Cliff Barnes has spent his life having adventures off the Northland coast. Photo / Clarissa Hastings
Hook, Line and Misadventure is the rollicking story of Cliff Barnes and his exciting life fishing off the Northland coast.
Cliff reckons he used up his nine lives during his career.
One of them was spent when his boat Concord hit the rocks and sank at the Hen and Chickens just before Christmas 1971.
It made a splash on the front page of the Northern Advocate at the time and is retold in this edited extract, which begins as he was trying to pick up his last cray pot before returning to Ngunguru.
“There was a dirty big swell which had started just after a storm,” says Cliff, “and we got in too close, and the pot jammed.
“We couldn’t get it off. The next minute, whoop, we’re up the rocks. Up on the side. We slid down and the swell picked the boat up again and it came down straight on its bottom, bang on the rocks for the second time.”
Such was the force of the impact that Cliff went over the side into a mass of big kelpy weed.
“It was slammed on the rocks one more time, and this time I managed to climb back up on the boat.”
Fortunately, the boat righted itself and Cliff grabbed an oar and pushed it away from the deadly rocks.
“It got outside the swell line. I had a look inside the hull, I thought, ‘uh, oh, it’ll be sinking’. There were big dents in the hull.
“Then I hopped over the side and had a look at the prop. What had been a 17 or 18-inch prop had gone down to that much,” he says, indicating that the propeller was now less than half its original size.
What’s more it was crumpled and twisted. But that wasn’t the half of it.
He also found that the drive shaft had no proper support beneath the waterline and there was a crack where the shaft had been welded on.
Even worse, the steel rudder was twisted and bent so much that it was now useless.
Cliff was thinking fast. Despite the damage, the Concord was still moving.
“It made a helluva shuddering noise when I let the clutch down and let her idle, but we did get quite a way away from the Chicks towards Ngunguru.”
What he needed was a plan to improvise a rudder. He did this by using the tyres that he kept on the boat as fenders.
“I put some tyres out the back, tying up tyres, so I could move them across from one side to the other.
“Steered it by moving the tyres from side to side. It created a lot of drag. Instead of doing 23 knots or something, it was only getting along about three knots.”
With his twisted, crumpled propeller and improvised rudder, he began steering for Ngunguru.
They would never arrive though, not just because they were heading into a freshening northerly wind, but because when they had gone about half the way, there was a loud bang from below.
“What the hell’s that?” thought Cliff.
It wasn’t the engine – that was still functioning in its normal, noisy way – so he climbed down, past the exhaust and into the bilge to investigate.
What he saw horrified him. There was a spout of water about half a metre high and the bilge was rapidly filling up.
The bang that he had heard was the drive shaft and the tube breaking free, causing a loss of power and allowing the water to flood in.
The Concord was, indeed sinking. So, he and his deckhand took the praam dinghy down from the top of the cabin and tied it with a granny knot to the railing while they prepared to abandon ship.
Because of the swell, the knot had been pulled tight and when the time came to cast off, they could not undo it. Cliff thought the Concord would suddenly go down and take the dinghy with it.
“I’ve heard of all these stories about people going down with their ship,” he thought... “but this kid’s not going down there”.
In the end they used a hammer and battered the knot on the rail until they freed the dinghy. They were just in time.
The moment it was released, the Concord went down backwards, slid down out of sight.
Cliff estimates it had taken about three minutes from the “bang” to the moment the Concord disappeared beneath the sea. But then it popped back up again because it had an air lock in the bow which was poking four or five feet above the water.
Just before it went down, Cliff had heard a weather forecast for freshening northerlies and he used this information to size up their position.
There were three options.
The first was to stick to their original plan and row northward to Ngunguru. The second was to tack westwards or northwest towards the closest land, Whangārei Heads.
The third was let the wind carry them south.
The first option was clearly out of the question. Not only were they facing the strengthening headwinds, but they would have to row too far.
The second option was not good either because the tide was going out when the Concord sank and rowing against the ebb would be every bit as challenging as rowing directly into the wind.
On the face of it, the third option looked best. Let the wind and the tide carry them south to safety with minimal effort.
But Cliff realised option three was really a siren’s call. It looked good and was very tempting. But he could see the danger.
The wind would blow them to Mangawhai Heads, about 30km south, where the little dinghy would run into the surf and most likely capsize.
“I didn’t want to do that because it would probably be a death sentence,” says Cliff.
“You might swim ashore, or you might not, it depends. And I’d say after the hours that we had in the boat we probably wouldn’t have made it ashore.”
Having ruled out options one and three, he thought again about option two and he calculated that, in due course, the tide would turn and help them on their way to the Heads.
“The tide was going out but when it was coming back in, I thought, ‘we’ve got a chance of hitting the harbour entrance at some time in the early hours of the morning’.”
With the Concord’s bow still bobbing up out of the water, they began to row.
After four hours, Cliff had chafed the skin off his butt and with the wind starting to blow the tops off the waves, he was so tired that he had to stop rowing and leave them vulnerable to the rising sea.
“We’ll just have to see if we can persevere until dawn,” he was thinking.
Fortunately, that was not necessary because in their darkest hour they were rescued by a trawler, the Tasman Star, skippered by Colin McDowell.
By this stage Cliff had been rowing for about 10 hours against the wind and the tide and they were about one mile from the Heads.
His arms “felt like rope”, he said at the time.
They tied the dinghy to the trawler, and the deckhand went straight below to catch some sleep in the bunkroom. Cliff, however, had unfinished business.
“Where is it?” asked McDowell, referring to the Concord.
“It’s round about there,” said Cliff pointing in the general direction of the Hen and Chickens.
McDowell altered course and, despite the darkness and against the odds, they found the bow of the Concord bobbing in the swell.
They hooked a tow line onto the bollard on the Concord’s bow and began towing it towards Whangārei. It was a slow and perilous journey because they needed to keep the bow standing vertically out of the water.
If it tipped, they risked losing the air pocket in which case it would sink after all and possibly drag the Tasman Star down with it.
“It would have been dangerous for everybody on board,” says Cliff, “so we just pulled it in slowly. We were just waiting for the tide, the incoming tide”.
The ordeal still had a long way to run, however, because the tow rope kept breaking and it was Cliff who had to keep going over the side to re-attach it.
“I hopped on and off the boat all night long, a couple of times changed ropes over, because the ropes were chafing through, a lot of strain on doing that, pulling a boat.
“So, in the end I got a bit of chain out to it and wrapped that around it. I’d been over the side half a dozen times through the night into the dinghy.”
They caught the incoming tide about seven or eight o’clock in the morning and crawled their way up the harbour and, four or five hours later, arrived at Whangārei.
They manoeuvred the boat to the water’s edge where it was lifted onto dry land with a crane. Among the welcoming party were a reporter and photographer from the Advocate, and their story appeared later that day, splashed on the front page.
“Fishermen row praam 6 miles to Heads after cray boat goes down,” said the headline.
By the time the crane hauled the Concord out of the water, says Cliff, he had gone 40 hours without sleep.
“But you’re young …” he says as he puts it all down to experience.
At the time he expressed optimism despite everything. He told the reporter he was off to have a beer.
“I think I’ve earned it,” he said and after that he would inspect the damage.
He was keen to “have another go” if he could raise the finance to repair his boat.
Hook, Line and Misadventure: Stories from legendary Kiwi fisherman Cliff Barnes, by David Hastings, HarperCollins, RRP $37.99.