Betio Fishing Competition

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The Betio Fishing club hold a monthly fishing competition that has been running since 1979. Five or six boats head out early in the morning, fish all day and must be back for the official weigh in at 5pm at the Betio Lodge on Betio.

This month I was invited to join the New Zealand boat along with our new VSA Kiribati and Tuvalu programme manager, Trevor. Trevor and I go back a few years. We first worked together at Aoraki polytech in Timaru in 2011 and though he moved onto Corrections and a couple of years ago up to Auckland we played each other at football regularly over the years in the local Timaru competition. So I was pleasantly surprised to see he had become our new programme manager- small world eh. Trevor arrived a couple of weeks back, while I was home on holiday, and is settling in to life out here in the middle of the Pacific.

It was an early start on Saturday morning (3am alarm). I biked down to the NZ High Comm arriving at just before 4am and after having been chased by four packs of dogs! Being early in the morning they were a bit vigilant and aggressive. The others were already rhere and starting to get the boat ready- Nigel, the Deputy High Commissioner, Trevor and Charlie the boat driver (and our fishing guru).

We quickly loaded up and took the boat down to the dock and were on the water before five am and soon heading north towards Abaiang. The weather was overcast for most of the day and a few squalls rolled past us heading for Tarawa early in the morning but we managed to mis most of them and the y cleared as the morning progressed.
We arrived off the coast of Abaiang just before sunrise and soon had our lines out and the fun began. Over the day we trawled the western coast of Abaiang, up and down past the small islands of the outer lagoon. We caught about eleven fish all up including a few sizable ones. We had one lure that caught 9 of the fish and so well and truly earned its keep and soon became our good luck token.


We took turns at bringing in the fish. I managed to catch the biggest fish I’ve ever caught, a 50lb dogtooth tuna as well as a very nice (23lb) wahoo and a 13lb Giant Trevally. Trying to bring the tun in was a bit of a mission. We also caught a barracuda as well as a couple of blue trevally and coral trout. Our story of the one that got away, there has to be one doesn’t there?, was a strike by a marlin which lept out of the water after taking the bait but then dove and disappeared. It would have been awesome to see a marlin landed! Oh well, maybe next time.


About 1:30 pm we headed home and got back to Bairiki about 3pm in time to unload the catch, clean the boat and store everything away before heading down to the lodge for the official weigh in. We ended up having a pretty good catch. The 50lb tuna I caught was just shy of the record for the year (a 56lb one caught by Aaron, a former VSA volunteer, caught earlier in the year). Our biggest wahoo and the giant trevally all earned us competition points- you get a point for the biggest fish over a certain weight per species and bonus points if you land 5 or more different species. We ended up coming second and stayed head of our ANZAC rivals at the Aussie High Comm (who’ve won for the past 3-4 years) to hold onto second overall place for the year.

It was a great day out on the water with some great company and we managed to catch some very nice fish.

 This years record fish.


Crew from the various boats at the official Weigh in at Betio Lodge. 


Not a bad day out all round really.

Craig

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