With a huge thanks to Ben Knaggs for the report and the committee who are juggling timelines between events and that pesky cyclone that is heading down the West Coast (Olwyn, not to be confused with Cyclone Nathan who is about to do a U-turn over the top of Lizard Island). We hope that Olwyn, which is currently predicted to head right over Exmouth the day before Gamex starts as a Category 3, doesn’t not cause too much damage.
Stay safe everyone – our thoughts are with you all over there!
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The event was held over March 8th – 12th with three days of fishing and considered a warm up to the famous EGFC GAMEX tournament. It is a marlin only tag and release tournament featuring light, medium and heavy tackle categories. Competitors fishing in the heavy tackle section are required to fish beyond the 100m depth contour.
The weather remained fair to good throughout the three fishing days of the tournament, with the fishing also along the same lines… by Exmouth’s lofty standards that is!
Day one of fishing on (March 9) saw the field of 31 boats straight into numbers of small black marlin, plus a few non-scoring sailfish and the odd much bigger blue marlin out wide. The crew on Rockall shot to a big early lead tagging 8 fish for the day, also a personal best for the team on board. Overall total of 58 marlin were tagged for the day.
Day two saw a further 33 tags added with little change to the leaderboards. The small blacks again made up the majority of the numbers, but with the omnipresent chance of one of Exmouth’s monster blues or blacks jumping on, conversion rates from most competing crews weren’t great, as statistics for the first two days of fishing show — 281 raised, 188 hooked and 91 tagged.
The final day of fishing began with Rockall holding onto a healthy 4 fish lead in the Champion Boat Overall section; a lead which turned out to be insurmountable. Mick Callan and his crew on Rockall took out both Champion Boat Overall and Champion Boat Heavy Tackle with 10 marlin tags for the tournament.
Hindsight took out Champion Boat Light Tackle with 6 fish tagged, while Goldstrike II won the Champion Boat Medium Tackle award with 7 fish tagged.
Day 3 saw a further 39 tags added forhealthy total tournament catch stats of 383-263-130.
With the first day of fishing for GAMEX 2015 scheduled for this Sunday the 15th (pending a current cyclone warning for the Gascoyne region on Friday the 13th), we can expect to hear plenty more out of the west over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!
