Great Barrier's Medlands white sand beach with New Zealand native toi toi fauna and mountain view. Photo / Mark Russell

Fishing Tales from Great Barrier Island 

This fishing tale, recounted by Fred Medland, vividly captures the essence of fishing adventures and life on Great Barrier Island between the late 1930s and 1950. Fred’s memories bring to life the challenges and joys of the island’s fishing culture, highlighting the resourcefulness and camaraderie of those who fished the waters around Aotea.

The story, like many fishing tales, reflects a time when fishing was as much about the journey and the experience as it was about the catch. This story is republished with permission from the Kay Stowell Archive.

By Fred Medland (Born 1926)  

As with all fishing tales and short and long yarns there is a beginning. Some begin in the slack times between bites, in the pub next day after the  physical work is done, but the best are told on arriving home late with  breath that smells of Captain Morgan’s throat lubricant to find a cold tea,  it’s dark and it has rained in the last half hour. Now there’s a bin or, in our  case, a sack of assorted fish to clean. Snapper, the odd cod, kahawai, a  gurnard and, if we were lucky, a monstrous hapuka.  

Photo / Fred Medland

If we were boat fishing and managed to lift a craypot we might be  rewarded with ten to a dozen crayfish. No escape slots in those days to let the yellow eels and  octopus in and out until they had devoured your crayfish. In our day pots were lifted each  morning (except Sunday) and re baited again in the evening if it wasn’t a full moon. Our craypots  were made from supple jack vines so had a limited life if lost during a storm; a block of wood was  used as a float (no name required). This all happened in the late 1930s to 1950.  

My first fishing trip about 1936 or 1938 when I was 10/11 years old was a well prepared days  outing. Tanekaha rods and cotton fishing lines. Our sinkers were odd nuts and bolts, even a spark  plug, and if we were keen, old lead heads off roof nails. The hooks we used were made by a firm  using the name “Alcocks” (much to the satisfaction of a local resident, E. Alcock of Tryphena). On  this fishing trip we had lunch of home made bread, a small billy to brew tea if we had time, and  an old “Enos” fruit drink bottle of milk. We made sure to carry matches as a back up to make a  fire if anyone was hurt.  

Our prime number one bait was eel caught the night before, filleted and toasted over a hand full  of scrub to bring out the oil and toughen it up. Two cattle dogs went with us; maybe if a wild pig  was found we could try out our home made knives, held onto our belt using some of Dads home  tanned leather for a sheath. The dogs we took were “Blackie” and “Bingo” and in later years we  had “Wave” and “Atom”.  

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We walked through Mitchener’s Farm (after making a phone call to them to seek permission).  That was before Mitchener’s Road was formed. We went up past the head of the river and the  fossils, climbing over the Big Ridge hill to the east but south of an area known as “the crater”  where the Osbornes had a number of beehives. We came to a big high rock with a hole through  it and this was where we would fish.  

In our fishing group were my father John who had a beautiful Tanekaha rod, Trevor my brother  and I who had only hand lines. Lionel my younger brother had a line on a small bamboo rod.  Sugar bags were used as a knapsack or Maori pikau and they did a good job of carrying a load,  your hands were free and the weight placed to your comfort on your back.  

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We timed our arrival at the fishing rocks for low tide, as we wanted to collect at least two sugar  bags of kina and the area wasn’t a good kina rock, too many snapper about. These were used as  burley or ground feed.  

Dad had chosen the day well, no wind, tide was low enough and next to no swell. It makes all the  difference on an open coast, very exposed and South America out of sight over the horizon. 

The day suited our hand lines and dad’s reelless rod. He used about 5 metres of line and one  hook as the bottom was very rough and sinkers didn’t last long. A stone tied on with flax made a  good substitute for a sinker. As we broke up kina and threw them in the fish activity increased.  Hundreds of bright sky blue maomao darted in and out of the sea egg burley. In their feeding  activity they signalled to other fish that there was feed about. The first fish we caught was the  active brown kelp fish, not an eating type of fish. Catch about 12 or 15 of these and you had  usually cleared the area of them. Now the Kahawai showed up and if we could catch 3 or 4 we  were set with a good range of bait for the day.  

When it was lunchtime and the billy had boiled and the first bite of a nice corned beef sandwich  had been taken the first good snapper would take your bait. These fish have well worn teeth and  a very dark skin indicating that they are rock or kelp feeders. It was a hard job to eat all our  sandwiches at times. The fish were now arriving. We were using a big slab of kahawai or eel on a  single hook on about 6 metres of line, no sinker. Our lines were cotton and with a choice of white,  brown or green, green was the most common. We waited for the fish, throwing in crushed sea  eggs until sooner or later another big snapper arrived. Sometimes a big fish would take some of  our small baits causing panic and the loss of a hook as this caused them to straightened out and  become useless. The fish would be back in a few minutes and we would be ready, a sharp hook  and the snapper joined the others we caught! After catching a number of fish they were filleted  to lessen the weight to carry home. I have seen as many as 6 to 8 snapper with an average weight  of about 8lb each caught in about 2 hours.  

On one fishing trip to this area some years later perhaps 1944/1945 I caught a monstrous kingfish.  Short of bait we had used ‘jelly’ to kill sprats, using one whole sprat, hoping to catch a big  snapper. With the help of a gust of wind I managed to throw out to about 30 metres. The water  erupted as kingfish fought to take the sprat. I had never seen anything like this before. One kingi  took the bait and dived deep, the line winding stick doing a dance on the rocks. Holding the  winding stick my line spooled out until there was no line left. I held on and walked along the rocks  trying to ease the pressure, hoping the hook and my cotton line would hold. Other kingfish were  milling around no doubt wondering what the hooked fish was doing. After about 20 minutes the  kingfish gave up and I managed to work it in to a gut in the rocks using an incoming wave and  then surfed it up where it was left high and dry. I grabbed it before the next wave and it was all I  could do to hold and carry 351bs (16 kilo) of kingfish up the barnacle-covered rocks. No shoes in  those days, just bare feet. Looking into the deep sea I could see more big kingfish still swimming  around waiting to be caught but I had more than enough weight to carry home. I removed the  gut and the head, along with the gills to reduce the weight. This fish and all fish that we had  caught were washed in seawater and covered to keep blowflies off and then left to drain.  

After a much needed mug of tea we began the two hour trip home with plenty of stops. Most of  my kingfish was smoked in our smokehouse, using ti tree. The other fish weren’t wasted, they  were fried or eaten as fish cakes. We had no freezers in those days. I wish that on some of these  fishing trips we had had a camera with us but as it was wartime camera film wasn’t in the shops  to buy.  

I recall about 1946/47 two trawlers were trawling off the North to South East coast of Great  Barrier Island. I understand two brothers skippered these vessels, ‘The Margaret’ and ‘The  Dorothy’. These boats had their rest times anchored in Medlands Bay. If we were going out fishing  in our clinker built boats we would call on them with some homemade butter and sometimes  milk and eggs. In return they offered us fish but we enjoyed fishing ourselves and what we really  wanted was a couple of coils of worn winch rope. One day the boats suggested we have a day on 

board while they trawled. We accepted and we anchored our two boats. I went on the ‘Margaret  with my brother Trevor. My cousins Ivan and Samuel went on the other boat. We travelled out  to sea for about 5 miles. The crew read us all the safety rules including; no stepping over a moving  rope, go around; no hands in your pockets you can play billiards at home!  

Running out the net was achieved by fastening a rope on a marker buoy and anchor steam down  one leg of a triangle and across the base. The net with its paravane boards was played out and  then we made a turn back to the marker buoy and anchor, running out rope all the way. I would  guess about 1 mile of rope on each leg. The net would be about 3 metres deep and the center or  belly was made of much heavier cord. A hole was tied with an easy release knot to dump the  catch over the hold. Trawling was dependant on weather, sea, wind and how much fish was  expected. A good operator would jump on the towing rope to try and guess the size of the catch.  Two main engine driven winches, one on each side of the wheel house hauled the net in and two  home made rope coilers took care of the rope after it was wound in 15-20 coils on each side, up  to 1.5 metres high. I saw one coil with each turn placed exactly on the turn underneath up to 2  metres high. A complete trawl would take about 3 to 5 hours depending on the sea conditions  and catch size. The net would surface some distance behind the boat, where the catch weight  would be guessed; can we lift it all at once or divide the catch? The catch was about a tonne so  was handled in one lift, positioned over the hold and the holding end trip knot freed, releasing a  cascade of all sorts of fish, snapper mainly but also the odd stingray and small sharks, into the  ships hold.  

Three men were working the boat, the skipper, engineer and deck hand, sorting the fish which  were then stacked in layers and covered with ice. Any fish or object that was unusual or had some  interesting colour or shape was put aside and later put in big glass jars with a liquid in them,  which I presumed was to preserve them. Later they were taken to the Auckland Museum for  study by a crewmember who had a relation working there.  

Some years later a large number of fishing trawlers, fishing in the Bay of Plenty area, found they  could catch fish “at the back of the Barrier” saving a large amount of time travelling. These boats  trawled the area hard and anchored at Medlands or Kaitoke beaches. I recall occasions when 12- 15 fishing boats were anchored at one time. Sometimes the weather forced the boats to the  western side of the Barrier. A number of these boats left their anchors in Medlands Bay, and  these were found later by shellfish and crayfish divers. The trawlers must have taken hundreds  of tons of fish from the Barrier and Gulf areas. Fishing continued even when catches were low.  

On the Barrier we saw the effects of this over fishing; no snapper, paddle crabs by the hundreds  eating the shellfish, no tuatua and hundreds of sea eggs eating the sea weed.  

During the 1930/1940 years heavy storms came down from the Norfolk Island area and the worst  storms from the Kermadec Islands. Tons of seaweed washed ashore, torn from the rocks by 6  metre waves and thrown up on the beach in a high wall, 2 to 3 metres high, about 1 hectare in  area. After about a week the seaweed fly laid their eggs in the decomposing seaweed, they in  turn hatched into small but active maggots and about 90% found their way into the sea at high  tide. Piper, sprats and kahawai were there in their millions along with the bigger fish, school  Kahawai, Kingfish and lovely John Dory. We would stand on the seaweed and catch big snapper,  waiting until the other fish and the small fish got out of the way.  

In later years when .22 rifle cartridges could be bought I shot big snapper through the small of  their tail, waded in and picked them up after doing a “down trow”. A small charge, walnut size, 

of “jelly” or gelignite gave us enough bait for a days fishing and big piper to eat. It wasn’t unusual  to get a big Kahawai, but they were hard to get, as they are very easily frightened.  

I recall night fishing off the Kaitoke beach after dark when we wanted big fish to smoke. We didn’t  mind fishing at night, using a kerosene lantern in the bottom of the boat. We found a lot of sharks  at the northern end of Kaitoke and any we caught using a large hook 100 yards of sash cord were  kept. Their livers contained saleable oil used in paint, and we didn’t let many go. Next day the  shark liver was cut into strips and laid out on a black-tared sheet of corrugated iron where the  hot sun melted the oil out. After a week the smell was as high as Mt Hobson and you had to keep  the rain off it or the oil quality was down graded. Leftovers were pig feed or garden fertilizer. The  Cresent Paint Company paid about 2 shillings and 6 pence a gallon (4.5 litres) (30 cents).  

One very dark night three of us were drift fishing off Kaitoke beach and we had been hearing  diesel engines noises for some time. It wasn’t until we woke up that we realized a trawler was  running out a trawl net that came in between us and the beach, about 300 metres in shore. Lucky  for us we had not put out our “stone in a bag anchor”. We managed to pull our lines in as we  heard the net towing rope cutting through the water. We were very lucky as no one was showing  any navigation or riding lights.  

Around 1944/45 my father John and Mum Nellie took us all to visit Walter and Jean Blackwell at  the Sugar Loaf. Jean was Mum’s sister. On the way home later that afternoon we saw, on  Medlands Beach, a big snapper in the company of some smaller fish and they were eating tuatua  in about 160mm of water. Just their tails were visible and they were 3 metres off shore. My father  had my sister Lois in a carry bag made of canvas on his favourite Tanekaha rod. He quickly  dumped Lois in the sand and harpooned the big snapper through the mouth. Away went the 12  lb fish out to sea but the drag on the big end of the rod bought the fish into shallow water where  Dad waded in and caught it. Uncle Jim didn’t want any fish as it had been caught on a Sunday  which he believed was not a day for catching fish. However, Uncle Sam and Aunt Muriel joined  us for a Sunday tea of freshly caught fish.  

The Blackwell and Todd families caught sharks off Mulberry Grove beach using a harpoon, 50-60  metres of window sash cord, and an old 12-gallon oil drum. The procedure was to harpoon the  shark, throw the drum overboard then wait until the shark drowned itself. In the 1930s they  made good money extracting oil from sharks and I think some stingray liver was also used. Some  of the bigger sharks teeth were removed and sold to the jewellery manufacturers. I understand  there was a good demand for good-sized teeth (may have been overseas).  

During their migratory life porpoise, dolphin and whales were often seen offshore and all around  the Barrier. On one occasion I was up on Goat Hill and looking out over the sea there were  hundreds, perhaps thousands of dolphins moving north. Another sight I’ll never forget is the little  pink-footed seagull. They were here in the millions, on the local wharves, where they would roost  at night. Their white droppings covered the timber woodwork until it was completely “painted”.  In the hot sun the smell was overpowering and when it rained it was very slippery and dangerous  to walk on. On Medlands Beach they could cover an area 200-300 metres long and 50-60 metres  deep.  

During the 1950’s to the mid 1970’s fishing from a boat around Great Barrier Island could be very  exciting.  

On a short trip with George Mason in the early 1950’s we caught 5-6 big school kahawai around  the reef in Medlands Bay and then moved down the coast behind Goat Hill 50 metres off the  rocks. There we scaled and gutted the kahawai into the sea. The blood and guts did the burley 

job and in a few minutes the big snapper arrived. We caught about 10-12 really big fish which all  finished up in the smokehouse. A number of cod and parrot fish completed the catch for the  evening. The craypot was baited and we arrived home just on dark. All these fish were dark in  colour showing that they had lived and fed amongst seaweed. Fifty years later I reminded George  about our fishing trips and I could see his fingers moving as he remembered the fish we had  caught and the way they could bite and pull.  

Every tidal fresh water stream on the eastern side of Great Barrier had a number of mullet in it  and they were fair game for us if we were short of bait. Smoked mullet were very nice but were  inclined to be oily so we smoked them flesh side down. The little sandy beach at the southern  end of Medlands Bay was for a number of years known as Stingray Bay (also known as Reids Bay)  due to the large number of rays there. They made good pig feed and cray bait. I caught three or  four by standing in the shallow water with a big rock on my shoulder waiting until a stingray came  close enough to drop the rock on. This either killed it or in its fright and panic it would go up on  the beach. These were cooked for pig feed and the hens loved them too, the egg flavour revealed  when the hens had had too much.  

Medlands Beach always had good shellfish; plenty of mussels on Memory Park Rock, two big  patches of tuatua at each end of the beach, paua and sea eggs on the rocks. While crayfish could  be lifted out of a gut in the rock near where Medlands boat shed was located with this amount  of shellfish it attracted fish to come in to feed. It was no trouble to catch fish at any tide, off the  beach at high tide or off the rocks.  

I recall Mother giving me two mutton belly flap squares and saying “here take these down and  catch a fish for breakfast”. I did. Those two baits caught 6 good snapper off the beach and I still  had two well-chewed pieces of bait left.  

Fishing was the same on the western side of the Barrier but we found bait was harder to get and  at times we had to shoot a shag to use as bait. I remember during the time I was employed to do  main line maintenance for the Post and Telegraph Department Cyril Eyre and I would shoot a  shag and, under the shag roost in Schooner Bay, using floating lines, catch some of the biggest  snapper I have ever seen. The shags coming back home to roost, over full with fish, couldn’t make  a landing on the high branches so they would drop a fish from their beaks or regurgitate half  digested fish. The snapper waited for this to happen every evening and Cyril and I caught about  5/6 big fish, all we wanted. Some of these we smoked. Cyril Eyre used pohutukawa for firewood  and made a first class job. Any left over shag bait was used in the crayfish pot the next day.  

When Medland Bros and Cyril Eyre were building the Tryphena wharf in about 1936 I remember  catching a big snapper off the end of the partly constructed wharf. The snapper was big, full of  roe, and going into the Hauraki Gulf to spawn. About the time the wharf was completed in about  1939 there was good fishing off the wharf and its steps. We caught many sprats and piper while  waiting for the weekly boat.  

During the war maintenance was carried out on the fender piles and one day some one  harpooned a monster stingray, well over 2 metres across. The harpoon line had tangled around  the wharf piles and the stingray lay dead on the bottom 2.5 metres down but we couldn’t see the  harpoon which may have been pulled out. Later a real big blue shark, about 3 metres long, came  in trying to get at the stingray’s liver which they really like. Edwin Alcock who was in the NZ army  fired a shot at the shark using his army rifle .303 and later we saw the shark with a mark on its  back. Next morning the shark had gone and so had the stingray. Just the harpoon was left, tangled  around an old anchor. We didn’t swim off the wharf for years after that! 

There are many unique fishing experiences we enjoyed that aren’t possible today.  

A group of us boys were fishing off Medlands Beach towards the Sugar Loaf end and on the way  home, after dark, we checked our cousins set eel lines under the bridge on Masons Road. There  were no eels hooked so just to have some fun we hooked two small snapper onto the eel line  and put them back into the drain. Some days later our cousins told us that there must have been  a very high tide as they had caught snapper off the bridge. We never said a word but with Mum  and Dad we had many a laugh about it.  

Another time my brother David Medland and my cousin Charlie Blackwell had been out fishing  and were clever enough to catch a hapuka about 301bs (1213kgs). When they landed at the old  boat shed slipway they knew they were being watched. One boy said to the other “lets slide the  fish under the boat and back up again 3 or 4 times”. Each time the fish passed under the boat it  was held up in plain view enabling our Uncle Sam Medland to see and count the fish he saw. The  boys knew Uncle Sam had Grandfather’s old telescope so could see what fish they were  unloading. The boys returned home very happy with their days fishing, a good catch of hapuka.  Two maybe three days went by before they met up with Uncle Sam when he asked “my word  boys, you did catch some hapuka the other day, but what on earth did you do with them all, we  didn’t see any?” With big grins they told Uncle Sam they had eaten most of it but did give a small  amount away. Have you ever seen a cat after stealing butter or cream grin that was the grins that  David and Charlie had on their faces.  

Crayfishing outside Medlands old boat shed on the western side of the rock is in a gut, quite deep  with an under water hole on the sea end. This gut used to house a number of crayfish. A net was  baited up with a leg of old mutton, 2 or 3 days old, and lowered into the hole area using a long  pole, 4 metres long. This pole pivoted on a post set into the rock. This post is still in the rock  today. It took all our strength to lift the net after about a 45 minute wait. The net was about a  metre in diameter and could hold 12 to 15 crayfish. These were not all big ones but certainly  more than half were. I have filled a wheat sack with crayfish and had to get the old horse to carry  them home the next morning. In those days there must have been hundreds of crayfish about.  Some times we would catch the packhorse type and these were always thrown back as well as  the small ones of the usual variety.  

In the mid 1970’s when we were living at Kumeu Noeline and I, with our daughters, Lynda, Joanne  and Leonie, returned to Great Barrier Island for regular holidays.  

Noeline and myself had been given sections in the John Medland school paddock, which was part  of my father’s farm. My father, John Medland, had foreseen the day when the land would have  to be sold, produce prices were going down, freight costs going up and there was no incentive by  the government to aid farmers in remote areas. He surveyed off a number of sections and left  Mother, the boys and one-daughter sections of their choice. Noeline and I sold one of ours for  $800 and decided to build a cottage down “The Lane” in Medlands Bay.  

We started building in 1974 and it was around this time that we had some unforgettable fishing  excursions during the school holidays, fishing around the rocks and down behind Goat Hill. We  had better fishing gear then and I had a beautiful Mitchell reel, given to me by Noeline and the  girls, as a birthday present. We would spend most of the day crawling over and under rocks where  the sea life was very interesting. We saw the occasional crayfish, caught some of them using a  section of net, bait in the middle, and dropped in the right place. We waited until the cray started  to eat or to remove the bait. When we lifted the net the cray became tangled and then it was  ours. In most of the holes in the rocks that had been covered by the tide we would look for paua, 

but we found more down in crevices. At times we could see them but they were out of our reach.  The sea eggs down some of these holes were at least 110mm across and we used them for burley.  They did a very good job. Some of our fishing spots behind Goat Hill were fishable only at low  tide and in one place the water was very deep. We caught some very nice fish there, including  the odd kingfish that had ventured into this deep-water area. I have never landed a hapuka off  the rocks, but once I had a small one on my line at the reef and lost it at the rocks in front of me.  I knew what it was thought.  

Among the mostly sedimentary rock formation that makes up a lot of the cliff face there were a  lot of fossils. Some timber, carbonised by heat was quite black. In one place, visible only at ½ tide,  there was a complete tree stump with roots. The stump was about 2 metres across and 1½  metres high and it had a hole down its centre. The root pattern, over an area of about 10 metres,  sat out on its own on a fairly flat rock. A lot of these fossils were partly petrified. This rock  formation is about 12 million years old. (see “NZ a Drift”, by Dr Stevens).  

On one trip up the “Big Ridge”, past the “Goat Hill”, to the hole in the rock fishing area, while  Lynda and Joanne fished, Leonie and I tried to find a way down onto the rocks further south. We  started down from above a goat cave high on the cliff face but there was no track. There was a  lot of loose rock among big old pohutukawa trees. With their massive root systems these trees  held onto the rock face. When we eventually made it down to the sea we found a water filled  cave which stopped us from going south and a sheer rock bluff which stopped us from joining  Lynda and Joanne to the north. A short boulder beach was between us. If we had been able to  get around the boulder beach we would have found a sulphur deposit from a hot water spring. I  found this spring years later while collecting fishing net floats. I also found a white painted  highway road marker with reflector paint on the top. I wedged this in a crevice up the cliff face  but it got washed away in Cyclone Bola some years later.  

Leonie and I returned up through trees and rocks to get back to Lynda and Joanne who had caught  some good fish. After lunch we caught more fish, collected a number of paua, explored a boulder  beach and then headed home. Climbing a grass covered hill on the south side of the crater Lynda  found a native orchid plant in the grass. She set to using Joanne’s fishing knife, with its yellow  handle and stainless blade, to dig into the soil. Unfortunately the blade broke off leaving the  yellow handle in Lynda’s hand causing some distress to Joanne who had found this knife on the  rocks near the boat shed.  

On the 5th January 1977 David and I went in his boat up to Whakatautuna Point. The day was  warm and the sea a good colour, blue, perfect for deep water fishing. We caught plenty of small  snapper and every now and then a good-sized fish. We also caught two blue cod and a number  of golden snapper with their big eyes and large mouths tangling up our lines. One of the last fish  to be caught was a 15lb hapuka, making the trip very worthwhile. To get good fish you had to go  out into deep water because off the beach it was mainly kahawai and sometimes a small snapper.  A large number of paddle crabs were in the sand and over tuatua beds and they could eat your  bait in about 10 minutes.  

Since then fishing has deteriorated with longliner boats working offshore, using lines over 5km  long with hundreds of hooks. The Government’s catch quota system has resulted in a large  number of small operators selling out to big companies offering good money for their quota.  Once there were no restrictions on fishing in the Gulf where snapper breed, but the Government  has reduced the number of fish allowed to be caught by recreational fisherman, making stupid  rules such as ‘if you have 9 snapper only 2 or 3 kingfish are allowed’. 

Today to try and catch fish you have to buy a top class reel and fibreglass rod, top grade nylon  monofilm line and special curved hooks that rust away if they are lost. Added to that you need a  special block of frozen burley for bait only to find the areas you fished as a boy with your Father  and he with his Father is now a Marine Reserve. If you want fish and chips at the local takeaway  on Great Barrier Island they cannot use locally caught fish it has to come from the mainland.  

I conclude with an article by Trevor De Cleene MP in the NZ Herald, dated 16 January 1990, when  he reports on his fishing days.  

“It’s no longer the Bay of Plenty  

For 30 years or so I have actively fished out of Tauranga. It is true that even when I began, the  days of Zane Grey, the famous American western-writer, were long gone. On the walls of the  social room at Mayor Island his photographs showed fences made from the bills of marlin caught  in the waters surrounding “the Mayor”, nevertheless in 1959, 14 or more boats serviced the  needs of anglers and marlin were boated in their hundreds.  

In small bays such as the “bait pond”, pelagic fish, the like of kahawai and trevally, were in such  schools that 10 minutes or so sufficed to catch enough bait for the day’s trolling. Even at sea far  from reefs great shoals of mackerel, kahawai, trevally and maomao dotted the ocean.  

A sure sign of game fish was the roar of the shoal and the surge of white water as it acted in  unison to escape the predator shark or marlin working it from blow.  

A pot or two cast overboard on the way out yielded crayfish for the table. A stray line sunk  beneath the schools yielded snapper in abundance.  

Merely clad in woollen long underwear and a jersey we moved among the rocks on the shoreline  feeling for, and taking, crayfish and paua.  

This was typical of the New Zealand coast at this time. Holidaymakers from Wellington travelled  to the Wairarapa rocky beaches out from Blackhead and Waipawa to throw their pots from rocks  at low tide to recover more than enough crayfish for themselves and their friends.  

From my own 18ft 6in (5.6m) clinker open boat with a series E. Ford 10 petrol engine, three of us  took 21 groper in one and a-half hours in 90 feet (27.4m) of water, not one under 40 pounds  (18kg) weight.  

This was the New Zealand as I knew it as a young man. Fish in the sea for all- deer and pig in the  hills – rabbits for sport and table, and the only young man carrying a knife a New Zealand hunter,  superbly fit.  

Now, of course, it is the gilded, tattooed, emaciated city-slicker with the only gleam in his eyes  the product of drugs rather than lust for life. He is the knife carrier of the new decades.  

If Captain Cook, the great navigator, were again to round East Cape from Poverty Bay, I very much  doubt if he would, from the activity at sea, call the Tauranga area the Bay of Plenty.  

The greed of mankind has, in those 30 years, rendered it a virtually lifeless sea – a comparative  desert where once the oasis bloomed.  

Eight crayfish licences work the zone. The floats and ropes of the pots dot every reef up to 60m  beneath the surface. They foul the propeller shafts of the boats at night and their baskets of bait  entrap an increasingly scarce supply of the delicacy. 

Does the New Zealander dine upon its flesh? Nay, not so! It is to the American, Japanese and  European markets that the fish are sent. Most New Zealanders cannot afford to feast on the  harvest of their own coasts.  

The marlin – what of the marlin?  

Joe Walding told me that in 1974 while returning by air from the United States, the aircraft  developed engine trouble and landed in Guam. He said there were freezers full of marlin,  broadbill, tuna – all the product of the Japanese dory liners interrupting the movement of the fish  to New Zealand.  

I caught, tagged and released a black marlin off Cairns in Australia. Three years later a badge from  the Game Fishing Club of New York certified to its catch off the South American coast.  

Their travels now face “wall of death” nets and the sport fishing fleet of Tauranga is no more.  Only six weeks ago, we saw a purse seiner operating out of Tauranga working “The Schooner”.  

A big school of mackerel was close in on the rock where it couldn’t be got at. The boat waited as  the alcoholic waits outside for the pub to open. As soon as the school moved from the security  of the shallows, around went the dory – the mesh closed and more New Zealand fish were sent  to be used for crayfish bait off Western Australia. There are four such large boats operating out  of Tauranga. While foreign boats chase the tuna around the Pacific in winter, these boats stay in  New Zealand and rape our pelagic fish, making the green all red with their blood.  

A spotter plane on a frosty morning with the ocean like glass, sees every ripple of the survivors.  It sends the purse seiners to their slaughter of our now limited stocks of fish. All this I have seen  and ponder upon.  

Are the televisions, motor cars and stereos really worth the privacy of the heritage we should be  preserving for our children? Will the resource be so raped that even the breeding stocks offish  will go? Will there be anything to bequeath to the following generations?  

My children, observing the comparative deserts of sea today, can only believe the photographic  evidence of times gone by. What it was like in the “old man’s days”. Surely, some sanity must tell  us: keep the big fishing boats well offshore, let the stocks revive, prevent the trawlers coming  close in to the breakers. At least give our amateur fishermen a chance to enjoy the sea air and  the beauty of their coasts. Let them eat off the sea’s bounty, even if it has to be in competition  with the Japanese, Taiwanese and all the other “eses.  

What profits it a man who gains a Mercedes, if in the process he can’t even catch his own  snapper?” 

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