OPINION: Tight competition in memorial challenge

The Broome fishing club held the presentation for the Lift n Rig — Brian “Fatty” Albert Memorial Challenge last Friday.

While the fishing was relatively slow, the competition was very tight.

Only a few fish separated many of the champion teams and anglers.

The Norman brothers, Callum and Ethan, fishing for team Billabarra, managed to catch some good fish, with young Ethan managing to sniper the champion junior title from his brother on countback.

Geoff Ellens and Amy Hyatt both caught a black marlin, with Ellens winning Fatty’s day champion title on a countback.

Ellens also took out the champion male, with Amy taking out the champion female slot, 500 points or one scoring sailfish clear of the next female competitor.

Jai Herd also took out the best supporting junior prize by spending two full days on the water helping dad Simon Herd find some fish in the terribly challenging conditions.

Team Lift n Rig managed to snag a couple of winning boats in the small boat raffle run as part of the competition.

The team have thrown their takings back into the pot to assist the club in putting on an ad-hoc billfish shootout on Sunday.

So if you missed out on the action at the weekend, you’ve still got a chance to get out and compete.

Registration for the competition is free to all members — just visit just the website, download the registration form and email it through. The team tagging the highest points for fish — marlin 1000 points and sailfish 500 — will take home the jackpot.

This is really encouraging as the fish finally made a profound entry into the fishery two days after the official Fatty’s day competition ended.

The fishing has been phenomenal, but challenging at the same time.

The fish aren’t responding to the traditional tease-and-switch angling style.

They’ve been feeding hard on the surface, with many of the fish taken in the last week responding to a well-presented pitched bait.

Once a pitched dead bait hits the water, make sure you keep in free spool to allow the bait to float around unhindered.

The fish have hit the area that hard in such good numbers anglers have been reporting captures on the bigger tides, where others are reporting good numbers of threadfin in the bay.