Is this the summer to put fishing on hold? With fish stocks collapsing, scallops being cleaned up, and crayfish functionally extinct in the Hauraki Gulf, some kiwis are asking time for the fishing habits of a lifetime.
Aucklander Matt Rayner has fished all his life and bought his first can as a 15 year old. But becoming more aware of the stands from the Gulf has left him demoralized about fishing. “I still go out in my boat all the time with the kids, we jump off and have picnics and stuff. But I’ve lost the joy of going out and killing things.
“It’s not just about fish, but about all the shellfish and crayfish that we used to target. There is none now. As a teenager we got scallops from places like Waiheke Island or The Noises, and clams from all over. Now the mussel beds are almost all gone and there is a harvest ban for the entire Gulf because we have decimated the scallops.”
This summer’s emergency bans are a benchmark how bad things are.
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* Are recreational anglers willing to pay the price of fish?
* In dire straits: Experts call for protection of 30 percent of Hauraki Gulf
Over the past 20 years, scallops have been fished in Marlborough, Golden Bay, Tasman Bay, Kaipara, Stewart Island, Wellington and the Chatham Islands. In April this year, the scallop fishery in Northland and most of the Coromandel was closed in hopes that the shellfish could recover.
Now all areas of Coromandel’s scallop fishery have been closed for three months as populations continue to decline. Two left-open channels around Hauturu/Little Barrier Island and near the Colville Channel have been subject to intensified commercial dredging, and last week Oceans and Fisheries Minister David Parker announced that those areas will also be closed. There is a new no fishing zone in Northland’s Bay of Islands.
Meanwhile, cinchona barrens cover the sea floor. Due to the lack of snapper or crayfish, which eat the cinchona, numbers have exploded and seaweed forests have been devastated. Rayner says seaweed forests are gone from all over the Gulf and along the East Coast. “Now we just have bare rock.”
Roger Grace and Vince Kerr/Whangarei leader
KINA BARREN: Large areas of the reef at Mimiwhangata, once covered in kelp forests, are now bare.
You can still catch snapper in some places, but that’s no proof that all is well.
“Snapper are generalists, like tui,” says Rayner, who works as a scientist. Tui does well in cities and farmland. But that doesn’t mean our native forests are doing well. “Species, such as the green flounder we used to spearfish, or hāpuka we caught in the Gulf channels, are dead or in decline.
If you fish the canals now, you’ll catch 20 or 30 fish and one of them might be legal. It’s all a bit depressing.”
As fish numbers plummet, boat numbers skyrocket. New Zealand has consistently high rates of recreational boat ownership. The share of recreational craft among the general population has sharply increased in 2022. Just over half of the Kiwis are some kind of boatie.
“The hunting and fishing shops are like a last bastion of Kiwi manhood. You can be in the office all week, but then on a Friday night you go out with your friends, with your hunting and fishing gear on, kill some fish and feel like a man again.
“Guys are talking about going to the 40 yards where you can get good snapper. But that’s what’s left of our snapper spawn. We’ve had this attitude of take, take, take. But now the pressure is so great, I just don’t feel comfortable with it anymore. It really saddens me because I love fishing, it’s part of our culture.”
Raynor wonders if fishing in the Gulf can be replaced by other forms of recreation.
“In the end, what do I like to fish? For me, and I think for many anglers, it’s about being out in nature.
“It wouldn’t be cool if we could go to places in the Gulf like Goat Island where we could snorkel and see green flounders, big snappers and schools of fish. How wonderful it would be if the government protected large habitats and we could restore some of that abundance.”