Net Fishing in Cook Strait: 1910

At half-past four on a cold, clear summer’s morning, the fishing launch swings away- from her moorings, the engine begins to beat, the exhaust choking and coughing from the pipe that is just awash, and sometimes dips under water as the little vessel rolls gently. She turns obediently, and heads for the narrow passage between the island and the mainland reef. The sky to the eastward is bright with the lights that live between the dawn and the sunrise—soft, beautiful tints and clear colours that no brush can every wholly catch—but as we breast the long swells there is no sign of the sun over the bluffs of Pencarrow. The destination is Terawhiti, where a number of fishermen are encamped, two of this boat’s crew having gone out there last night, with boats and nets. Sinclair Head is outlined clearly against the sky, the surf fretting over the outlying rocks shows white in the morning light. 

Presently, half a mile offshore, the engine is stopped. The boat is rowing out to us. When it sweeps alongside the fish that it carries are transformed to the launch. An animated conversation in Italian goes on. It appears that a huge blackfish, a mammal of the whale variety, has been breaking the nets and feeding upon the captured fish. There is despair in the hearts of the fishermen, for they cannot shoot or net the marauder. With a shrug of the shoulders, the head fisherman sets his engine going, and the launch moves away to try for cod and other fish with lines. 

The boat returns to the nets, which were set and cleared and re-set in the dark of the morning, and must now be taken up again. The men are rowing with long sweeps, standing up, and their rowing differs from the rowing of the oarsmen or the watermen or the sailor. The stroke is only half a stroke in length, all the power being imparted in a hard jerk at the end of the stroke. The oars and rudders, too; in a strong side-wind, when the wind, blowing the stern of the boat, makes a bow turn into the wind’s eye. The man on the windward side gives only a quick, heart-breaking jerk, with the handle of the oar well forward, as the old-time Phoenicians steered. His work is to hold the boat on her course, his comrade propels her.

The first net to be taken in is a warehou net, 200 ft. long. Two buoys of cork mark its seaward extremity. The corks of the net are thirty feet beneath the surface and its lower side is anchored with heavy stones, for the warehou swims deep and some of them run up to twenty pounds in weight. Each man takes a line, one connected with the corks and one with the weights of the net. The resistance of the net suggests that it is immovable; presently, however, it begins to come in. First a huge stone, twice the size of a man’s head, then the meshes of the net, all slime with weed. The net is piled in a heap in the boat as it comes in. The first captive is a six-foot shark, half-drowned by long detention in the racing tide. It is flung into the boat by request, the fishermen would have tossed it overboard again. Next come some clean-picked skeletons, showing the depredations of the shark, and then some small warehou. At about every ten feet a huge boulder-anchor has to be taken aboard. The haul is not a good one. There are too many thieves about; wide rents in the meshes show where the blackfish has been. “ Blackfish no good.” The fisherman’s remark finds answer in a long-drawn “Whe-e-e-w,” like wind in an attic. 

"THERE HE IS.” 

A pale cloud of vapour floats above a big black fin that is like a spoke on the rim of an enormous black wheel revolving porpoise-like in the sea. There is a gleam of white, a ribbon circling the girth of the beast behind the fin, as it dives again, close to some nets. ‘‘Every time go down, take-a de fish. Eat a hundred easy’.” “Worse than sharks?” we ask. Yes, he is worse than sharks, for the shark often gets netted, while the blackfish goes right through. All the net is in the boat, and the fish are flapping on the bottom of the boat. It is time to set the net again.

A stone anchor goes over, then some net, then a stone anchor, one man paddling slowly. The corks float bravely awhile, but one by one they succumb like drowning men. They dip and bob and disappear, to quiver and strain at their tethers, thirty feet below. In shallower water, where seaweed flourishes and rocks adjoin, the moki and butterfish nets are set. Skirting along the line of corks through the clear water, the imprisoned fish may be seen, while many more captives are hidden in the seaweed. When, by slow and arduous work, all have been cleared and re set, the boat is beached, and an adjournment is made to the whare for tea and bread and cheese. The whare is made of a medley of material. “We make,” a fisherman says. And it is a creditable performance. Galvanised iron, old boxes and driftwood all find a sphere of usefulness here. Inside, there is a wide fireplace, and at the opposite end wide double bunks, four in number, fill nearly half the space. Here they live, these toilers of the sea, rent free and comfortable enough, but for the chilliness that bites through galvanised iron in the hours before the dawn, and the isolation. From elderberry wood a man is skilfully shaping a netting-needle, and with a similar needle another is mending a net. With the net the fish are caught, and the price of the fish pays for all the labour — adequately or otherwise, as the gods decide—but the skill is there all the time, and the endless toil. In the afternoon, the launch returns. The boat rows out to her, and another lot of fish goes into the cool hold. The coast here is too rocky 'or the drag-net to be used. 

Sightseers are beginning to gather, and they retard the workers in their eagerness to see the haul. In the shallow of the beach’s fringe of foam the ceaseless beating of fins sounds like steady rain falling on the water. The crowd has drawn so close that the men have to ask them to stand back, and avoid trampling the nets. But the civil requests are unheeded. Now one, now another, dives in and seizes a fish; the small ones they may take, but the large ones mean silver to the fisherman. So they fold the net over the fish and hurry to bring bags. In the hand of one in the crowd a knife is held. It flashes swiftly, some fine fish drop into a bag, and someone laughs.

Out at Terawhiti, the blackfish, one of the stupidest of God’s creatures, bites at the fish in the nets and tears the nets to ribbons.