FISH FROM THE LONG WHITE CLOUD Our cousins across the ditch in New Zealand impress Joe Riley with variety and size of fish. Joe Riley shares his trip.
I
’m a regular visitor to New Zealand, usually rivers or lakes chasing trout, always with a fly rod. In March this year I took another trip, this time not just the fly rod, but spinning gear in the 4000 and 6000 size range ready for snapper and kingfish in Parengarenga Harbour . Te Hapua is the closest town to Parengarenga Harbour, which is close to the Northern tip of the North Island. A large harbour which has in parts, pure white sand spits and in others mangrove fringes. A large harbour with strong tidal movements through a large barway. I travelled on my own across the ditch and was picked up by an old mate, Steve Brown. Steve and I have been fishing together regularly after becoming good friends after meeting at the World Fly Fishing Championships. From Auckland airport, a 6 hour drive north to get to a farm stay aptly named Mangrove Batch. The old farm house converted to an Air BNB has it’s own channel through the mangroves out into the harbour, At high tide the boat was slipped into the water ready for the fishing to begin.
We had several objectives for the trip. Catch a tailing snapper polaroided in the shallows. Catch kingfish both on stick bait lures and hopefully on the fly rod. These were the main plans and other than that just catch plenty of snapper, kawahai or black back salmon as we know them and what ever else came our way. The first morning we worked around the edges of some mangroves, sighting snapper, mullet, and tons of luderick, schools and schools of them. We were trying to sneak up on a snapper with the boat but they seemed to see us before we got much of a chance to have a cast at them. Having given up on the snapper for now, we went exploring some of the many bays looking for more shallows. There were kawahai everywhere occasionally small bust ups but mostly charging around as the boat travelled over them in the numerous channels and over sand flats. We got to the Southern most channel and worked our way towards then end. The channel cut around a point and as we slowly moved past it I saw two big kingfish
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Fishing News - Page 7
