tuna turned up first, but then the marlin have turned up since then. And just before New Year we had our first marlin caught. And early in the New Year we had some excellent catches of blue marlin, the heaviest 281kg. Another one at 222kg. So we've seen a number of blues turning up, but a lot of striped marlin.
“On an average day out of Gisborne, there's not a lot of game boats out, so we're probably seeing around a dozen game boats out if you're lucky. And most days we've been sort of getting six or seven marlin and six or seven big eye a day. So most boats have been catching fish.”
Roger says the fish are being caught not that far from Gisborne.
“It's about 18 nautical miles from Gisborne, in a couple of hundred metres of water. And that seems to be where the concentration of tuna and marlin are.”
He says there are more members targeting game-fish now than previously.
“What we're seeing is a lot of people who normally don't fish for game-fish have gone in, and I know the tackle shops have run short of game gear because there's been such a pressure from people going in wanting to grab gear and everything. And people that normally don't go game-fishing are going out and catching marlin and tuna, which is great news.”
