Have you ever been sitting around, either on shore, or on a boat, bored out of your mind? You look down into the calm water below you, breaking just below your feet while the sun beats down on your face turning you tomato red and making you want to fall asleep.

In glancing out of your peripherals (so you don’t have to turn your head) you’re able to notice that all of your friends are in the exact same mode, they all look like they’ve died hours ago and are just waiting around to decompose in the blistering heat. Naturally everyone is holding a beer, and the majority of you are resting the beer on your giant middle aged man beer guts, your thick coarse stomach hair makes for an awesome drink coaster, preventing you from feeling the cold bottom of the can, because heaven forbid something should make you uncomfortable on your boring ass fishing trip.

Realistically, relaxing like this in a boat is really not that bad, so long as that is what your intentions are. But if you’re looking for something a little more exciting, perhaps a fishing trip that will get your adrenaline pumping and will test your physical and mental abilities, you and Matt Watson share the same desire.

Matt Watson is the host and the backbone behind New Zealand born extreme sports fishing program,  The Ultimate Fishing Show.  Matts fishing career started as a 3 year old, learning from his father and grandfather at a local harbor. Slowly he began to progress;

The Manukau harbor was Matt’s first stomping ground where at just seven years old he became the skipper of his own dinghy and started to terrorize the local snapper flounder and mullet on the muddy flats around his home town of Weymouth.- The Ultimate Fishing Show

If it hasn’t become obvious enough to you, Matt was destined to become a professional fisherman, and that is all he wanted. He knew what he was going to do with his life, but continued his education and eventually became a relatively talented writer on top of his insane fishing ability. Writing articles on his fishing exploits as a key writer for New Zealand Fishing News came easy for him, as he had been working on the most successful fishing boat in all of New Zealand for the previous couple seasons. It is important to note that when I speak of fishing and fishing boats in relation to Matt Watson, I am not referring to the typical “Deadliest Catch” style of commercial fishing involving pots or nets that people commonly associate with professional fisherman. I am referring to catching BIG fish, using rods and hooks.

Gradually, Matt Watson earned a name for himself in the New Zealand fishing world and before long he was working on a 90ft luxury fishing boat known as The Ultimate Lady. A couple of years beforehand, Matt had gotten the sensational idea to bring video cameras along and film their fishing trips with the hopes of launching his own fishing show with the help of his friend Kerren Packer. It just so happened that The Ultimate Lady went out in search of new, mostly unfished off-shore marlin grounds and found the jackpot. Netting 405 marlin in one season, the most of any vessel in New Zealands history, the Ultimate Fishing Show was born.

The videos below give you a taste of what the Ultimate Fishing Show and Matt Watson have to offer;

Marlin from a Surfboard

Marlin on a Jetski

From a helicopter? The catch that earned him the nickname “Gannet Man”