Cray diver becomes catch of the day

By PATRICK GOWER

Crayfish diver Peter Fuller thought a barracouta was attacking him - but he had been hooked by a gamefisher chasing marlin.

The 49-year-old's right hand was ripped open and needed nine stitches after a four-pronged hook from a line on a passing boat embedded itself and dragged him to the surface near Tairua, on the Coromandel Peninsula.

"The idiot was rigged for marlin but he caught me," Mr Fuller told the Herald.

It was not until he surfaced that he saw the lure and realised he had been hooked. He could not cut the line because, as a right-hander, he had strapped his knife to his right leg and could not reach it.

The fisherman had passed just 40m from the boat that Mr Fuller and his friend were diving from on Wednesday afternoon. It was displaying a dive flag.

Maritime regulations require fishing boats to stay 200m clear of a craft flying a dive flag.

"He was shaking like a leaf when he pulled me aboard," Mr Fuller said. "He said he was from Pauanui, but I've got the feeling he was a weekend sailor who had come down from Auckland - he didn't know what the hell he was doing."

Mr Fuller is a former British Navy diver with over 35 years' experience on commercial operations off Nigeria, in the North Sea and the Middle East.

The former owner of the Tairua dive shop and local restaurateur had returned for a holiday with his wife, Kaye, and their four sons.

He had borrowed dive gear to go for crayfish before returning to his home in North Hampshire, England, early next week.

Mr Fuller was diving 200m from shore in water about 18m deep when he was hooked. The line was tense for about 10 seconds as he was dragged a few metres.

"Thankfully I was only 10 feet under - any deeper and they would never have known I was a diver. And if I didn't have my glove, I wouldn't have a hand."

The fisherman was using heavy tackle - at least a 30-pound line and a lure with three sets of reversible hooks, each with four prongs.

"I don't know why he was fishing for marlin out there anyway."

Mr Fuller was not shaken by his lucky escape.

"I've been in enough diving accidents to know the first thing you do is keep your cool. And to be honest, there wasn't quite enough pain to put me into shock anyway."

But Mr Fuller said he had a "definite sense-of-humour failure" when the boatie pulled his catch on board his 6m fishing vessel.

He did not take the boatie's name as he bandaged his own hand and was taken back to his friend's boat.

"I didn't want to make a fuss because he had his two young kids with him. But if we had been back in the United Kingdom, I would have sued him."

Mr Fuller warned other boaties to be careful this summer.

"It's a freak accident ... but accidents like this one can be prevented with just a little common sense."

Mr Fuller said that not only had he lost a large chunk of flesh from his hand, but "I bloody dropped my good cray hook as well."

He did manage to hang on to the two crayfish he had caught, but they were undersized and "I ended up throwing them back."

Herald Online Marine News