\u201cThey are a harder fish to fight than marlin, so that is my number one, so far, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tuna has since been carved up and shared between friends and family to be enjoyed for Christmas.<\/p>\n
Hay with the tuna on board the Waimea. <\/p>\n
As the weather heats up, large fish such as tuna and marlin generally make their way into New Zealand waters.<\/p>\n
Hay and his three mates, skipper Carl Fairey, Andrew Young and Bruce Moroney, headed out from Napier on Monday afternoon, having noticed good conditions for potentially landing a big one.<\/p>\n
The crew anchored near the Rocket Lab base in Mahia on Monday night, then headed into deep waters early on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Hay said they had a system by which all four anglers had 15-minute turns watching the rods and, if a fish was hooked during that time, the respective angler took charge.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe trawled for six hours, then hooked up.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Hay\u2019s turn. For the next two and a half hours, he reeled in the big fish.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had it right up to the boat probably five times before we actually got it. <\/p>\n
\u201cOne particular time, it leapt right out of the water, which was pretty amazing to see a fish of that size.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he was pretty shattered by the time they got the fish onto the boat, and there was no way he could have done it alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not an individual sport at all … if you haven\u2019t got all four people working together, it ain\u2019t going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fresh tuna can sell for big money, but Hay said he had no interest in selling any fish he caught.<\/p>\n
He also caught another tuna, only slightly smaller, a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThey are a harder fish to fight than marlin, so that is my number one, so far, for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[32220,49816,3390,1068,9525,19630,78,424,80178,15399,3607,111,43,139,69,56769,54885,312,114497,73780],"class_list":["post-179529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-alan","tag-amazing","tag-best","tag-catch","tag-caught","tag-fisherman","tag-in","tag-life","tag-mahia","tag-massive","tag-napier","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pretty","tag-reels","tag-says","tag-tuna","tag-whopping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}