This is a story about heading up to the Three Kings, losing the biggest kingfish I've ever shot in my life, and then landing a very good fish with what we call a unicorn shot to the forehead.
I headed out with Kerry and Sam in summer of 2020. We launched from Houhora, Northland, and ran up to the Three Kings for an overnighter on Kerry's vessel. First day diving, we had one boatman and were working some pinnacles for kingfish. We didn't have a lot of intel on the area, it was kind of just winging it, but I did know of a few spots. There were huge trevally getting around, upward of six to seven kilos, and big schools of pink maomao. Just absolutely beautiful sights.
Water was pretty dirty, around 15 to 16 degrees Celsius, and Kerry started talking about a really, really big kingfish he'd been seeing.
At that point I was running a carbon 120 Durville gun, double band, 8.5mm Rob Allen shaft with a double flopper. I did my drop, and that's when I saw the biggest kingfish I've ever seen in my life. It had about a 12 kilo fish in front of it, and I genuinely believe it could have swallowed that fish. It was just absolutely monstrous. As soon as I saw it, I knew.
So I dived down and my goal was to get the front fish to turn in toward me and hopefully bring the big one with it. I kept my head tucked in, stayed as relaxed as I could, knowing this thing was a monster. Just looking up every now and again. Got to the reef, looked up, saw the little fish turn, then the big fish turned in on me. I smacked it. Got the shaft right through with the double flopper, which was brilliant. The fight was just ruthless, very hard to control, as you can imagine.
I was screaming at Kerry to get down and put a second shot in. He was trying, but the current was making it hard to get down toward the fish. We fought it for a good while, and then the shaft got destroyed and we lost it.
I was absolutely gutted. I don't know if I'll ever get a chance at a kingfish that size again. I dived down afterward to look at what had happened. The line had wrapped itself around this prominent rock sticking out of the pressure point, almost like Pride Rock from The Lion King, maybe a metre wide, and it had wrapped around there about four times. After that there was no chance. It was just the fish versus the spear, and a fish that size can quite easily tear off with the amount of power it has.
I always look at dives in hindsight. That one, honestly, I don't know what I could have done differently except stone it. And sometimes that's just hard in the moment.
So we moved into a little bay to look for paua, golden snapper, pink maomao, more of a chilled out dive. I got the 90cm roller in the water. I was seeing some really good snapper schools, actually quite silly snapper, and started dropping kina for them while the boys worked a rocky outcrop further out in the current. I was by myself.
I was diving down looking at these snapper when I noticed a shape and spun around. Camera was on. Two kingfish approached me, and one big one came right up, front on, heading straight for me.
Now I'm thinking: I've got a roller, it's 90 centimetres, it's shallow ground. If I let this fish turn broadside, take the shot, and miss the stone, I'm going to absolutely destroy my gear down here and I'll probably lose the fish. High chance of losing it on a reel gun in that kind of ground. So I didn't let it turn. I shot it front on, right in the forehead. The unicorn.
It went spastic, but it didn't really know how to fight. Every time it pushed forward, there was enormous pressure on the 6.5mm single flopper shaft sitting in the front of its head, gone in just under the brain. So it kept trying to shake the shaft, pushing forward, doing some pretty wild battling, but it couldn't focus enough to get into the reef because of this big thing sticking out of its face. After a couple of minutes the shaft pulled back, bent backward, and actually killed it. Went through and damaged the brain. Fish died.
Nowhere near as big as the one I'd lost, but still a very, very big kingfish.
Getting it to the surface and dealing with all the line, I'd completely lost track of where I was. By the time I got everything sorted, I looked around and I was drifting hard in very heavy current, almost toward the horizon to the west. There was one rock between me and that horizon, breaking the surface. I got pinned up against it.
That was honestly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in the water. Top three to five worst moments I can think of. I had to breathe up, get enough back, and then swim with this kingfish, hands through its gills, float line and gun trailing, and push about 30 yards to the next outcrop, grab onto the kelp and hold on. Managed that. Breathed up again. Then another 20 yards to get around the corner of the rock and back into the bay.
Got the fish on the boat. Big slab. I'm guessing somewhere in the 30s. No official weight, but we cut the two fillets off and they were about 19 kilos combined, just flesh and skin. The body was heavy, the head was heavy, guts were heavy. Yeah, 30s.
I told the boys when they came back to the boat that I'd got a dinner-sized fish. Had Sam come over the side first and he was just blown away. Then Kerry came over, and he asked me why I'd brought so many spear shafts. I said because I needed them. I brought three and destroyed two.
Pretty terrible sleep that night, rocking around. Got up the next day, saw some more good kingfish but had a bit of trouble with them. Got in, grabbed a bunch of paua, got some crays. The boys had golden snapper, trevally, tarakihi, all sorts of really nice fish.
The Three Kings is just an amazing spot. We had the full range, tarakihi, crayfish, big trevally, big kingfish, paua. An awesome place to load up on seafood. Hopefully I get back up there one day.