WA’S Exmouth Game Fishing Club is once again hosting its annual Gamex Competition. The comp kicked into gear on Sunday 16th March, and will conclude on Friday 21st, with the presentation dinner to follow on the Saturday night.
Exmouth is certainly living up to its famed game fishing reputation, with a swag of black marlin tagged and released during the initial three days of competition.
The first day of comp kicked off with a bang, with 104 billfish tagged between the competing 63 boats. The following two days saw 92 billfish and 108 billfish respectively, bringing the total to 303 billfish tagged and released in three days of fishing – impressive stuff.
The blacks aren’t large fish, averaging around the 20-30kg mark, but they’ve been around in such numbers that boats are raising up to 10 fish a day, and tagging up to seven blacks a day. Today I was a guest on board Gres Vukman’s 26ft Sailfish where Fishing World’s advertising man Chris Yu was the team’s deckhand. In superb conditions we raised five blacks for three fish to the boat tagged.
We also caught some nice mahi mahi today, and over the past three days of competition there have been some cracking wahoo, Spanish mackerel and longtail tuna weighed for line class point score.
There have been a handful of sails and a few blue marlin tagged as well, but it’s definitely been the blacks which have dominated the action.
There was a large black estimated at around 300kg lost on the second day of competition after a mammoth 2.5 hour fight on spin tackle, and today there was a 90kg black tagged and released on 6kg after a two hour fight – mammoth effort.
The competition has three days remaining so we’re assured of seeing some more great fish. Stay tuned for more updates.
