The business offers women a safe space to learn outdoor skills. Video / Wild Chix
Isabell Zitzelsberger founded Wild Chix to teach women boating, hunting and fishing skills.
The business empowers women by providing a safe space to learn traditionally male-dominated hobbies.
Participants report increased confidence and skills, enabling them to enjoy outdoor activities.
For Tauranga marine scientist Shanel Honoré, the ocean has always been her second home.
“It’s the place where I’ve always felt the safest, so my whole life has pretty much been structured around that,” she tells the Herald.
“[But] I’d walk into the fishing club - I do quite alot of game fishing - and it’s always that stereotype or judgment: ‘She’s a woman, she must not know what she’s talking about or what she’s doing.’ The respect just isn’t there.
“Working and studying and being in that marine field is really hard because, from the outset, you’re on the opposite foot. You’re always trying to fight to be heard or have that respect, so it makes you really afraid to ask questions because you don’t want to be judged for it – because you’ve already been judged for your whole life.”
Honoré, mum to a 17-year-old daughter and boys aged 10 and 8, would spend time on the family boat with her children and then-husband. But when her marriage ended, the boat went with him. So she set out to build her own and get the qualification she needed to skipper it alone.
Surtees Boats’ Isabell Zitzelsberger, with whom Honoré first bonded over their shared love of boating, helped her put together her dream vessel. It was then that the seed was planted for what would become Wild Chix: a business run by women, for women, teaching valuable skills from boating to hunting to fishing - hobbies that are largely male-dominated.
Wild Chix is a business offering courses on hunting, boating and fishing designed to build women's confidence.
“Women teaching women is just a different space,” Honoré says.
“We have had teenage girls who have come with their mums, right through to older women who are widows, who have been boating with their husbands their whole lives – and then their husbands have passed away and they can’t access that any more, so they’ve come to learn. There is no age restriction on it, which is amazing.
“There are women who come with no boating experience ... there are women that come with extreme amounts of experience, but they still wouldn’t even know how to lift the anchor because they’ve never been shown it before.”
Some have signed up for courses to fill a knowledge gap after a relationship breakdown or loss; others know all too well that trying to learn certain skills from your partner can put a strain on the relationship.
“It’s really hard to ask your significant other for advice the minute that you’re trying to back a trailer down a ramp,” Honoré points out.
“It’s that anxiety that you feel that you’re always going to do it wrong, or that the men can do it better. A lot of them are just looking for a safe space where they can ask those questions that are not seen to be dumb questions, because that’s the fear.
“The women have said it’s life-changing - the amount of confidence they have that they can then help their husbands clean the boat, put the boat away, or they can fillet the fish that they or their husbands caught. Then they know what they’re doing rather than just sitting on the side as a spectator.”
Isabell Zitzelsberger says "it's crazy" how male-dominated hunting, fishing and boating still are.
Working in boat sales in Tauranga, Zitzelsberger had a front-row seat to the stereotypes faced by women in the marine industry.
When she and her partner moved from Germany in 2012, they “fully embraced the New Zealand lifestyle”, from boating to fishing and hunting in the bush.
“When guys came into the shop, they often looked past me first and looked around like, ‘Is there anyone I can talk to about a boat?’ I’m like, I’m standing in front of you, mate. It’s pretty crazy how male-dominated this industry is, even now in 2025.
“New Zealand is the country of hunting and fishing, and [women] fully embrace it and often go along, but we are not confident taking the helm or knowing our stuff.”
These encounters inspired her to organise a boating seminar for women at the Tauranga Sport Fishing Club in January last year – which proved so popular she started running similar events around the North Island. “More and more fishing clubs started ringing, asking if I could come in.”
She then enlisted the help of Honoré - “probably one of the only females I’ve ever had in the shop by herself” - to join her as a presenter. She eventually quit her job to pursue Wild Chix full-time.
“I left my dream job behind because there was such a big mission to tackle here with the girls - educating them and building this community and building confidence.”
Wild Chix hunting courses offer women the chance to go into the bush for a weekend and learn about the sport.
After completing an eight-week introduction to deer-stalking through the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association, she wanted to introduce other women to the sport. Now, women can sign up for weekends away with Wild Chix to learn about hunting at their own pace and comfort level.
“They can just have a little taster, come out for the weekend and just experience hunting in a way where it’s not just killing – it’s more about the connection to nature, understanding where your meat’s coming from, learning about our environment, learning about the deer itself as a pest in New Zealand and how to control it.
“In the bush and on the ocean – those are areas where you can detach yourself from the busyness of life. That’s where I recharge my batteries."
Zitzelsberger wants to encourage women from all walks of life to sign up, not just those who already consider themselves outdoorsy.
“Learning skills in the outdoors is so empowering, and just removing the barriers where we always think we’re not good enough.
“It’s growing amazing friendships and an amazing community, which I’m extremely proud of.”
Katie Bachman signed up for Wild Chix to find a sense of community with other women after having her son.
For 37-year-old chef Katie Bachman, the isolation that can come with new parenthood was the catalyst that led her to sign up for a Wild Chix hunting course. She’s since signed on as the business’s official caterer, providing meals for the women who come along.
“It started out as just me wanting to teach my son a bit more about hunting,” says Bachman, who is originally from the US.
“I’ve always been really outdoorsy - a lot of it was the isolation of young parenthood and trying to find myself and a community again, and build up a skill set that I didn’t quite have.
“I work in a male-dominated field, constantly having to be the ‘tough chick’ - you’ve got to know twice as much and do it twice as good just to get half the amount of respect.
“To walk into a space where I don’t have to have that ego is really refreshing. There’s no silly questions, nobody’s going to be belittled for not knowing something - [it’s] just really making that safe space to let women grow and be vulnerable.”
Tauranga banking specialist Kelly Price, 42, wanted to be able to skipper the boat she shares with her husband, so she signed up to Wild Chix’s boating boot camp.
“I was like, I can’t keep relying on people to go fishing,” she tells the Herald.
“It was a really good environment, and you could ask any questions that you wanted to. They had the answers to everything. They were really relaxed and chilled.”
She’s since found the confidence and learned the skills to skipper the family boat - and has shared some of her newfound knowledge with her husband.
“I came home and I was talking to the husband and even taught him a few things ... I’m so glad I did it.”
What would she say to other women who might want to sign up, but are hesitant to take the leap?
