Strong winds spoiled the first part of the carnival, with Sunday’s Great Lakes Gamefishing Tournament cancelled. Gusts were forecast until midweek, and organiser Max Frost blamed the conditions for keeping crowds away.

“I would’ve liked to have seen thousands, but we lost four days to bad weather,” he said.

“Fishing is a sport that really relies on the conditions, and it’s hard to attract people when you’ve got a 40 knot gale forecast until Wednesday. A lot of guys planning to come to town for the week decided not to, but once we got good weather things picked up.”

There was another headache when the 18,000 litre Reef Science tank’s filter stopped working - a new one was soon fitted, to the relief of a few dozen fish.

The Australia Bream Tournament’s skins event drew a healthy crowd to Wallis Lake’s shores. A field of fishing experts, including the gangster rapper of angling Kaj Bushy Bush, inundated the Reef tank with 270 bream. Nabiac’s Pete McKinnon took overall honours with team mate Martin Richards.

The carnival’s open fishing competition was more about participation than results, but it yielded some huge fish. McKinnon backed up his angling win with the biggest bream, a whopping 1.41kg specimen.

Local teenagers Jacob Bowland and Shaun Ireland won the Squidgies Forster Flathead Classic.

In the week’s best underdog story, the mates with a foam esky full of bait outdid seasoned pros with the latest sat-nav technology.

“Unfortunately the prize money got canned because there weren’t enough entries,” Ireland’s dad Craig said ruefully.

There was no cash, but they hauled in a five kilogram monster to win a top-of-the-range kayak.

Coolongolook’s John Startin won the major prize, a Quintrex E-Tec Hornet boat with Evinrude engine. Startin’s boat is pink, which will contrast nicely with his friends’ green eyes.

Heidi Sims won second prize, a top range Lowrance colour sounder.

Other winners were:

Mark Amato, largest flathead

Ken Grzeslik, best snapper

Allan Freihaut, biggest pearl perch

Martin Barry, biggest cobia.

When organisers schedule next year’s carnival they’ll almost certainly say yes to less.

“We bit off a bit more than we could chew [in organising the carnival]. I don’t mind admitting that,” Frost said.

“Next time we’ll look at streamlining it to four days, not a many events and have it earlier in the year for better weather. We’ve broken even and we’re happy enough with that side, but we’ll need some more dollars to do it all again in the future.”