Lunch break dive sets a Fijian wahoo record

FIJI – Fiji-based Australian spear fisherman Jaga Crossingham has won plenty of fans since images of his monster 57kg wahoo made a hit on social media last month.

“It was pretty huge. I tried to lift it vertically for the photos and I couldn’t do it. I caught a 75-kilogram dogtooth tuna last year that was a fair bit heavier but easier to lift because it was more short and fat.

“This thing was basically seven-foot – 2.13 metres – long. I think the world-record for a wahoo is 62 kilograms, so it wasn’t far off.”

The monster – and several other wahoo his group caught – ended up feeding an entire remote village, Crossingham said.

“They are very edible, really good eating,” Crossingham said of his Fiji record, which came in the “wild” waters some 160 kilometres off Fiji’s south coast.

“All of it would have been used. We took it straight to the nearby island village and probably ended up feeding 400 people with it.

“We caught maybe 12 fish like it that day and by giving them all to the village it’s our little way of paying them back for allowing us to be out there.

Crossingham, who is from Kempsey in New South Wales but moved to Fiji 12 years ago, runs charter company Fiji Freedive and it was only by stroke of fortune that the catch, which has captivated the internet, even happened.

“We had four paying people on a charter and they’d all got personal bests,” he explained.

“Me and another guy I worked with really just jumped in the water for five minutes on what was effectively our lunch break. It turned out to be a pretty good break.”

Crossingham, 31, originally headed to Fiji at the age of 19 as a builder, working on the construction of a hotel. He fell in love with the country and the lifestyle, met his American wife Heather and the couple now have two young children: Noah, aged six, and Natalya, who is four.

His abilities in the water as a spearfisherman have helped him become “internet famous” this past week.

- Stuff/PNC