This was going to go to a magazine but the pictures just aren't high enough res. All we had was our cell phones but I wrote most of the article when I was bored down there anyways. I figured I'd Pass it along to others who might enjoy it.
Pics to follow in posts below
Christmas Day most people spend lounging around the house with relatives, enjoying a big Christmas dinner and opening gifts. Me? I spent Christmas day desperately trying to finish packing my gear and make it to LAX on time to catch a flight that would take me to Auckland via Fiji.
When I arrived 26 hours later in Auckland my grandmother was waiting for me and I somehow managed to cram all my gear into her tiny little sedan, after a few days getting my bearings I hopped on a ferry to Waiheke island to stay with some friends of my cousin for New Years. When I arrived at the house and looked over the cliff I could see clear water and what even looked like some pinnacles off a quarter mile or so up the island. I asked my new friend’s mother if she ever saw any kingfish out at the pinnacles. Her response “oh yeah I run into kingfish every now and then when I snorkel out there”.
Pumped to finally be getting a dive in I trekked down the steep windy track to the beach, tossed my stuff in a kayak and headed out to “the needles”. After looking around shallow for snapper for a while I decided to head up current and off the structure to see if I could get lucky with a kingy. I dove my way out to where the structure completely ended and faded into sand, at about 45’. On my second drop at the edge I was coming back up from the bottom when I got schooled. I get total tunnel vision on the closest fish to me and take my shot with my 90. Blam, fish rolls over dead and as I break the surface I have a small school of kingies circling my fins, some of which look over 40lbs. I can’t be too mad at myself though, first hour in the water and I’ve already stoned a kingfish? The trip is already starting to look like it’s going to be a good one. I spent another hour doing drops on the spot and getting buzzed by kingfish in the same size class I had already shot. On my way back to the kayak I did one final drop and managed to pull a cray out of a hole. Climbing up the track back to the house in full gear with a fish was one hell of a workout but was oh so worth it.
New Year’s eve I teamed up with a tank diver to go grab some scallops. The scallop beds he dives sit in about 60’ of water, I think I had only managed to grab half of my limit freediving for them by the time he had collected limits for the boat in about 10 minutes on a tank. These scallops are a lot different from the ones we get in California, they don’t attach themselves to the rocks and can actual squirt away from you to some extent. That being said they aren’t exactly a challenge to hunt but are some of the tastiest things the waters of New Zealand has to offer.
That night we BBQ’d garlic butter scallops on the half shell and decimated an entire kingfish. As the ball dropped I took a sip of my Mexican beer then got nearly leveled by two of my new friends who gave me a fat kiss on the cheek. They laughed and said “bet you didn’t think your first kisses of the year would be from two dudes did you?!?!” (no homo)
2012 finished strong and I was set to pick up Tyler from the airport in a few days and really the kick fish killing into high gear.
Tyler arrived early in the morning a few days after New Year’s. From the airport we headed back to my grandmother’s house to pack the car up then we headed north up the Bay of Islands. The first day we arrived all of the hostels were totally booked up, not too stoked on sleeping in the car we hit up the store for some beer and watched the sunset.
Here’s where things got interesting, according to some of my kiwi friends legend has it there’s a Mori women up in that area with a thing for younger guys. So we’re propped up on this wall drinking when this lady shows up and starts chatting us up, telling us about Mori history and all these cultural stuff. She keeps feeding us these cans of bourbon and cola the entire time. It gets dark and we are getting drunk, for some reason we hit up the store again and buy some more booze. We all walk over to the only bar in town that was going good named the “Pipi patch” (pronounced peepee). In the end she got one of us while the other got to stay in the bays nicest hotel for the night.
So after an absolute train wreck of a night (for one) we drove over to Russel, pumped up our dingy and finally got in the water. Pretty clean water greeted us and after kicking around for a bit Tyler had managed to shoot his first kingfish of the trip, I had spent the entire day trying to snoop out some snapper, the name the kiwis have given to the art of stalking snapper and came up with a stringer of pan sized fish.
The next day we had a managed to get ourselves onto Andy’s boat to have ourselves a go at diving at some of the inner islands in the bay. We loaded up early and Me, Tyler, and 4 other divers were off in the 23’ aluminum center consol. We started the day by dropping off divers at different points on different islands to give everyone plenty of ground to cover in hopes of snooping up some snapper. When it was my turn to get in the water I did my best to emulate the things I had been told about how to properly snoop out these incredibly wary fish, move slowly, never make any noise, and always come over the top of objects with just your eyes to check for fish. After the first half of an hour I had seen nothing when a kingfish swam past me, I blew out my air sunk and gave my band a strum. Sure enough the fish made a turn and came back close enough to stone him with the 90. Happy that I had gotten a kingy I spent another hour snooping my ass off for not even the sight of a snapper. When the boat came to pick me up Andy’s son had shot himself a very nice fish up in the shallows on one of the other islands, about 24 pounds when we weighed it at the end of the day, an absolute monster that the pic does no justice to.
After spending the morning snooping we headed out to an island that never quite made it to the surface, walls of blue maomao and kahawai greeted us as we entered the water. I spent the dive enjoying exploring the high spot and enjoying the conditions, I ran into one school kingfish but decided to spare them as I already had one in the box. Meanwhile Tyler had managed to shoot himself a kingy before we called it a day and headed for the barn.
The next day we drove north, hopped in the little dingy and putted for about 45 minutes till we made it to an island. Diving whatever island it was, was great, clear water and lively. Determined to try and snoop up some snapper I made my way out slowly to a high spot that broke the surface, I spied what appeared to be a large dropoff in the distance so I breathed up, made a dive and made my approach. As my eyes cleared the top of the reef I spotted a large shape mulling around at the bottom of the ledge, I looked away quickly, keeping the fish in my peripheral while slowly bringing the gun out from behind me. Gun extended I looked back to the fish, lined up my shot and watched as he locked eyes with me but it was too late and after a short fight I held what would be my second biggest snapper of the trip in my hands. Absolutely stoked I slid the fish onto my float line, reloaded, and started back to the boat. Moving slowly I came up to what looked like the top of an old lava vent, Luckily the sun was at my back and the big snapper sitting in the tube couldn’t see me. I took a quick instinctive shot and stoned the fish, to my surprise another, much bigger fish exploded out of the grass bordering the hole. Absolutely stoked on my two big fish I swam back to the boat and we ended up calling it a day soon after.
The next morning we were back in pahia loading back up onto Andy’s boat for a run out to Cape Brett and the hole in the rock. After a stunning boat ride through the islands of the bay we made it out just past Cape Brett to the hole in the rock to try for some better grade kingfish. The spot is notorious for insane current and Andy tells us that sometimes you even have to climb on top of your float and swim freestyle in order to make it back to the boat. The spot is just a sheer rock face that comes up from about 100ft and keeps going after clearing the surface. Getting in the water the current was ripping like crazy, apparently what is considered normal for the spot. My routine was make a drop down to about 70-75 where the fish were supposed to be hanging out, get pushed a few hundred feet down current then hug the wall to escape the majority of the current and beat back into the current and do it all again. For all the effort I saw zero kingies. The boat ended up with a bunch of trevally and a few pink maomao aka “widowmakers” due to how the fish like to let you keep chasing them down into oblivion for a shot.
When pulling the hook I slipped and absolutely ate crap, falling halfway into the anchor locker and getting put almost completely out of commission for the day. That was painful, learned a lesson on where not to stand while pulling Andy’s anchor however. At the next high spot just off the Cape the guys got in and started seeing some good fish and it wasn’t long before Tyler and one of the other divers shot themselves nice 40lb class kingies. I tried to suck it up and get in on the action but my run in with the anchor locker was killing my breath hold and my diving was sucking. Meanwhile Tyler bagged himself another nice fish and at the end of the day even let me hold it for the group picture. On our way back in we stopped at a spot to dive for some scallops and after finding the beds the group made quick work of grabbing limits.
Saying goodbye to Pahia we traveled back to Auckland for a night or two of shenanigans and womanizing. We then headed north again about and hour and a half to a random point we thought looked good from the satellites. When we got to wherever we wound up that night we were pretty lost and passed out in the car. The next morning we woke up to find that we were in the right place but the park ranger was not happy about us breaking the rule of no sleeping inside cars in the park. After Tyler attempted to nap on the beach with me not allowing it to happen we geared up and motored for almost an hour to get to the first spot which turned out to be lifeless. We pushed on and eventually found an area with a couple fish and Tyler managed to shoot a pair of nice snapper for the day.
With our fish and gear we loaded up and drove north looking to find some grub. We came across a small rugby club with a sign that read “takeaways” so we drove down to the clubhouse and Tyler ran in to see if they were still serving food. This stop for food ended up leading to vastly improving our trip as Tyler came back and said they would cook up our fish for free if they could have the leftovers and the carcasses for soup, not only that but one of the bar patrons told us that we were welcome to use his spare bedroom for free and told us that the fishing out of the port a kilometer down the road was quite good.
Stoked to have free accommodation we all had some real NZ fish and chips and followed our host Kelly back to his house. The “lock” to their front door was a rock that you prop up behind the door and the house only had like 3 working light bulbs, we got absolutely demolished by mosquitos all night long but Kelly and his family were awesome hosts and I plan on staying with em again the next time I go down.
We got up the next morning, drove down to the local wharf, got suited up and charged north up the coast. We stopped at a point that looked decent and scoured the inside for fish. I ended up shooting a squid which I thought was pretty cool. After seeing almost nothing on the inside I decided to swim out of the point in hoped of finding some new habitat. After a swim out of the main headlands I hit the jackpot, a series of pinnacles happened to come into my view. I made drops doing long aspettos on the edges of the pinnacles for about an hour, after seeing nothing I finally gave into my urges and pulled the trigger on a butterfish. As I slowly kicked to the surface pulling the fish in, as if on cue a big school of kingies with a few fish in the 50lb range came into view, followed me up from the bottom, then proceeded to swim circles around me just long enough for me to remove the butterfish and almost finish reloading.
With renewed focus I pushed out off the pinnacles I had been diving and swam further out, here I found another pin that happened to be a full 20ft deeper to the top. I set up on the structure and started back to my aspetto’s. On the third or fourth dive as I was halfway buried in the weeds strumming my bands I slowly looked to my right scanning for fish, then slowly scanned back all the way to my left where I came face to face with a big bronze whaler charging me at mach 5. I just had enough time to position the gun in between the both of us when he ran into the spear tip then took off, now in California we hardly ever see sharks, let alone interact with them so when this happened I almost shit my suit. Heart going a million miles an hour I let go of the rock and slowly kicked back to the surface, then slowly made my way in the direction of the boat with my head on a swivel like it had never been on a swivel before. When I finally made it to the boat I made on hell of an ungraceful exit and yelled to Tyler that there was a shark. After a small pep talk we teamed up and started diving the first pinnacle I had seen fish on earlier together. Sure enough the shark found us again and Tyler got buzzed sitting on the pinnacle the same way I had, now that we were expecting it we didn’t tuck tail and run back to the boat. Instead we kept making our drops and we started seeing fish. It wasn’t long before we each had shot a kingie and called it a day.