The whitebait season is underway and runs until October 30.
My late grandfather was a seasoned whitebaiter and I remember seeing him in his shed leading up to whitebait season making repairs to his net.
That would be over 50 years ago, and I always remember him telling me he used to catch so much whitebait, that after sharing it around with friends, anything that started to spoil (not much room in the icebox in their fridge) he used to dig a trench and bury it.
After a few months of rotting in the ground, he would plant his tomato plants on top.
He grew the largest beefsteak tomatoes that I had ever seen!
When I was compiling a few of the old articles on whitebaiting, I felt deeply saddened to read article after article about people of all ages, men, women, and children, who had lost their lives while whitebaiting.
So, if you are whitebaiting this season, please be safe, whitebait with a friend and hopefully you will catch enough for a few fritters, tucked inside a couple of slices of bread - delicious!
The decrease of whitebait in Canterbury rivers was discussed by the Council of the North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society.
Mr E. F. Stead said efforts should be made to reinstate whitebait in the Avon and the Heathcote.
Whitebait could be obtained and liberated fairly well up in reaches.
Professor Blunt said it has been shown that the greater the quantity of polluting matter that was deposited in a stream, the less fish would go up it to spawn.
Whitebaiters at the mouth of the Kai Iwi Stream. Photo / Bevan Conley
Mr. Stead said, if whitebaiting was stopped and whitebait were liberated in the upper reaches, good results, he was convinced, would be obtained.
Professor Speight said very little was known about the whitebait’s habits.
There is probably only one other expedition which man sets forth which reveals his hopes so prominently in the preparations — collecting wild honey from bees of the bush.
In whitebaiting just as in honey collecting, a man sallies forth with at least two billies or jars.
His wife doesn’t think much of him if he takes less.
Every move he makes is charged with hope.
One Wanganui man was so fully imbued with prospects for a week-end whitebaiting effort that it worried him all through the night.
He was to meet a co-fisherman at 5 a.m. He got up at three, prepared the billies, three in number, looked to his nets and did all the sundry odd jobs necessary for an undertaking of the sort.
He and his friend went, they fished, they joked at first, they saw the sunrise, they heard the birds of spring singing — but the river was muddy.
At noon high hopes of the morn were like the green leaves Byron tells of in his poem on the Battle of Waterloo.
The trees along the river “waved above them green leaves, dewy with Nature’s tear-drops as they passed.”
They came home with two fish.
According to pre-arrangement they took half the spoils each and went to wives with tales of lost hope, of a muddy river and appetites that thought more of “good old ham and eggs than of whitebait anyway.”
They had their ham and eggs; one with the consoling thought that the death of whitebaiting hope was not like the demise of the sort which preceded a search for honey.
