A Tauranga Fishing Trip

I must have been 9 or 10 when my dad first took me fishing. My rod was an old piece of bamboo and it had a make-shift line – no reel – with a float at the end. ‘Watch the float and if it bobs right into the water, give the line a tug,’ I was told. Amazingly, within the attention span of a 9 year old, it worked! Of course the fish was tiny and no-one in their right mind would consider eating a roach (of any size) from the Norfolk Broads, but hooking the fish and reeling it in – well, pulling up the line – was a thrill!

…So when our house swap host, Owen offered to take us out fishing for the day on his speed boat I jumped at the chance – and dragged Paul along too.

Owen had a favourite spot a few miles from shore, beside a tiny island close to Mount Maunganui. We’d be fishing for snapper; he told us and hopefully we’d catch enough for the evening meal. It was a perfect morning with blue skies and just a light breeze, but we were bumped and buffeted as we sped through the water; it was exhilarating.

We followed Owen’s instructions on baiting our rods with the frozen tuna we’d picked up on the way at a fishing bait ‘drive thru’(!) and dropped our lines. It didn’t happen immediately but soon enough there was a tug at the line. ‘Don’t strike too soon,’ Owen warned. ‘Wait for it to fully take the bait. Right, now go!’

I started reeling it in at speed; it wasn’t going to be very big, but it still took all my weedy strength! When it broke the surface it was such a beautiful fish – a silvery white snapper with crystal-like sparkles of blue on its body. How could we do this…? It measured a few cm over the 30cm minimum so we could keep it.

Owen was going for the bigger fish. He loaded his hook with a large sardine and casted it out far behind us. He did get one bite, but he snatched at it too quickly: it was ‘THIS BIG’ – but it got away…

We all caught several more fish but some were under sized and some (the biggest of course) had got away, so we came home with a modest catch. Owen gutted and filleted them for us. We got chips from the local chippy round the corner, picked fresh salad from the garden and had our snapper with a glass of NZ Sauvignon Blanc. Superb!