{"id":49289,"date":"2025-09-29T02:49:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T02:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/49289\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T02:49:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T02:49:03","slug":"shark-snatches-9kg-snapper-off-young-fisherman-at-northland-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/49289\/","title":{"rendered":"Shark snatches 9kg snapper off young fisherman at Northland beach"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt was still good. I just, yeah, cut off the bite marks and kept the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The salvaged portion of the snapper weighed 3.7kg gutted and gilled, and his grandfather Jack Rogers estimated the full fish would likely have weighed in at 8.75 to 9kg. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew he was playing a snapper and it was a bloody good one,\u201d Jack, a veteran surfcaster and fishing news contributor to the Northland Age, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe [Koby] played it for like maybe 40 seconds or so\u2026 and then all of a sudden the rod just buckled over and took off.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shark<\/a>, which neither of them saw, was suspected to be either a bronze whaler or a great white. Jack estimated it had to have been about 2.75-3m long.<\/p>\n

Koby said it was hard to imagine the culprit being a bronzy. <\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t unknown for white pointers to be in the breakers off the beach, Jack said.<\/p>\n

\"AA great white shark. Photo \/ Clinton Duffy<\/p>\n

The remains of the snapper didn\u2019t go to waste but was transformed that night by Koby\u2019s grandmother into a \u201cprimo boiled snapper head dinner,\u201d Jack said.<\/p>\n

At 75, Jack\u2019s been fishing Ninety Mile Beach since he was a teenager but didn\u2019t personally have a shark-snatches-catch story to match Koby\u2019s.<\/p>\n

However, Jack said it was a known risk when torpedo fishing. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou always celebrate when you get half a fish back on your torpedo because your chances are you\u2019re more likely to lose the whole torpedo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack said it wasn\u2019t uncommon for fishers to land huge snapper<\/a> from the shore there using just a standard 6.5kg line, as Koby had been.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest fish on record in the [Ninety Mile Beach] annual Bonanza surf casting competition<\/a> was 12.04kg.\u201c <\/p>\n

The conditions last Friday were rough with a decent-sized swell, Jack said, which was often when the big fish came in close to the beach.<\/p>\n

Koby said it wasn\u2019t the first time he\u2019d lost a fish to a bigger one, but this was the first in a while and the most dramatic. <\/p>\n

The teen, who heads back to his final term at Auckland Grammar next week, will no doubt have an unforgettable fishing tale to tell his schoolmates when he sees them again.<\/p>\n

Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years\u2019 experience in journalism, most of which she spent reporting on the courts in Gisborne and the East Coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt was still good. I just, yeah, cut off the bite marks and kept the rest.\u201d The salvaged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[42778,42780,1975,7972,1068,19630,14648,11927,42782,21494,111,43,139,42781,1067,69,6662,8481,7971,42779,42777,11555,20110,1316,4741],"class_list":["post-49289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-9kg","tag-angler","tag-at","tag-beach","tag-catch","tag-fisherman","tag-hed","tag-landed","tag-mile","tag-monster","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-ninety","tag-northland","tag-nz","tag-off","tag-reeling","tag-shark","tag-snapper","tag-snatches","tag-started","tag-thought","tag-when","tag-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49289","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=49289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}