Early birds catching fish with online licence

Hawke's Bay fishermen can now book fishing licenses online.

Hawke's Bay anglers looking to head for Taupo to do a spot of trout fishing are urged to sort out their now online-available licences before they hit the road.

There has been some criticism of the online licence scheme which was introduced by the Department of Conservation in Taupo - mainly through delays in getting a licence or with anglers finding they had poor internet access in some areas.

"We have had some performance issues," conservation services manager for the Taupo Fishery Kim Turia said.

However, she said while there had been some problems it was not as widespread or severe as some people had made out.

"We had 4000 licences sold over the Christmas period on-line so it is working," she said, although she acknowledged individuals and licence-issuing agents in some areas had experienced problems.

That was the main issue, she said - the locations where licences were being sought from.

"There are some areas of poor internet access."

In a recent column in Hawke's Bay Today Labour's conservation spokeswoman Ruth Dyson said she had been contacted by people who had told her the online system had crashed at times, but Ms Turia said nothing had come to her attention from individuals or agents who issued licences for people.

"We have had no real outages or system crashes." Ms Dyson said the online system should have been introduced alongside paper-based licences and that there was no "phase-in".

Ms Turia said many agents had operated both systems and many still did, which was confirmed by one of the agents.

She said before the online set-up, which is also used by Fish and Game and a growing number of similar agencies overseas, was introduced anglers across the Taupo region were surveyed and the main question in reply was "can we get our own licence online?"

Others, mainly older anglers who were not familiar with computers, preferred to have them sourced through an agent.

"So we did both."

There are 17 agents in the Taupo region and many still issued paper licences, although were transitioning to online licences.

Ms Turia said the main advantage was that an online licence stayed in the system and could be easily reprinted if lost - whereas a paper-only licence, if lost, meant a major delay in getting it replaced.

She said the new system was a big change after 20 years of paper-only licences so there were expected to be some issues.

"But it is being looked at and hopefully it is coming right."

She said the height of the summer season meant a huge increase in licence applications, which could also have slowed the system down.

There are three fishing licence agents in Hawke's Bay and Ms Turia said anglers who did not want to go online themselves should seek them out.

"And my advice is go online and get your licence sorted before you get here - have it all ready to go."

Hammills in Hastings, Hawke's Bay Marine and Guns and Tackle in Napier are agents for DoC fishing licences.

A Guns and Tackle spokesman said there had been no issues with the small number of Taupo online licences they had put through.

"It's pretty straight forward".