Ultimate Cup- Final of Barker vs Spithill fishing Challenge - Saturday

by Matt Watson, ITM Fishing Show on 11 Sep 2014 It’s kind of like when Princess Diana was killed: when Jimmy Spithill and his Oracle team delivered that killer blow to Team New Zealand in the America’s Cup’s final race, everyone remembers where they were when the news came through.

I was fishing in Samoa, the news crackling through on the VHF of the boat I was fishing on. The boat fell silent for a few seconds, then was broken by a single loud expletive. I was gutted, as was the other crew on board and all of New Zealand sitting in front of their TVs back at home. So dark was the mood on the boat that a double hook-up of dogtooth tuna just minutes afterwards didn’t raise a single hoot or cheer of joy.

I’m a proud Kiwi: I love my sport, I love that we punch above our weight on the international stage, and, like most Kiwis, I love seeing the underdog come through. So I took the America’s Cup loss pretty hard – harder than the All Blacks 1995 Rugby World Cup final loss to South Africa in extra time. And it was even more painful than the quarterfinal loss to France in 2007, too. So if I was feeling so bad, how was Dean and rest of Team New Zealand feeling?! They’d dedicated years of their lives to bringing the cup home and had come so close, ultimately undone by a bigger budget that ironically paid for the help of Kiwi boat builders to somehow get the Oracle boat going faster.

But amidst the speculation as to how Oracle had managed this almost overnight, Dean Barker, Grant Dalton and the whole team carried themselves with dignity. They picked themselves up and started to regroup for the next challenge – so who was I to mope around sulking about the result. Instead, I decided to create the opportunity for us to set the record straight.

After all, we are the greatest nautical nation, are we not? We just needed one more chance to prove it – so the idea for a fishing challenge was born. But this event would be far more important than the America’s Cup (after all, fishing is almost three times more popular than sailing globally) and would, once and for all, sort out who is the greatest on-the-water nation and bring ultimate glory to its people.

So a Barker versus Spithill fishing challenge was born, with the first to score nine over a range of species and fishing techniques winning the aptly named ‘Ultimate Cup’.

Rules of the Ultimate Cup:

Here’s how it would work: I would take both Jimmy and Dean fishing separately; they were each allowed to bring a grinder or ‘winder’ to do the grunt work, assist with rigging gear, catching bait, even help wind in the fish. I would oversee that all the rules were followed and provide a level playing field, or at least a level Stabicraft.

All table fish and game fish were eligible. And, like any fishing competition we hold, it would be based on length, so after measuring and photographing, the angler had the option to either release or keep their fish. The longest fish of each eligible species would score a win – nine wins and the Ultimate Cup was won – a pretty simple premise. But there has to be rules for such a prestigious event, so I created a rulebook based on the rules of the America’s Cup. I figured why reinvent the wheel, when I can take the existing rules and put them into fishing terms.

Like anything, the idea is the easy part, but making it happen presented a few logistical challenges, particularly trying to align the schedules of three guys who are constantly travelling. And then there’s the weather – the bloody weather! It always seemed to go bad right when we got everything else aligned. On the positive side of the ledger though, Jimmy, Dean and I were all keen to get out fishing. But, as these guys are fierce rivals, having them confined to a small boat’s cockpit during such intense competition was deemed too risky, so they had to be taken separately.

Jimmy

After months of planning, we finally got out on the water. Jimmy was first up, arriving from San Francisco and being choppered into his luxurious base at Kingfish Lodge in Whangaroa Harbour, conveniently located on the doorstep of some of the best fishing in New Zealand. Both he and his nominated ‘grinder’, his long-time Kiwi mate and fishing buddy Aaron oresen, had done quite a bit of snapper fishing here in New Zealand, so they elected to start on snapper to rack up some scoring fish. Then, with an improving forecast, they went out wide to target the deep-sea species, such as bluenose, hapuku, bass, tarakihi and gemfish. And, while out wide, they also caught some small tuna to live bait for marlin.

For day two the weather was not as good, so the inshore species, including kingfish, were targeted. This was where racking up the species was important for points and where Jimmy’s competitive streak became obvious. Every decent fish was quickly celebrated, before refocusing and moving onto the next one; when a fish was lost, the anguish was clear – he wanted it bad. However, to say here exactly what was caught would be to ruin the spectacle and the drama – though I can say Team Spithill had some great catches and set the benchmark high. But it wasn’t without controversy, with the boundaries of the rules tested and the protest flag raised several times.

Dean

Next up was Dean. Being a Kiwi, you would expect him to have the home-track advantage, but in fact Jimmy had a bigger personal-best snapper to his name before the competition commenced. And, making things even more of a challenge for Dean were the months of schedule changes and bad weather, which meant he had to fish in mid-August with a weather forecast that was sketchy. Worse still, by this time the marlin and tuna accessed by Jimmy had long departed our shores.

To win, Dean would have to come from behind and do it all by catching table fish, most of which were much harder to catch in winter. What Dean did have going for him though, was the expert grinder we’d recruited to assist him from the ranks of Hunting & Fishing New Zealand. Paul Woolhouse (aka Wooly) is from Napier and specializes in gurnard, which is one of the table fish on the list, and possibly the hardest to catch on Northland’s east coast.

Despite some trying conditions, the pair worked hard, and some of the catches were freakish. Often Dean would have to sting his exhausted grinder into action, or bribe him with promise of a cold Lion Red (Wooly’s favorite beer), but as the hours ticked away, it felt like déjà vu. My stomach churned. ‘Surely this time it will be a different result,’ I said to myself. Of course I can’t give the result away, but as we all know, incredible things can happen in sport.

To see a replay of the first part of the show click here