Eden - 3 Way State Championships

The Mosman Whalers Skindiving Club had more than our normal contingent of divers make the journey to Eden for this years 3 Way Championship.

We collected Mussels and Abalone to complement our fish, making a big seafood cook up. Gerry made some great pasta with crayfish from Narooma and mussels and fish from Eden. I made some fish cocktails with rice flour beer batter, and Jen made the abalone fritters.

Saturday is the eve of the Championships, and serves as scouting day. We search out the locations where the hard-to-find fish are aggregating. Three species were our targets – Nannygai, Sea Sweep and Boarfish. We travelled an hour south of Eden to launch the boats in Wonboyn Lake, but had to walk next to the boats to float them out to the ocean in a few inches of water! Luckily the tide was running out when we launched, and was running back in just before dark. All three species were found, and locked into the chartplotter as GPS marks.

Sunday is an early start as we all needed to register for the Championships, as well as launch the boat and organise all the gear. With over 40 boats registered, the boat ramp was busy. 130 competitors took to the water at 8am, returning at 2pm.

The race to the first fishing spot is a solid 25 minutes flat-out! Thankfully no other boats wanted to fish this particular spot first, and we managed to get the species we were looking for. Moving on to the other spots, and spearing the other species, the time passes quickly. Unfortunately the spot where I saw a Boarfish on Saturday was already being fished by another crew. As luck would have it — at the last spot — right before we needed to go back, I found a Boarfish to add to my bag of fish :)

Such a big event takes quite some time to process all the divers' fish, and tabulate all the scores. To add to the delays, the scorekeeper's computer had a few failures taking several more hours to overcome. So while we all waited for scores, we had a few drinks and caught up with other competitors. It was great to catch up with Rick, after returning from our South African trip a few weeks earlier.

My point score was 722, putting me in 18th place overall.

Waiting on photos from friends....