SPEAR FISHING: Plenty of fish to spear

HAMISH BIDWELL
A man, a spear gun and the ocean. No oxygen tanks, no nets, just hunting and gathering in one of its purest forms.
It's a sport, too, and one that Kane Grundy and his small band of Hawke's Bay freedom divers take very seriously. They are among the hundreds of spear-fishing enthusiasts around the country who think nothing of jumping in their car and driving hundreds of kilometres to some far-off spot that the weather charts indicate diving conditions will be ideal.
On the morning that Hawke's Bay Today talked to Grundy, he'd just returned home from a day trip to White Island in the Bay of Plenty. It was a mission that yielded his group just three fish and, yet, he couldn't care less.
For Grundy, just being in the water is fulfillment enough.
"It all started for me when I was a young fella and a mate of mine got me into diving around the rock pools for crays and paua," Grundy said.
"I just love the challenge of it and the simplicity. We're very selective in our fishing and we don't just go round shooting every fish we see.
"In the old days, spear fishing got a bit of a bad reputation because some of the old fellas did go pretty hard. These days, we just concentrate on looking for good edible species like butter fish, moki, snapper, kingfish, giant boar and terakihi etcetera.
"There's a limit to two fish per species, which means we're not endangering the future of the fishery."
But chasing fish and being an alien presence in their domain also means having to be wary of the more natural marine predators.
"Yeah," Grundy said, chuckling.
"It does get pretty hairy when the sharks take an interest in you. They like to come up and poke you in the nose occasionally, so you've got to be on guard. Well, not so much on guard as aware of their presence."
He backs the move by Minister of Conservation Chris Carter to impose heavy fines on anyone killing great whites, for instance.
"I would like to see sharks protected. I love the ocean and I love what's in it and it's a privilege to be able to use it as our playground.
"But in doing so, we have no right to complain about sharks, because we are the ones putting ourselves in that situation and we have to respect the fact that it's their habitat," he said.
"Wherever there's fish, there will be sharks. We have to respect the fact that that's how the marine foodchain works and be careful not to become a part of that foodchain ourselves."
Grundy says experience teaches you how to react to the arrival of sharks and while you never get comfortable with it, you certainly learn to cope better.
"When they see you, they like to come straight at you but once they get to within six or seven inches of you, they tend to veer off," he said.
Still, it is a good idea to get any shot fish out of the water quickly, before a frenzy ensues.
A few miles on the clock also help when it comes to avoiding the dreaded "black-out". Grundy says without the aid of artificial-breathing apparatus, being able to estimate the depth you're going and how to stay as calm and as still as possible are as important to a spear fisherman's armoury as his gun.
"If you can overcome a lot of the natural anxieties that people have, then you'll dive well.
"The guy that can't is the one that has a lot of barriers in his head. With free diving, 50 percent of it is lung capacity and the rest of it's mental."