Alliman Shield 2016 – 1st May – Watsons Bay

Sunday dawned with heavy overcast conditions and rain as the divers gathered in Robertson Park next to the historic Watsons Bay hotel. The safety talk was conducted and the divers jumped into the boats and headed out slowly to outside the moorings where the event start was made from Matt Poulton’s boat.

The rain was a dampener but as the forecast promised sunny conditions later in the day the fifty brave divers headed out into Sydney Harbour hoping for good conditions. As it turned out the conditions were great slight sea light winds, 15 – 20m visibility outside and up to 10m even in the Harbour even though it was low tide.

All the boats and divers made it back by the 1:15pm finish time and the fish were lined up at the weigh in table ready for the scoring. At this stage a crowd gathered to see the fish and ask plenty of questions. There was also some fish donated to the onlookers which made us very popular!

Some interesting fish were weighed including a 1.1kg king wrasse taken by Matty Poulton, a 3kg amberjack & 2.7kg sawtail by Phil Sheppard and up and coming junior Joel Halkyard (NS) with 2.3 kg flathead , a nice sawtail of over 1.8kg and a blue bar parrot fish of 1.14kg. North Shore junior Patrick Koch got the most unusual fish, a grey sweetlip normally a Queensland species.

Adreno is sponsoring the most meritorious fish for senior & junior in each competition this year, this month Phils sawtail of 2.7kg (109pts) took out the senior prize and Joel with his 93pt flathead got the junior prize. They will be presented before the next Alliman.

It was good to see twelve Juniors and Sub Juniors diving today and they did well too!

A good days diving, catching up with mates and taking home a feed makes it all worthwhile!

The next Alliman competition is at Gunnamatta Bay Cronulla on Sunday 5th June 2016, sign on at 7am, comp start 8am, comp end at 1:15pm sharp!

If you would like some more information please contact Lee at [email protected]

Lee Dalli
President
Metropolitan Spearfishing Zone