Northland fisherman hauls in a scary prize

Wilf Simpson with the snake eel he caught at Ninety Mile Beach. Photo / Supplied

Wilf Simpson has caught a lot of fish in his 80-plus years, but a New Year fishing spell on Ninety Mile Beach left him feeling a bit snakey about his favourite recreation.

Hauling in his torpedo longline at Lone Pine, south of Waipapakauri Ramp, Mr Simpson was amazed to find what looked like a sea snake on the last hook.

It was a long, skinny creature just shy of 2m-long but narrow enough in girth for a small hand to fit around it, and with a couple of rows of nasty, spiky sharp teeth.

Mr Simpson figured it could be one of the poisonous yellow-bellied sea snakes that occasionally wash up on Northland beaches after drifting too far south in a sub-tropical Pacific current.

He took his strange and fortunately dead-on-arrival catch home, with the seven snapper he'd also hooked.

After inquiries made by Northland's Northern Advocate newspaper, Mr Simpson's catch was identified as a giant snake eel, also called a serpent eel.

Senior aquarist at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World, Joseph Woolcott, who identified the creature from the newspaper's photo, said they lived in sandy coastal areas, either off-shore or near rocks. Young individuals sometimes live in estuaries.

Snake eels are also found in Australia, South Africa and Europe.

They spend most of the time completely buried in the bottom sediments with only the eyes and part of the mouth showing, waiting to lunge at a passing meal.

They are able to burrow very rapidly through the sand and like other eels can move just as fast backwards as forwards.

"One of our reference books states that longline fishermen occasionally find these eels on their hooks and mistake them for sea snakes, hence the common name for the species," Mr Woolcott said.

They can grow to 2.5m long, but never more than 5cm in diameter, and their most distinctive feature is the prominently blotched or spotted body colouration.

In early 2009 commercial fisherman Bill Milich, of Te Kopuru, found a large snake eel washed up about 12km south of Glinks Gully. The fish was very much alive when he found it and it tried to bite him.

"I decided to leave it alone for a while."

Mr Milich said he returned later and took the dead eel back to Dargaville "to show it off to the grandkids".