Mercury Bay club promotes free Southern Bluefin Tuna safety seminar

Trailer-boat crews heading into winter Southern Bluefin Tuna should mark Tuesday, May 26: Mercury Bay Game Fishing Club is putting on a free seminar aimed at the safety mistakes and prep gaps that can turn a promising bluefin run into a bad day offshore. The session is pitched at new and experienced anglers alike, and it is meant to help crews make better launch-day calls before they commit to a long cold-weather run.

The club’s Friday Flash for May 15 said there was “nothing to report” from the fishing grounds that week, but it used the bulletin to push the pre-season session hard as winter bluefin fishing in New Zealand draws closer. The seminar will run from 7pm to 9pm NZST at Mercury Bay Game Fishing Club, 12 The Esplanade, Whitianga. Coastguard Tautiaki Moana will host it, with the New Zealand Sport Fishing Council involved in presenting a night built around practical, real-world instruction.

The focus is not catch counts. It is trip planning, setting up the boat and gear properly, communications, safety equipment, local knowledge, what to do if something goes wrong, reading the signs online, navigation, fuel management, and checking the weather for a viable window. The club says the point is for anglers to leave with a clearer sense of when to go, when to wait, and how to turn back before conditions or distance from shore start stacking the odds against them.

That emphasis fits the fishery itself. Maritime NZ warned in May 2025 that recreational bluefin fishers on the West Coast should keep watch, keep clear and keep safe around commercial vessels, noting that small recreational boats are often 6 to 10 metres long while commercial trawlers can be 40 metres to more than 100 metres, with nets that can stretch as far as 300 metres from the stern when hauled. The seminar is part of a wider Southern Bluefin Tuna pre-season series across New Zealand, with earlier stops in places such as Tauranga and Christchurch.

The bigger backdrop is just as serious. New Zealand is a founding member of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna, its allocation rose to 1,288 tonnes for the 2024 to 2026 quota block, and the recreational bag limit has been one fish per person per day since June 1, 2019. Southern bluefin can live to 30 years, reach about 190 centimetres and 140 kilograms by 20 years old, and most are mature by around 12 years old. For Mercury Bay anglers, the seminar is about getting the boat, the crew and the decision-making right before that first winter window opens.