Celebrities at Tunarama!!

Yes it’s true! Although unless you’re from Australia you’ll probably have no idea who I am talking about (I’d never heard of him). Ryan “Fitzy” Fitzgerald,  who has recently become a ‘b-grade’ celebrity in Australia, (mainly because he was a contestant in the Australian Big Brother 2004, but also as an Aussie Rules footballer prior to that) was the host of the Tuna Toss this year.

Inspite of that, we still took our time getting out of the house on Saturday, and arrived down the street just in time to view the heats for the Tuna Tossing Competition.

Now for those of you who have only seen tuna on the shelves of your local supermarket, they were not throwing tins! No, the ‘Tuna Toss’ involves swinging and launching a 10kg tuna (just a baby one really, they can reach 400kg) as far as you can in a ‘hammer throw’ style.

It’s the only competition of its kind in the world, which isn’t surprising considering it’s a waste of good fish. However, it’s become the most popular event at the Tunarama Festival in Port Lincoln and the winner of each category wins $1000 courtesy of John West!

The record for tossing a tuna is held by former Olympic hammer thrower Sean Carlin, with a toss of 37.23 metres, but the longest throw we saw was just edging into the twenties I think.

After watching it for some time, we all agreed that it was much like watching tennis, the mens competition was much more interesting than the ladies.

There were about 100 contestants in all, but we headed off for a bite to eat after a little over an hour and we didn’t stay down town all that long afterwards either.

The fireworks display was scheduled for 9:30pm, but by that time we were too lazy to go back down the street to see them, so the pictures you see in the slideshow were taken from outside our house which is about 2km away.

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