Fishing: Cooler climes, bigger catch

It's winter fishing from now on - fewer but bigger fish.

Anglers need to change technique. Glen Eden mate Lee Wynyard noted this week that he'd started thinking like a fish in order to help work out where the snapper were - follow their food trail.

We were chasing the last of the summer kingfish in the outer Hauraki Gulf but the predicted 10 to 15 knot northeasterly turned out to be a 30 knot sou'easterly. We'd had trouble getting kahawai, eventually following the working birds to a surface school and jigging some up with small green/blue lures.

I'd been using a larger Zest jig below the school, bouncing it off the sandy bottom out from Rakino, with no strikes bar one small kahawai - it is amazing the size of prey a fish will attack relative to itself.

Stopped over our favourite kingie reef while baits were put out for trolling, I had a flash about the bottom to see what was there. We'd seen kingfish on the sounder. What else would risk a run from the shelter of the reef while those big predators were there?

Only a very big snapper too big for a kingfish to swallow and with it's own fearsome bite.

So I dropped the 30cm Zest down and it didn't even hit bottom. Wham! The way the fish ran I thought I had a small kingfish. But then it started giving the double nods of a snapper and, fishing 8kg line, I played him carefully trying to keep pressure on to bring him up and stop a run to the rocks but wary of busting off on what was clearly near the breaking strain. He came out of deep water and with swim bladder bloated could not be released.

Those big resident reef snapper crush shellfish after knocking them off the reef with their head, thus developing the classic bump, and are a deeper red colour, occasionally with dark brown vertical stripes to conceal them in drifting kelp beds. They love crustaceans and several contests have been won by wily anglers using cray tail bait - little fish don't have the jaw to get at it.

Weighed at Mt Eden Fisheries before going into the smokehouse it tipped the scales at 8.1kg, the biggest snapper I've taken from anywhere in the Gulf - bar the outer islands like Barrier and the Mokohinaus - in 40-odd years of fishing.

My biggest ever was 11.45kg on 6kg off the rocks south of Doubtless Bay, also in mid-May. It was a complete contrast to this week's catch, a "sandy" with no bump, a greyish colour to it to aid concealment on open seabed. It took the last half-piece of messy pilchard that I had, so bashed it had to be tied to the hook. Then it headed for its comfort zone, straight to sea. Had it gone left, right or down as a reef fish would have, it would have busted me off.

A fish of that size would probably not be less than 25 years old and could be as much as 55. National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research fisheries scientist Cameron Walsh ages around 3500 snapper every year using the ear bone or otolith. The oldest he's ever had was a 66-year-old snapper from Tasman Bay. Most really big snapper - over 11kg - come from the Bay of Plenty and most are between 35 and 45 years old. Hauraki Gulf snapper can be 10 and still under the minimum legal size of 27cm and weigh only half a kilo; off the west coast where food is more plentiful, snapper can grow to 10kg within 20 years.

Japanese-designed Zest jigs are shaped so as to flutter on the drop. They are longer, some diamond shaped. They are tied from the head rather than the tail and the hook is also on the head, so it runs up next to the body as the jig drops. Some have a "rudder" tail. They swim differently to the standard Kiwi jigs, lead poured into holes bored into an aluminium body at strategic places.

Some anglers fit a hook at each end and secure them around the mid-part of the jig's body with a rubber band - two chances of hook-up. We've caught kingies up to 20kg, ocean-going kahawai and lots of snapper with them.

Importer Chris Wong trolls the Japanese tackle shows annually and says they use a vastly different technique to that common here. Rods are short. The jigs are brought one lift and one wind off the bottom, then the action repeated so the jig works a yo-yo action over the bottom 10m or so as opposed to the fast wind-in on longer jellytip rods that is general practice here.

He out-fished baits to nail hapuku on a charter trip and has tested the product from the Wairarapa coast to the Three Kings. Wong wonders whether jigs work sometimes when bait won't purely out of annoyance. Our targets may not be feeding, may not be hungry but will go for a small fish dragged past their nose as a matter of food chain superiority, in the same way spawning trout will take a lure.

Through the colder months it is worth changing technique and trying different rigs, baits and colours and shapes of lures to vary what can often be hard fishing. On a charter with Lance Paniora on Smokin' Reels during the hard fishing before Christmas I used duck breast found buried in the freezer.

I caught the biggest snapper and was the only one to get a limit bag. And as an example of what snapper will eat, Far North fishing mate Des Rogers and I had a day south of Doubtless Bay where every fish we caught was filled with crickets, blown to sea by an offshore wind.

Shallow water can produce big fish in winter, straylining the best method with lots of berley drifted towards rocks and reefs. Light line encourages more hook-ups, even if it does mean more bust-offs. I don't use a trace or swivel, tying direct to the line of 8kg to 15kg depending on the bottom terrain, or threading the hook onto the loop of a double. Use as small a sinker as possible, or no sinker. Cut bait is often more effective than whole pilchard.

Matt Cowan, in charge of recreational fishing compliance for Mfish in the Auckland region, reports good levels of awareness of the rules and observance of them over the summer fishing season. More than 90 per cent of those stopped at boat ramps or boarded at sea were inside the fishing rules.

But wholesale plunder continues, some people caught with hundreds of cockles in excess of the daily limit of 50 and a Manukau man fined $2500 last week for possession of 750 mussels at Muriwai.

Mfish will have a stand at the Auckland Boat Show for the first time in years to demonstrate how it identifies and measures fish species.