A young angler thought he’d landed the catch of the day when he started reeling in a monster snapper off Ninety Mile Beach in Northland.

As 18-year-old Koby Hokai skilfully played the fish, easing it closer to shore, for nearly a minute, he didn’t expect he’d wind up sharing it with a shark.

“I was probably halfway through pulling it in and just got smoked by the shark,” Koby said.

He lost the catch while surfcasting with his grandparents near Karaka Creek on the beach last Friday.

“I was actually left with nothing, but after a while I saw something bobbing up and down in the breakers and went to have a look and it turned out to be the head of my fish with my hook and trace still in it.

“It was still good. I just, yeah, cut off the bite marks and kept the rest.”

The salvaged portion of the snapper weighed 3.7kg gutted and gilled, and his grandfather Jack Rogers estimated the full fish would likely have weighed in at 8.75 to 9kg.

“We knew he was playing a snapper and it was a bloody good one,” Jack, a veteran surfcaster and fishing news contributor to the Northland Age, said.

“He [Koby] played it for like maybe 40 seconds or so… and then all of a sudden the rod just buckled over and took off.”

The shark, which neither of them saw, was suspected to be either a bronze whaler or a great white. Jack estimated it had to have been about 2.75-3m long.

Koby said it was hard to imagine the culprit being a bronzy.

It wasn’t unknown for white pointers to be in the breakers off the beach, Jack said.

A great white shark. Photo / Clinton Duffy

The remains of the snapper didn’t go to waste but was transformed that night by Koby’s grandmother into a “primo boiled snapper head dinner,” Jack said.

At 75, Jack’s been fishing Ninety Mile Beach since he was a teenager but didn’t personally have a shark-snatches-catch story to match Koby’s.

However, Jack said it was a known risk when torpedo fishing.

“You always celebrate when you get half a fish back on your torpedo because your chances are you’re more likely to lose the whole torpedo.”

Jack said it wasn’t uncommon for fishers to land huge snapper from the shore there using just a standard 6.5kg line, as Koby had been.

“The biggest fish on record in the [Ninety Mile Beach] annual Bonanza surf casting competition was 12.04kg.“

The conditions last Friday were rough with a decent-sized swell, Jack said, which was often when the big fish came in close to the beach.

Koby said it wasn’t the first time he’d lost a fish to a bigger one, but this was the first in a while and the most dramatic.

The teen, who heads back to his final term at Auckland Grammar next week, will no doubt have an unforgettable fishing tale to tell his schoolmates when he sees them again.

Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in journalism, most of which she spent reporting on the courts in Gisborne and the East Coast.