Fishing: Hard and fast

The fishing gear may look a little heavy, but it is brutally efficient on groper like this one. Photo / Geoff Thomas

This is how you catch groper," said Stephen Page, as he hauled in the rope hand over hand as fast as he could grab the thick green cord. His baits had been in the water for about three minutes, while the Aucklanders had been busy pulling in fat blue cod without a sign of a groper.

This is fishing Chatham Islands style, and it is serious fishing - serious in that you have a fish on as soon as you drop your baits.

Page is a crayfisher, and he sends about 50 tonnes of crayfish to New Zealand, as the islanders call the mainland, every year.

But when some of the boys visited he left the 400 cray pots he has scattered around the coast and took the team out to get some groper and cod. Groper is the preferred name for hapuku and you will encounter the name from about Masterton all the way to Stewart Island and across the southern Pacific Ocean 1250km east to the Chathams - so far east that the clocks run 45 minutes ahead of the rest of the country. But time on the islands has a different meaning. Page doesn't wear a watch, and although the fishing expedition was scheduled for an early start to try to beat the wind, it was 1.30pm before the boat left the wharf.

But nothing worries these guys. They know exactly what they are doing, and, as Page said: "We only need a couple of hours to get fish and have a dive."

The depth sounder showed 12m as the boat drifted over some marks showing on the bottom, and Page baited his two long-shanked hooks with recurve points with chunks of fresh cod. The hooks are attached to short traces of 100kg monofilament, which are clipped to loops in the rope. At the business end, a couple of chunks of steel rod act as sinkers. When he feels a bite he yanks on the rope and hauls it in quickly, then hefts the gleaming groper over the side. It is all done efficiently and brutally fast.

The Kiwis enjoying their first visit to the Chathams were in awe at finding groper in such shallow water and catching them on snapper rods.

"It's unbelievable," said Harold "Flaps" Chapman, of Pukekohe, as he battled his fifth groper and largest at 20kg. "The biggest problem is getting past the cod - and they're huge."

Groper can still be found in shallow water only in remote areas like the Chathams, parts of Foveaux Strait and Fiordland, where there is little fishing pressure. In the rest of the country they are regarded as deep-water fish, but were once common all around the coast. Being slow-growing, they have gone from shallow water.

The day before, "Big Al" Roberts, from Te Puke, was shaking his head after a madcap ride for 20km through bush and scrub on quad bikes to hunt wild bulls. "These guys are doing 80km/h through the scrub, so I just had to keep up with them," he said. The wild cattle hunt added six beasts to the tally. When not hunting wild cattle or sheep, you can go spearing eels, or netting flounder in the huge lagoon that covers half of the big island, or netting whitebait, or hunting weka (yes, it is still allowed here), hunting wild pigs or shooting swans.

Seasons don't carry as much meaning in this community, but respect for the resources is evident in the self-imposed rules, including no commercial harvesting in the lagoon, a closed season on crayfish in March and April, and a 10-paua restriction.

One area of concern is the ban on using scuba tanks to dive for paua and crayfish commercially, which is how many islanders make a living. They are going up and down from the seabed to the surface every minute or so, and that is when they are most vulnerable to sharks. With great white sharks now protected their numbers are increasing and divers want to be able to use scuba gear, arguing that the quota system protects the resource and how it is harvested should make no difference. One diver was badly mauled and lost an arm.

When you get to the airport ready for the 140-minute flight back to Auckland, a Ministry of Fisheries officer on hand to check the contents of chillybins to make sure you haven't exceeded the limits for paua and fish fillets. And you must account for the crayfish. Did you dive for them yourself, or did you get them from somebody's holding pot? We have to admit to the latter, as Stephen Page pulled up a holding pot and put a dozen huge crays into a bin. These will be accounted for as part of his catch.

That pot had several hundred, waiting for good prices at Chinese New Year, and was one of many such pots. Like the fishing, it is a serious business. So is lugging all the chillybins to the car at the other end.