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Mark Burgess with one of the salmon taken behind the Whaleway Station. You can see just how calm the sea was that day! Salmon taken on a silver ticer lure.
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Descending from the Hundalee Hills to Oaro I was struck by the calmness of the sea. There was barely a ripple on the surface and almost no discernible white line at the water's edge. I struggled to remember a similar day on the Kaikoura coast. Both sky and sea were a brilliant blue. I was confident we would catch fish today!
The plan was to go surfcasting from the beach behind the Whaleway Station. We drove into the car-park mid-afternoon and quickly began carrying our gear across the stones. Birds were working a surface school about 500 metres from the beach; always a good sign.
Due to a lack of foresight on my part we only had frozen squid bait. However I was sure it would get us started. As mentioned the conditions on this late August day were simply delightful with the sun shining and very little wind. The sea was calm and clear. We cast out several surfcasting rigs at various distances from the beach. Though the earlier work-up had soon disappeared I felt certain spinning with a kahawai ticer had to be worth a try.
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Mark playing his salmon. |
Time passed. Nothing! Our baits remained untouched. Not even a nibble! The beautiful postcard vista from Kaikoura Peninsula around to the still snow capped Seaward Kaikoura Ranges was broken periodically by a small blue helicopter taking tourists on site-seeing flights. Tourist buses came and went from the Whaleway Station behind us carrying passengers to and from the whale watching boats wharf on the south side of the peninsula.
As we fished some of the mostly Australian tourists would wonder down for a chat. Both they and I expressed amazement that the whales would oblige by surfacing near their boat so they could see them up close. The visitors also had a close encounter with a large pod of dusky dolphins. Many couples appeared to be travelling around New Zealand in campervans both large and small. It was still late winter and the night's cold. I couldn't help but consider the massive contribution they must be making to our economy. I asked them how their holiday in New Zealand was going; to a man they were full of lavish praise for our country and its people.
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Skate taken on a frozen squid bait. According to a local surfcaster the once plentiful snapper and gurnard are hard to find nowadays. |
Keeping up the spin fishing effort was well rewarded as several members of our party, including my son Mark, landed quinnat salmon close in to the beach on green and silver 68g ticers. They weren't big fish at around 7 to 8 pounds but they were salmon nonetheless. We were delighted. So too were our Australian onlookers who expressed surprised that we could catch such excellent fish with seemingly little effort.
I finally got a take on one of my squid baits. It was a skate - which we kept.
Later on I wondered down the beach casting and retrieving a ticer as I went. Several hundred metres down I struck up a conversation with a local angler (he lived across the road) who had the spin fishing bug as well. We stood side by side casting our lures chatting about our prospects of landing a big fish – or indeed any fish for that matter. He told me he first moved to Kaikoura back in the 1960s. In those days he said it was nothing to catch 30 or 40 big snapper every summer from this beach. He would also take many good gurnard - a species that was once plentiful around the peninsula. Nowadays, he lamented, the fishing isn't a patch on what it was back then!
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The old Kaikoura railway station is now the Whaleway Station.There is still a dusting of snow on the Seaward Kaikoura Ranges. |
In those days, he told me, kahawai were unbelievably plentiful along the Kaikoura coast. You could stand on the beach and count vast schools in every direction. He reckoned that unbridled commercial fishing in the 70s and 80s in particular had decimated snapper and kahawai stocks to such an extent they haven't recovered to this day. He also thought that rig shark were much harder to catch now as well. Aside from the odd salmon he felt the only fish you could catch from this beach today were skate and conger eel. The once plentiful gurnard and snapper that were taken by surfcasters had gone altogether. He did give me a few pointers on how to catch big moki in the area - but he made me promise I wouldn't pass on what he said about that.
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The little blue helicopter returns from another scenic flight. |
Having experienced tremendous fishing in some of the almost untouched areas of Fiordland I could certainly see his point. Back in the days of Captain Cook groper could be caught close to shore all around New Zealand 's coastline. The close to shore fishing in those days must have been phenomenal.
Today we have to work much harder for a feed of fish. It is important to try new areas and to employ different techniques in order to be successful while surfcasting. Try a variety of different baits, live baits, spinner baits, large and small hooks, and so on, all at the same time if you can. As we found at Kaikoura's Whaleway Station beach, spin fishing and surfcasting at the same time proved to be key for a successful day.
You might also be interested in sea fishing off the Kaikoura Coast which is a good place to catch blue moki. See boat fishing at Motunau Beach in North Canterbury. Fishing for Yellowtail kingfish and trolling for albacore tuna .
You might also be interested in: Surfcasting at Kaikoura's Goose Bay, and Surfcasting for Elephant Fish . What about these snapper caught with a longline off the beach at Hokitika. Catching elephant fish at the beach. Taking kids fishing for little fish . Other New Zealand sea fish species.
