Story by: Matt Watson
Photos: Matt Watson and Johnashley.com.au

The stories are true! Matt Watson was part of the discovery team and here he gives us the details.

Being alone on watch over the swordfish baits when the fishing is slow can make the imagination drift into flights of fancy. And, as every fisherman does at some time or another, I indulged in the fantasy that there was still a ground out there yet to be discovered with more and bigger fish on offer.

So, with a cup of coffee and little else to do other than wait for a bite, I scrolled the cursor on the chartplotter northward from where we were fishing at the banks out from the Three Kings islands, beyond the northern tip of New Zealand.

We were more than 100 miles from our home port and already at the realistic extremity of our safe operating range, but out of curiosity I explored the charts of the north Tasman Sea.

Another 90 miles away was the Reinga ridge, but scrolling further to the northwest, towards Norfolk Island, the contour lines bunched up to reveal canyons and banks with pinnacles as shallow as just 18m.

This awe-inspiring undersea feature, which stretches across almost 100 miles of the ocean floor, was labelled the Wanganella Banks. But exploring these banks was just a pipe dream. Because it is located in the rugged north Tasman Sea, more than 300 nautical miles from mainland New Zealand and 150 miles from Norfolk Island, spending any significant amount of time at the Wanganellas in a sportsfishing boat seemed unrealistic.

AN OPPORTUNITY
More than two years after spying the Wanganellas on the chart, I received a call from friend and Ultimate Lady skipper Tom Francis asking me if I wanted to head to the Wanganella Banks with him as part of the crew.

Opportunities to be involved in pioneering a new sportsfishing ground don't come along every day, so the answer was quite obvious.

The Ultimate Lady is one of few sportsfishing vessels in that part of the world capable of taking on a long-range pioneering voyage of this kind, which is why, up until then, the Wanganellas was nothing more than a name on a chart.

The Wanganellas had an almost mythical status, with rumours circulating among fishermen that the water of these far-off banks teemed with marlin.

The rumours stemmed from commercial fishing boats that had worked the area.

So in June 2003, after some careful planning, we set off to find the banks and see what big gamefish we could extract with sportsfishing tackle.

The plan was to fish a couple of seamounts for swordfish on the way north. While we did troll sword baits at night, right over a 400m-deep hill marked on the chart, the sounder returned not a single echo back from the bottom, with the range set at 1000m.

This was our first indication that the charts of this seldom-travelled region were inaccurate.

We since learned that the charts were last updated in 1982, before constant and reliable GPS fixes were available.

Still, we pushed on while our window of reasonable weather remained open, and 48 hours after leaving port we received an indication we had found the Wanganellas when the bottom rose up to 400m.

As it turned out, the main bank was about 10 miles from where it was drawn on the chart.

Just as Tom announced we had found a bank, we got a bite. A striped marlin came in and took a lumo pusher set in close on the right flat line and, in typical fashion, threw the hook after a series of determined jumps.

We then had about 20 bites a day, and tagged an average of 11.8 marlin every day.

While these tag and release numbers are replicated elsewhere in the world, it is the size of the fish that sets the Wanganellas apart.

The average estimated size of the 456 marlin we tagged and released in my time crewing on trips to the Wanganellas was a healthy 118kg. Several were estimated at more than 150kg, and a few as big as 200kg.

It seemed the legend of the Wanganellas was true, and even more exciting was that we had only fished a fraction of the structure that was shown on the navy charts.

The difficulty was, with the charts so inaccurate and the fishing so unbelievable, it was challenging for us to steam into the unknown to try to locate some of the many peaks on this 100-mile long undersea structure.

The other consideration was the weather. We'd often get up to five days of good weather before the nasty stuff came through. We were often reluctant to explore in big seas and high winds, opting instead to shoot the sea anchor and sit out the weather.

Such is the enormity of the Ultimate Lady that we could enjoy a roasted meal at an eight-seat table, become engrossed in a movie on the television, and completely forget that we were hundreds of miles out at sea with a 40kt gale just outside the door.

During a trip in April 2004, after catching 15 marlin for the day, we decided to turn our back on the packs of hungry marlin and use the good weather to troll away from the bank to try to find more of the structure. After 10 hours with no bites and no sign of finding any structure, we were discussing the option of driving back though the night to our spot when Tom found the edge of another hill.

Just on dark we got a double strike, which was enough for us to stay and fish the next day.

Further exploration in the morning revealed that we had found a small hill, and another amazing phenomenon - hundreds of meat-balling marlin.

On our first day fishing the new hill we tagged 16 large striped marlin.

There was a lot of bait on this hill, unlike the other spot where there only seemed to be hundreds of hungry marlin.

The bait was small mackerel, and in the afternoon the marlin would herd the panicking bait into seething balls. At 4pm every day, on the top of the bank we'd see the most spectacular feeding displays with possibly hundreds of marlin tailing, slashing and feeding, totally oblivious to us as we trolled alongside within a couple of metres of the action.

SABOTAGED BY DOLPHINS
Whenever we passed one of these frenzied feeding sessions the anglers would put on harnesses and stand by the rods before up to 12 marlin peeled into our gear, fighting over our lures. The meatball action would last until a pod of dolphins showed up and broke up the meatballs.

The dolphins darted in front of marlin following a teaser or lure, as if they knew what we were doing. Then, when we were fighting marlin, the dolphins would often swim alongside the high-viz line and, right before our eyes, take seemingly deliberate swipes at the line with their tails.

One of the most amazing things about the Wanganellas is its consistency. This allowed us to experiment with all sorts of rigs and baits, but aside from a few refinements the most successful days we had were when we fished in the same way as when we started.

Despite having the luxury of a 32ft beam to spread our lure pattern, we only ran three lures and one teaser.

On deck we would also have two pitch-baits ready. With marlin everywhere, pitch-baits flying, and hooked marlin doing their best to weave a basket out of the lines, it just wasn't practical or necessary to troll more than three lures.

We would often hook up on all three lures and then both baits. Landing five of these striped marlin at once became a bit of a challenge for us. Our other challenge was to catch more than 16 in one day. It was a record we had set and equalled four times.

Both records fell on one spectacular day, after a week of fishing in scruffy conditions. We started with the standard hook-up at dawn as we trolled toward the bank. I wired a fish with a slice of toast still clamped between my teeth, grumbling about not being able to finish my cup of tea.

Then we got a triple, then a quadruple, then a double, and before we knew it, it was midday and we'd tagged 10 marlin. All nice fish of about 120kg. The fish seemed to come in packs of big or small.

The bigger ones usually bit and switched better, thus increasing our hook-up rate.

And this day was no exception. The big fish were biting lures well and the pitch-baits were being snaffled.

At 1pm, the call 'right flat' came booming down from the tower through the loud speaker. As was usual procedure, one person tossed out a mackerel on the right, and I stood by the left side.

As is often the case, a solo fish appeared in the gear for a few moments before the rest of the gang show up. An instant later the whitewash was full of quivering dorsal fins and swirling tails. I held back my belly-flap pitch-bait until all the lures had been eaten, then I held it skipping in close while I waited for the two marlin that were hounding the bridge teaser.

There is nothing better than holding a skittering bait while a couple of marlin are bearing down on you. But with the squabbling pair of marlin still 20m away, my bait was sideswiped by another fish that was swimming in, cleanly missing in its haste, before, a second later, another fish pounced on the bait.

We now had five on, and the remaining three marlin circled below the bridge teaser - dangling from the rigger, before slowly sulking away into the blue with nothing to show for their efforts.

We used 80lb tackle and we fished it hard on multiples to try to get the fish under control.

After we survived the bite and got the dance sorted out, we picked off the fish one at a time - with the third being tagged a split second before the hook pulled. Soon enough we were celebrating our milestone as the fifth tag went in.

This took the day's tally to 15. With four hours' daylight left we were on track to better our mark. The trouble was we didn't raise another fish during the following three hours.

With just an hour of fishing left before dark, we hooked a double but, for no apparent reason, the hook pulled out of one of the fish midway through the fight.

But soon after tagging the 16th, we raised a lone fish that was switched onto a dead mackerel, and we dispatched it with a tag at dusk.

Then, in the fading light, Tom spotted a pack of feeding marlin so we hurried the gear back out for one last pass. In the fading light we couldn't really see what was going on, but as soon as one reel buzzed, both baits went in and we found ourselves hooked up to five marlin once more.

As the fish crossed over we struggled to see the line in the failing light and suffered a bust-off.

Still, if we could tag the remaining four, we would end up with 21 marlin for the day.

The first two were duly tagged while we worked the third close.

The fourth we were certain had died because at the time it was hanging limp 250m below the boat.

As we tagged the third fish and began to remove the hook, a panicked cry of 'cut it off - we're going to get spooled!' rang out across the deck. And sure enough, the Tiagra 80W was down to just a few wraps on the spool. As we charged backward to regain some line, I joked, "Maybe it's been eaten by a giant squid."

We continued to back down while a heavy pull persisted on the line. We were perplexed at how a striped marlin could take so much line, and a dead one at that!

More than an hour later, with just 50m of line to regain, the weight came off and out of the dark water the ravaged remains of a striped marlin came to the surface.

Immediately I recognised the bite marks as those a squid would make.

We sent the remains to squid specialist Dr Steve O'Shea, who later confirmed our suspicions. The remarkable event overshadowed even our incredible day of marlin fishing.

CAPTURING THE ACTION
Footage of a bent rod and screaming reel with a marlin jumping in the distance is okay for those who haven't seen it before, but it does nothing to encapsulate the heart-stopping moment of the bite and the hook-up.

That's what we wanted to film. With little experience, filming a darting marlin from a moving boat proved to be difficult to capture but, fortunately, what we lacked in skill was made up for in the sheer number of filming opportunities.

Eventually we had cameras set in the right spots and we'd even devised our own towable camera to try to capture images of the marlin in attack mode. We were quite proud of the results.

We shared the action on our fishing television show in New Zealand, The ITM Fishing Show, and compiled the best of it onto a DVD called Ultimate Fishing Adventures Vol 1. Ultimate Fishing Adventures volumes two, three, and four are in the pipelines.