Epic spearfishing session lands massive kingie at White Island

Tauranga-based Thibaud Dos Santos and a few of his mates had an epic spearfishing session to kick off the new year, nailing some really big kingfish at White Island.

"We made the call to drive to Whakatane for the day, to go spearfishing at White Island. The plan was to check out two spots, with one of them proving a winner.

"I jumped in first with Mike, Garrett was in the boat. Straight away in the blue I saw a massive tail," he says.

"At first I thought it was a marlin, but turns out it was a mako!

"That made it a bit more interesting – it's pretty tricky to spear big kingie when you have a big shark around, especially a mako. A bronzie you can play with, but with the mako, you need to be a bit careful."

Mike managed to spear a 15.7kg kingie before the boys decided to change spots.

"It was a beautiful dive, but only an average sized kingie for the place, so we decided to go back to the first spot," Thibaud says.

Straight away the boys could see a school of bigger fish.

"But because all the fish were the same size, it was really hard to get a guess on the size. We ended up swimming for 30 minutes with them."

Garrett and Thibaud thought the fish looked around 20-25kg.

"So after a while Garrett just decided to just give it a go."

Watching Garrett, Thibaud could tell he had a pretty solid fish.

"With this big mako around, we wanted to get the fish back in the boat as quickly as we could."

Thibaud says as soon as the fish was in the boat, they couldn't believe how big it was.

"It meant that all the fish in this school were probably above 30kg."

"We were all excited. I jumped back pretty much straight away with Mike. The kingie were still there, and I took a shot at a fish. Turns out that one was almost bang on 30kg. We were stoked," he says.

"Seeing a school of 30kg fish swimming like this, it's pretty intense.

"When you realise that they are that big, you just try to look for even a bigger one. And there were some bigger fish, there were probably fish about 40kg in this school."

His first time to the notorious spot, Thibaud says he cannot wait to go back to White Island.

"There was heaps of smoke coming out of the volcano. It was my first time there, same for the boys.

"It's pretty intimidating when you arrive, especially knowing what happened there. You can smell the sulfur, even in the distance."

Thibaud says the waters around White Island are full of life.

"Even the size of the blue maomao is massive, and there are some really big trev, the biggest trev I've ever seen,” he says.

"We all want to go back there.”

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