previous club record<\/a> with a 162kg swordfish catch last year.<\/p>\nThe five-strong crew set off from Napier on Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe fished all night for swordfish and didn\u2019t get any bites, just a couple of sharks, and then 10.30am on the Saturday morning we hooked that one,\u201d Cushing said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a couple of lines in and I just happened to be on the rod.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it took him about two and a half hours to reel in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t see the fish until maybe two hours and 15 in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt jumped out of the water about 20m away from the boat \u2013 so quite close \u2013 and we knew when it jumped out how big [a fish] we were dealing with.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a couple of gaffs in, and it took all five of us to pull it on board.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cushing said he\u2019d caught a bigger fish in the past while overseas, a tuna, but this was the biggest fish he\u2019d caught in Hawke\u2019s Bay.<\/p>\n
![\"]()
The huge swordfish during the weigh-in alongside the crew, including fisherman Doug Cushing (right).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means a fair bit. My [late] uncle, Kevin O\u2019Keefe, he was the club president for years and his name is on the heaviest swordfish trophy for the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe family donated it, so, if I can win that trophy, it would be pretty cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cushing said swordfish was good eating, and it would be shared around \u201dthe village\u201d once it had been processed.<\/p>\n
Club operations manager Neil Price said the catch had created excitement around the fishing club, and garnered interest around the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone is keen to know where it was caught, and they start getting ready to go out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said Cushing had been a long-standing member, and his son actually held a junior world record for a tuna catch.<\/p>\n
As for swordfish, he said they were rare.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has not been a lot of them over our scales.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has probably only been six or seven over the history of the club, and we have been around for 62 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are a deep-water fish. They are not on the surface, they live on the bottom of the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, a Northland angler caught a 279kg swordfish<\/a>, while the New Zealand record appears to be a 404kg swordfish caught in 2012 off the Karikari Peninsula.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fisherman Doug Cushing after catching his breath and the enormous swordfish. Smith, who was the skipper, held the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1561,9525,18836,11586,1976,8482,80178,111,139,69,6662,1974,50643,78891,213,150783],"class_list":["post-607705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-bay","tag-caught","tag-club","tag-coast","tag-hawkes","tag-huge","tag-mahia","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-off","tag-record","tag-smashed","tag-smashes","tag-sports","tag-swordfish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607705","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=607705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}