From The Editor...

Limit your catch

Fishing is one of the most popular outdoor recreational activities in New Zealand and at no time more so than during the summer when so many families spend holiday times by the sea. Even people who normally consider fishing to be on a par with watching paint dry will be tempted to try their luck with hook, line and sinker, or at least help their children have a go.

As with most outdoor activities, fishers come in all manner of shapes and sizes, degrees of obsession and skills. I tend to fall in the middle of the bunch. I enjoy a few hours out on the water in a small boat trying to catch a fish for my supper. There are plenty of times when I return empty handed, but I generally don’t mind. Fishing is often just the excuse to be out there, puttering around our magnificent coastline, watching birds and marine life.

I mostly fish from a small boat which means I am close inshore where there is no end of visual delight. The rocky shore is one of the most fascinating environments in the outdoors.

All the same, I am not going to deny the thrill of a good fish running off with my line, finally coming aboard, getting due plaudits from the waiting family – and then being eaten. When you have tasted fish just an hour or so out of the water, it is hard to go back to the shop-bought variety that has either been frozen or in the ice box of a fishing boat for days.

Now I know it is probably a sign of old age, but there is no doubt that inshore fishing is not what it used to be. Sure, the good fishers catch plenty but they tackle the task like a serious mountain climber. They use lots of different techniques and devote a lot of time to their fishing. But for the average fishers like me, the fish just don’t seem as prolific as they were 30 or 40 years ago.

Conventional wisdom among recreational fishers is to blame the other guy, which mostly means commercial long liners operating close inshore. I have no doubt that commercial fishing has some impact on the health of the fishery, even under the quota management system. But if recreational fishers want to speak from the moral high ground, they need to look at the effect of their own activities.

I am always amused to hear someone moaning about lack of fish when on the wall of their bach are several photographs from yesteryear showing dozens of crayfish spread out on a lawn along with enough wet fish to feed the 5000.

I have seen people collecting buckets of shellfish and then asking “what do we do with them?” People harvest sacks of mussels when only a few are needed – and they are obscenely cheap in the supermarket - catch fish that they never eat and so on.

Given the numbers of recreational fishers out there, I have no doubt that all these instances of greed, isolated though they may seem, when added up have a considerable impact on our inshore fishery.

So my plea for those boating and fishing summer is to follow good fishing practise: Limit your catch; don’t catch your limit.

Tight lines.

Colin Moore, Editor