Hi All,
See below for the write up of the comp over the weekend. This was written by Pete Thompson and edited by myself. Thanks Pete for taking the time to do this.
After beingt initially postponed, the Newhaven Boat Comp took place on Sunday with 18 senior and 3 junior divers signing on. There were also a few social divers that didn’t compete. Most divers competed from boats and there were 4 jetski’s amongst the pack. This is the favourite competition for many members and historically has produced winning bags of 20 or more species, and with recent reports of tuna and kingfish landed, the anticipation was high. The swell was forecast to be 3ft but with very light winds around 5 knots, good enough to get to most of the regular spots in a fast boat or ski. The start was a bit chaotic, but at 9am everyone took off in a race to their favourite spots.
The swell on the ocean side was OK, but enough to make it uncomfortable diving, and visibility down to 5 or 6m and no sunshine. Most boats tried the Cape Woolamai bays first, some headed further west towards Pyramid Rock or further out to check some bommies for kingies and ended up playing with dolphins. Some went as far west as Kitty Miller Bay and others went as far west as Kilcunda. Stoj, Scotty and I stayed around Woolamai and steadily ticked a few reef fish of the list, but nothing much other than maggies, wrasse, zebs, jackets and sweep were seen. After a few hours, we took off and found some calmer water which had a sand-reef line in about 8m depth. Fitzy was just leaving and said there wasn’t much there so we knew it would be good. The reef here had a few more species, and we saw some occasional salmon, snook and a school of trevally also. Time got away from us and instead of being back in the carpark an hour early as usual, we had only enough time for a 10-minute dive at the last spot to try and find a flathead.
Back at the ramp before 3pm sign-off, except for one boat which was 11 minutes late due to a faulty watch and unfortunately disqualified – some good fish on board too.
The barbeque and weigh-in started spectacularly with a barbeque set alight by a leaky gas can which was installed by yours truly. We then reverted to the municipal barbeques which cook snags in 45 minutes but never burn them. Thanks Joseph for the hamburger patties.
Plenty of good bags were weighed in, and some nice fish including 745gm sand flathead (Geoff G), a 1615gm rock flathead (Russell), a 3.4kg snook (Fitzy) and a 1375gm black drummer (Fitzy). Some species just don’t like the swell (my theory) and just weren’t easy to find on the day. Murray not only took out the race to the heads in the morning, but once again took out the comp with 17 species. Many of which the rest of us never saw all day! Well done to Marcus who logged 13 species and all the juniors doing well on the day. After Murray and Marcus, Fitzy and Watto had the next highest number of species respectively.
If I hadn’t missed that salmon and if the zeb had been a bit bigger and if I’d looked harder for a whiting I might have had a decent score, but I had to settle for 7 species. Apparently the viz was 10m over at Kilcunda, maybe we should have gone there.
It was good to see Pete and Mac Riddle make the trek over from port fairy and was good to see Bob come down to the comp too!
Scores are still to be finalised and will be posted up when completed. Thanks to all that helped with organising the day and made it an enjoyable Sunday.
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