Geoff Thomas: Rachel a hunter with rod

Rachel released most of her snapper. Photo / Geoff Thomas

Rachel Hunter wants to catch a shark. A big one. She couldn't resist a Jaws T-shirt she spotted in a Newmarket store, and flashed it as soon as she hopped on to the boat at Half Moon Bay marina on Monday.

"Look at this!" she announced. "I'm ready!"

The shark story goes back four years to when she was connected to a big bronze whaler on stand-up fishing tackle. The 24kg Penn rod looked much better in Rachel's hands than any other angler who had hung on to it. The gimbal belt and kidney harness completed the outfit beautifully, although it was not the usual attire seen on the catwalk.

But then Rachel is not your usual catwalk sort of girl. She is right at home squeezing a slippery squid on to a hook and dropping it over the side for a snapper. She is not interested in having somebody bait her hook, or taking her snapper off the hook. In fact she's a good Kiwi girl.

So the shark story entered chapter two this week. Chapter one involved battling a huge bronzie in the Rangitoto Channel, but that came to an abrupt end when the reel flew into free-spool while the shark was tearing line from the madly spinning reel. The resulting explosion of line and dreaded "bird's nest" snapped the line instantly and the shark went on its way.

Rachel's expletive can not be recounted publicly, but the message was pretty clear.

The shark thing is dear to Rachel's heart.

Since then she has had some practice tangling with big sharks on a rod. "I caught a 3.6m tiger shark in the Bahamas," she said. "They are very impressive fish."

A Kiwi bronzie would fulfil her shark fishing ambitions. "We will release it of course," she added.

Monday was the worst day of the week for weather with the wind gusting 30 knots from the west.

The sharks around Crusoe Rock are usually pretty easy to latch on to. You just catch a fresh stingray, or more often a yellow-brown eagle ray, and drop it close to the reef on a shark hook and wire trace and it doesn't take long before the rod goes off. Another favourite bait is fresh kingfish, and a kingie head will do the trick nicely. In fact our host Paul Green specialises in catching kingfish here and had four of them taken by bronze whalers in one session recently. They will take a frozen bonito, but fresh bait is hard to beat. You always use galvanised hooks so if the hook can't be safely removed it can be clipped off and will rust out quickly.

The wind limited fishing to a small sheltered spot in the lee of Crusoe, and the sharks obviously didn't like the blustery conditions. But the snapper were not so fussy, and Rachel, daughter Renee and her good mate Laura Haden were kept busy pulling in good-sized fish.

Most were returned to the sea, and a handful of 3kg snapper went into the bin for dinner. "That will give us good karma for the sharks," Rachel commented, as she twisted the hook out of a 2kg snapper and dropped the fish back into the water.

There was plenty of karma accumulated, and it will surely help with chapter three.