KEY POINTS:
Whitebaiting is a daft activity. It is so daft that it should really be called an inactivity. How else can you describe dawdling the day away on a stream edge while waiting for comically small fish to blunder into your net?
But despite this daftness, nothing quite matches the taste of freshly caught whitebait in a freshly made fritter.
So if a friend invites you to their bach during the whitebaiting season, take care how you respond. "No" is ill-considered. "Maybe" is misguided. "Yes" is sensible but unimaginative. "Yeehah!" is best.
A year ago, I went whitebaiting for the first time. My wife and I made our way to a beachside bach, not far from a secret whitebaiting stream known only to a few thousand locals. The bach was occupied by four friends and a large dog that answered to the name of Benny, but only when you were eating chocolate biscuits.
We had been told to dress appropriately but didn't know what this meant. Perhaps we needed camouflage so that the whitebait would think we were a natural river feature, such as a rock, an isthmus, or an abandoned Holden. Or perhaps we needed blazers and ties. After all, whitebait spend their time in schools.
On the way out of town we trawled the aisles of a large retail emporium. There were clothes for playing several kinds of sport, and more clothes for watching other people play several kinds of sport. There were no clothes for whitebaiting.
Whitebaiting is yet to be exploited by the apparel companies. This is, I suspect, due to the lack of televised whitebaiting competitions, the consequent shortage of celebrity whitebaiters, and the associated dearth of rock star/hotel heiress/porn actress girlfriends.
And so we purchased togs and jelly shoes. This was a mistake. The other whitebaiters were decked out in various combinations of wet-weather gear, waders, lifejackets, jerseys with elbow patches that their wives had sewn on, old trousers with binder-twine belts, and those hunting hats with the fold-down ears.
Appropriate dress for whitebaiting, it seems, is anything that allows you to dawdle the day away in atrocious weather. You never know when the whitebait will be running, and you don't want a storm forcing you to abandon your net at the wrong moment.
But our clothing choice didn't matter. Whitebaiters are tolerant of newcomers no matter what they wear, because newcomers are unlikely to catch much.
The only thing a newcomer needs to be careful about is the invisible buffer zone that surrounds every whitebaiter and their net. Keep your net out of this zone and life is pleasant. Place your net inside it and tolerance will be replaced by scowls, muttering, sabotage or random violence.
The size of the buffer zone increases with the apparent cantankerousness of the whitebaiter. If the whitebaiter is a middle-aged lady who smells of scones, the zone may be just a few metres wide. If the whitebaiter is a wizened old man with a bull-mastiff gnawing on what appears to be a human thigh-bone, it may extend over the horizon.
Our hosts gave us nets and buckets. They also gave us equipment made out of plastic bottles, broom handles and tyre tubes. Some of this we tied around our waists and the rest we waved about in a vaguely ritualistic fashion hoping that this might help. It didn't.
There are many ways to whitebait. You can stand in the surf at the river-mouth and hope that something will blunder into your net before you get swept out to sea.
You can lay a whiteboard down on the riverbed, wait for whitebait to swim over it, and try and catch them in your jelly shoes.
Or you can place your net beside a riverbank and fall asleep in the long grass, while Benny eats your chocolate biscuits.
We tried all of these techniques with little luck. Fortunately, whitebait are difficult to see. Even if you are not catching any you can pretend that you are. All you have to do is pick up your net, inspect it, scoop out a fistful of imaginary whitebait and triumphantly deposit them into your bucket. Chances are that nobody will suspect your fraud.
We did this several times and although it made us feel better, it didn't greatly improve our catch. After dawdling the day away on a stream edge, my wife and I were cold, wet and hungry. We cursed our togs and jelly shoes and dreamed of thermal underwear.
But it was all worthwhile. As we trudged back to the bach, our bucket held 12 freshly caught whitebait - just enough, perhaps, for a quarter of a freshly made fritter.
* The whitebaiting season finishes in most parts of New Zealand at the end of this month, except for the west of the South Island where it closed on November 14.
