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| Our women await their hunter-warriors return. Kapiti Island in the background. |
New Zealand is surrounded by a bountiful larder in its coastal waters. So grab any chance you can to get out on the waters and spend a day fishing. Nothing more relaxing than taking a day off, heading out early, and getting horribly sunburned while everyone else is enjoying their work immensely. I mean, wouldn't you chose to go to work rather than getting all fishy smelly, and seasick, and burnt, and running the risk of getting gobbled up by sharks, or orca?
Our son and I have half shares in a 5 metre runabout. Sits on the backyard most of the time, hardly gets used because his work commitments means he is on call so much.
But now and again it's "Come on Dad. We're off tomorrow!"
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| We head out early morning. Those fish will be too sleepy to realise the breakfast carries a wee surprise! |
A flock of seabirds circling around and diving into the water showed us where the fish were. They were feeding off schools of herring or mullet, and in and turn they are followed by larger fish such as kahawai. And the big
kingfish will be feeding off them both. Really is exciting if you can bag a big kingfish. They can be over a metre long and that is huge! That would frighten the women...all that cleaning and gutting!
I was first to haul in a kahawai. Well I managed to get it into the scoop net...it squiggled violently for one last chance of freedom, and threw the hook which flicked back past my eye!
And that's when I caught my hat!
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My second catch of the day.
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Kapiti Island is separated from the mainland by Rauoterangi Channel, part of which is now a Marine
Reserve. Reserves are great at protecting areas from over exploitation. More should be set up, but instead of large areas, it would be better for many small reserves interspersed with unrestricted fishing areas so the reserves act as incubators restocking the fishing areas.
There is good fishing at both ends of the island depending on weather and tides. The birds on the rock in the photo know the shoals of fish will be heading their way
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| On herring guard duty. |
Often more than just shoals of herrings come through the channel. Imagine the thrill when you're out there in your puny boat and you look up to find you're in the middle of a pod of orca or killer whales! That day they were just a few metres off our boat, surfacing, blowing, diving again- stripping all the fish off our set line. After that incredible experience I always take a camera with me. Such wonderful photo opportunities and I missed it.
Seagulls always accompany us, diving at our chum trail, grabbing any small scrap released as the frozen bait block melts. The variety of birds we saw on our last trip was encouraging - seagulls, terns, skuas, and 1 lone gannet, well off course- they normally nest way further north around Cape Kidnappers.
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| Our beautiful companion. |
After a hard day's fishing, and missing out on any kingfish we head over to retrieve our set line. A buoyed and weighted line with 25 baited hooks: our failsafe. Always a fish on that, even if our big ones have got away. We haul in a tangled mass of lines and dogfish, a small shark which is good eating. But the snapper we hauled in which had tangled our line was HUGE! What a fish! 14lb.
Have you ever seen a guy hopping around a boat in joy, trying to hang on to such a monster?
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| When Tim calmed down we managed to get this pic. |
The biggie that didn't get away!
Although the women wished it had. Fish has got to come from the supermarket for them. But after I cooked fish pie that night from the kahawai, my wife changed her tune. Delicious.
My Land: Get out fishing New Zealand's coastal waters.
Human settlement, and the introduced predators, have wiped out their mainland population, and now they are considered endangered. Restricted today to some 30 islands around New Zealand, those populations remain at threat should rats, ferrets or even hedgehogs become introduced to their island sanctuaries.
