Fish bites: Billfish Challenge shotgun start caught on camera

This year’s four-day tournament, which kicked off on August 15, is the 40th time the event has run. On hand for the daily start was Townsville Coast Guard, which captured all the action of the competition’s first shotgun starts where all the boats line up, and then take off en masse.

The vision shows dozens of sportsfishing boats, some of them belching clouds of black smoke as the skippers roll on the throttle, mixed with a number of smaller boats heading offshore to reach the reefs, shoals and channels of the world-famous marlin fishing grounds. 

The event's records show the first marlin was tagged by Silverback at 9.41am, and the first Sailfish was tagged by Rehab at 9.44am.

The tournament officially ends at 5pm today.

Western Australia’s snapper and dhufish fisheries could be closed off to recreational fishers for most of the year under proposed changes aimed at ensuring the state’s fish stocks are sustainable by 2030.

The WA Government this week suggested the state’s fisheries could be closed to recreational dhuie and snapper fishing for up to nine months to protect each species during the most vulnerable parts of their breeding seasons.

Not surprisingly, the revelation has angered recreational fishers, with the state’s recreational fishing lobby, RecFish West, yesterday slamming the proposal.

“The discussion paper released by the Minister for Fisheries today ignored key recommendations we put forward, including a spawning closure to protect dhufish and a properly funded voluntary fisheries adjustment scheme to ensure a long-overdue fairer restructure of the fishery,” it said in a statement issued after the paper’s release.

“RecFish West’s recommendations were developed following months of extensive consultation with the fishing community and were well balanced, focussing on protecting the sustainability of the fish while delivering the best social and economic benefits.”

RecFish West said it would be “closely examining the consultation papers” ahead of recommending to members the best course of action to take.

Public consultation on the proposed changes is open for four weeks until Friday, September 16.

Sticking with sports fishing, the Game Fishing Association of Australia has just released the latest edition of its annual heat map for southern Queensland and the Fraser Coast updated with data from the 2021-22 season.

The grids show a roughly 3.0-nautical-mile-square location off the tip of Fraser Island on the Fraser Coast is the region’s most accessible sportsfishing hotspot, with 706 recorded catches since records were first kept in 2012.

The next most-accessible site, with 319 recorded catches is around another 20nm further offshore.

However, the real hotspot continues to be around 18-20nm offshore from Noosa where more than 1700 catches have been recorded.

Melbourne-based fishers hunting kingfish should have an easier job ahead of them with a number of new artificial reefs hitting Port Phillip Bay waters this month.

Sixteen new artificial reefs have hit the waters, with the move expected to do two things – keep kingfish in the bay for linger periods of time, and get recreational fishers away from the bay’s busy shipping lanes and the dangerous rip.

The new reefs are in four modules and set in about 28 metres of water about 800m north-north-east of Observatory Point within Port Phillip, 2.3km east-north-east of Point Nepean and 3.8km north-west of Portsea.

Anyone wanting too add the reefs to their cartplotter can use the following coordinates: