BIG 5 Competition: 33.8kg Kingfish
Adreno's NSW correspondent, Max Gordon-Hall, reports on a recent dive trip where he landed a MONSTER kingy! Max entered his fish into the Adreno BIG 5 competition for a chance to share in over $15,000 worth of prizes. Click here to read more about the competition, view photos of the current entries and get your own entries in!
We sat with the bait, tapping our guns and strumming our rubbers for a good 20 minutes, Greg gave me a yell… “Head off in 5, nothing here”… I take a look at the watch, we had been shore diving for over 4 hours. I breathe up and dive, with Greg watching over. I dive down to 7.6m, sit on top of a rock and have a look around… not much going on… then the bait suddenly disappeared… and what do I see… a king is swimming straight towards me, I mean perfectly directly at my head, eye to eye…I outstretch my arm, check the safety is off and take aim, at this point the king looks to me about 18-20kg, nothing worthy of a blog…
The kingy notices and turns and swims to my left…I for some reason didn’t decide to track with the gun, rather bring it back in and try and sort of scrunch up. I grab the speed spike an tap the gun, I notice I spark the kings interest and it does a U turn, it is now swimming from my left directly to my right infront of me! I once again outstreach my arm, and let it pass by, I aim and fire……………
I watch, as it feels like it really in slow motion, I think I even heard the thump, as the spear enters the king, just above the lateral line. It is at this point that I start to wish I loaded the 1.3m gun with the 8mm spear to the 2nd notch with the one 18mm rubber!! The fish does a THUMP and disappears; I grab the rigline, and start swimming to the surface with some pressure on the fish. I surface, look towards Greg and he already has his gun by the barell shoving the handle towards me, I think he actually hit me in the head with it he was that excited to get the 2nd shot in! I scream through my snokel “I cant do anything!” he looks towards my hands, both gripping the floatline and putting as much pressure as I dare on the fish! The rigline goes slack…..I start to think multiple words in my mind…. Then all of a sudden THUMP about a meter of line gets ripped through my hands, the fish is still on!
I know in my mind that I had to get to deeper water, so I could play the fish more, but the fish had other ideas, and he was winning! I was now in about 6m of water on top of the bommie, getting towed like nothing, both hands gripped on the floatline and kicking my heart out to keep the fish off the bottom.. The fish does a few powerful kicks and makes it under a ledge and out the other side I see the spear is still in but my Dyneema shooting line is stuck under the rocks…. The fish swims to the side a bit and the shooting line scrapes along the rocks and pops out from under the ledge. Round 2!, I look at Greg he attempts to hand me his gun, I stick my head up and cursed, yelling shoot it for me!
We had planned jokingly if this was the scenario that the person that shot the fish got to second shoot it with the other gun.
Greg takes a dive, takes aim, no more then 30cm away from the fish and fires! HE MISSES! I start yelling and cursing.
All of a sudden he is back down reloaded and set to go again, I think he would of got the record for the world’s fastest reload, like, I have never seen someone reload so fast! He takes aim, and fires! BANG! Spot on, through the back and out the gill plate, a great 2nd, well 3rd shot! I start screaming, he surfaces and we both are cheering our heads off, I’ve never screamed so much, I’ve never cried while diving... I guess that what a fish I’ve been chasing for four years does to you…
I grab the line and pull in the fish, pass my hand up the spear and slip my left hand into its gills, gripping as hard as I could; I reach for my knife and dispatch the fish. My knife only reaches half way into the head (Omer Laser) I ask for Greg’s knife, and finish the kill. Greg starts deciphering the shooting lines and rigs, and starts to unthread the fish. I yell at him wait until I get my speed spike through, I couldn’t live if I lost this fish now. I thread the fish on and wrap my gun up, Greg reloads and we start the swim in, we have been towed a good 70m, now about 150m from shore. I start kicking in…..
Max's dive buddy had this to say: "The best thing about the day was that I watched a mate that started spearfishing around the same time as me, went through everything that I did as a newbie spearo shoot a fish of a lifetime and I couldn’t think of any one that deserves it more for his work with new spearo’s and work with the USFA also sharing information with mates from out of town when they come to dive his local. A great fish for a great bloke as many have said, Well deserved." Click here to see Greg's side of the story..
