John Eichelsheim - Top Catch: Hook Up New Zealands Top 12 Species

During the 1970s snapper were not overly common in Wellington Harbour and certainly didnt figure in the catches of a small boy restricted to occasional mornings fishing from the wharf at Petone or Days Bay.

A couple of seasons worth of unrestricted commercial fishing for spawning snapper in the early 1970s had totally destroyed the regions snapper stocks, as it had in Golden Bay; it has taken until the present day for them to partially recover. A few commercial fishermen got rich during the snapper boom, but the rest of us were left much the poorer.

As boys our sights were set on humbler fish we could tackle with hand lines and hooks wed begged, borrowed and found. The gear was simple: a length of nylon line we considered ourselves too modern for the green linen cord lines the old blokes used wound onto a plastic or glass bottle filled with fine gravel. Large Coke bottles were popular because their flared bases and voluptuous curves made them ideal for casting: hold the bottle by its neck with the base pointed in the direction you want the line to go, twirl the sinker and bait around your head and let rip. The sinker would fly through the air, pulling coils of nylon from the bottle just like a spinning reel. We could achieve respectable casts this way with minimal tangles.

Although, like most kids, I started fishing for cockabullies and spotties, by the time I was 11 or 12 years old these tiddlers no longer held the same attraction. Id set my sights on the occasional kahawai, barracouta or red cod that frequented the wharves I fished.

Kahawai were the glamour fish. We used baits of whole herring (yellow-eyed mullet) when we could get them, fished alive or dead. Otherwise it was whole spotties or strip baits cut from whatever fish we could catch. Store-bought bait was rare and much less generally available than today. Some dairies carried small boxes of trevally and squid, but we caught our own baits, often scrambling onto the cross-members beneath the wharf to gather mussels and access the bait schools that congregated there. Stale bread would usually attract herrings and bread paste on a small hook would catch them. Either that or a large weighted treble hook used to jag them!

To be honest, catching bait was as much fun as fishing for kahawai, although not without danger. Resting seals were regular occupants of under-wharf platforms and cross-members during winter. They were not always amenable to sharing their space with small boys and a bad-tempered seal could evict us from the wharf altogether. At other times they were happy to tolerate us at close quarters.

Ill never forget their stench, or the way the oil from their coats (probably mixed with urine if I think about it) would get into our clothes as we clambered around under the wharf. It had a very distinctive odour and was, my mother told me, impossible to wash from my clothes.

A Sunday morning indelibly etched in my memory kindled a love affair with snapper that remains to this day. It began like many others. My long-suffering mother dropped my mate Ian and me at Days Bay Wharf after early Mass. We clutched our tackle bags, a lunch box and half a loaf of stale bread. She never took too much notice of my dont pick me up until dark plea, but I was reasonably confident wed get to spend most of the day fishing.

Bait fishing that morning was poor. Try as we might, we couldnt lure any herrings close enough to catch, and there was nothing under the wharf. Fearing Id miss out on the best fishing of the day, I settled for a small spotty I caught near the wharf piles while Ian persevered with herring fishing.

Spotty is not brilliant bait, at least for kahawai, which was what I hoped to catch. I had caught the odd barracouta on it, but seldom kahawai, so I was somewhat surprised when my plastic Vim bottle began to rattle and jump just a few minutes after Id tossed the unweighted spotty as far out into the bay as I could.

Picking up the line, I let it slip steadily through my fingers before taking a deep breath, tightening up and striking with the typically exaggerated arm movement of hand line fishers. If the timings right, more often than not the reward is solid resistance and a strong pull on the line. If the gods are smiling, a fat kahawai will leap out of the water and a very excited boy will pull it in hand over hand as hard and fast as the line and his courage will allow.

But this time there was no leap, and while there was solid resistance, there was none of the zipping around Id come to expect from kahawai. Hauling on the line, I made little impact on the fish at first, the line cutting deep into my index finger and drawing blood. Conscious of the number and dubious quality of the knots joining my composite line together, I eased off a little, retrieving line only when the fish allowed me to.