Annual Yellowfin Tournament Report
May 29th, 2008With 82 boats out at 7am and 112 at 8am it was obvious that there were some serious competitors in the 27th annual Canberra GFC Yellowfin Tuna Tournament at Bermagui 17-19 May. This three day event is proving one of the most popular in NSW with 122 boats entered from as far north as Port Stephens and southern Victorian clubs.
With the two hourly skeds there were numerous reports of Yellowfin tagged and a few captures. It is good to see that once there is an estimation of the heaviest fish, the majority are then tagged. The weather conditions deteriorated so the committee decided bring forward the 4.30pm stop fishing to 2pm. and the fleet started heading in.
While pulling down the gear on “Game Over” a crew member noticed a person yelling and waving his arms in the water! They established that there were four people on board a vessel that had gone down and subsequently found three of those. There was another person still in the water and a search was instigated by a number of boats in the tournament. There were several boats that went back out who were in harbour having already signed off. They went immediately the call went out for assistance and later all said it was the natural thing to do.. it could have been them. The fourth person was found and retrieved by “Hotshot”. Sadly he was deceased but had it not been for the fact that we had a tournament on and there were so many boats available there would very probably have been four deceased as the boat in question had not signed on with Coast Guard and was not part of our tournament. Very sad, but also very lucky!
Sunday brought Gale Warnings so fishing was cancelled.
Monday was fishable again and about 80% of the fleet were getting back into it. Because of the previous days weather there were some boats that chose to return home and there were a few phone calls saying that perhaps they had been a little hasty in pulling the pin.
Anyway we had some great results with well over 100 fish tagged, four weighed with the heaviest being 70kg all caught on some terrific video footage by Andy Caves and Ryan Capp.
We also had the NSWGFA Junior Team fishing with Grahame Williams President of GFAA on board “Bill Collector” and they managed to tag two Yellowfin which was great.
To competitors, thank you and we hope you join us again next year.
Sanchia Glaskin
Radio Operator
See our Tournament page for a list of the results.
