The NZ Boat, Fish & Dive Expo is back at Mystery Creek Events Centre in Hamilton on Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 August 2026, and if the exhibitor list is anything to go by, the Waikato’s own boat show has well and truly found its feet.
This is the third running of the event, and it’s filling a gap that sat empty for over a decade. The region had its own Boat, Fishing and Leisure Show between 2002 and 2011, which at its peak drew just under 23,000 people through the gate before it folded. When the Expo relaunched in 2024, organisers pitched it as bringing that tradition back for good. Two shows in, they’re reporting more than 20 boats sold on site at each event, along with what they call record sales across the wider exhibitor floor.
Mystery Creek is better known as the home of the National Agricultural Fieldays. Roughly 8,000 square metres of indoor space and another 10,000 square metres outside, there’s plenty of room to spread boats, tenders and trade stands without anyone feeling cramped. Worth knowing if your only experience of the grounds is Fieldays itself: Expo parking sits right outside the Events Centre, not up the hill with the long walk down that Fieldays regulars will remember. Boating New Zealand walked the floor last year and it was packed, inside and out, with a Central North Island crowd that skewed heavily toward people who tow their boats rather than berth them.
On the water front, trailer boat buyers get a wide spread of hull types to compare in one weekend. National names like Stabicraft, Rayglass and Haines Hunter sit alongside a provincial spread of smaller builders: Allenco Boats out of Matamata, Hydrolab Boats from Raglan, and Tauranga’s Future Boats with its 550, a hull built specifically around lure fishing rather than adapted from a general-purpose platform. Nautique Boats NZ, the Hautapu-based importer of French-made ski and wake boats, covers a different end of the market entirely, and sold through Auckland Marine Centre is Seastorm, unsinkable rotomoulded polyethylene fishing boats designed by Sweden’s Mannerfelt Design Team. Honda Marine NZ, Yamaha, Suzuki Marine and Garmin cover the power and electronics side, and DAIWA returns as headline sponsor of the tackle hall, with every adult ticket going into the draw for a fishing gear package worth more than $8,000.
That spread of builders tracks with how much a Waikato trailer boat is actually asked to do. West to Raglan and Kawhia, north-east to Thames and the Coromandel, east to Waihi Beach and Tauranga, and further south to Whakatāne and the wider Bay of Plenty, saltwater anglers get a genuine run in pretty much any direction. Head inland instead and the Rotorua Lakes and Lake Taupō turn the same boat into a freshwater rig, while the calm hydro lakes further down the Waikato River, Karapiro among them, pick up the water-ski and wakeboard trade. Add in bar crossings at Manukau, Raglan and Hawke’s Bay, and it’s clear why a 5 to 7.5 metre aluminium hardtop gets treated less like a luxury around here and more like a utility vehicle.
This year, Innovision Boats is showcasing Battle Axe, the latest IV616 Venture, a custom build shaped entirely around one owner’s fishing habits, right down to a bespoke boarding ladder and gaff storage worked into the steps up to the casting platform. The Venture design won the Consumer Product category at the 2025 Best Design Awards, and Innovision will have its newest IV707 Explorer on the same stand before that boat heads to Melbourne.
Three years in, that’s the real story here: a show that started as a gap-filler for the Waikato has grown its own identity, from custom trailer boats built around one owner’s specific fishing habits to the sheer range of water within reach of Mystery Creek.
