KEY POINTS:
The snapper fishing around the upper North Island has been brilliant, with loads of school fish up to 4kg easy to catch at dawn and dusk.
The fish are now in close around Auckland, in the Rangitoto Channel and off the North Shore beaches, around Motuihe and the shoreline of the Firth of Thames.
Use a running rig with long trace or a strayline rig, using as little weight as is necessary to get to the bottom.
The huge numbers of small fish or "pickers" can be frustrating at this time of year. Don't use berley as it attracts them. Use fresh baits like kahawai, mullet or shellfish baits which are harder to pick off.
If plagued by juveniles, it's best to move, even 100m, advises Eugyn de Bruin on charter boat Sea Genie. The best fish are being taken on fresh jack mackerel and the Gulf is full of those.
The easterly winds have continued a bonanza for kite fishers off the west coast. With the change to sou'west on Thursday, there was increased effort from game fishers but the year's first marlin is yet to be recorded. The Whangarei Deep Sea Anglers club thought they had the season's first on Christmas Eve but the stripey weighed in at 81.6kg, short of the 90kg club limit and the angler wasn't a member. Two yellowfin were caught out from Tutukaka that day and two more on Thursday. Several have been caught further south to Whakatane.
The Manukau Harbour continues to produce gurnard but small snapper are in in numbers so the best time is the two hours after high tide on the flats above the channels. Scallops are plentiful and most are legal size.
At Taupo, catch rates are high but the fish small and mostly spent.
The size of trout being caught in the Tongariro fishery this year is down by around 4cm in length and 350g in weight but it's hoped the change is part of a natural cycle rather than a permanent decline.
Department of Conservation fisheries manager Glenn Maclean said the smelt spawn in the next two to three months would need to be better than that of 2007 to reverse the problem.
"The important thing is we want to see the fish grow, which is what they didn't do this year," he said.
The issue is discussed in depth in the December issue of DoC's magazine Taupo Trout. There are a variety of factors at work.
1. The smelt count was down and 90 per cent of a Taupo trout's diet is smelt.
2. The autumn runs are getting smaller and the spring runs bigger. The fewer fish that are in the autumn runs have not fed as well as usual, yet angler pressure on them hasn't changed and so the numbers of bigger fish are declining.
3. Good conditions in the upper river reaches and the absence of extreme weather and floods may mean there are more fish than usual resident there.
The DoC report that collated information from its traps, research on the lake and smelt monitoring programme to produce the above information also provides some useful information for anglers.
From March to August fish move only after a fresh. In autumn when weather is stable, the fish do not move much, so over a period of time anglers are targeting fewer fish in the same pools, ie the fishing gets harder. In autumn, the fish generally move at night so fishing is best dawn and dusk.
In spring, fish run in any kind of flow conditions, do not require rainfall to trigger them, and run at any time of day. And there are more of them, by a proportion of about five to one. So spring fishing is far better.
The Ministry of Fisheries is investigating the dumping of hundreds of legal-sized snapper from a commercial boat off Coromandel. An amateur fisher reported around 400 fish of about 30cm size floating off the Coromandel Harbour and fish later washed up on beaches.
MFish reported they were in good condition, recently caught by commercial means. So they were probably dumped in favour of fish of another size for a designated market. High-graders risk a $250,000 fine and seizure of vessels and gear.
The ministry has also seized two Korean boats that have been fishing here under licence and is investigating allegations of "trucking" - catching fish for which they hold quota in one area outside that designated area. The Melilla 203 is at Tauranga and the Melilla 201 at Dunedin. Both are owned by the Dae Hyun Agriculture and Fisheries Company based in Korea and were fishing for Tauranga-based company Trans Pacific Fishing. The inquiry is believed to involve hundreds of tonnes of ling.
