Anthony McNamara leaves the chalkstreams of the UK behind and heads to New Zealand
I moved to Waiheke just over four years ago, it’s a sizeable rock just off New Zealand’s north east coast in the Hauraki Gulf. It’s a short ferry ride from downtown Auckland and is known as a bit of a playground thanks to all the vineyards here. Work brought me here but a new wife and an ocean full of fish is what kept me here.
It would have taken something special for me to turn my back on the chalkstreams of south west of England where I had been living but after selling a business there, I found that saltwater had seeped into my bones and had begun to erode my foundations. Salt is known to do that.
Throwing flies at the picky bass of the Dorset/Devon border can be the dictionary definition of infuriating but occasionally it is just rewarding enough to feel the start of something significant happening to your habits and with a family farm on the west coast of Ireland, it’s wasn't hard to push those habits along a little with the help of a few coalfish and white trout. Fluke catches became more regular and half baked theories became rules. The learning curve was steep but thankfully it had been undertaken in complete solitude. The demolition of rod tips with poorly cast clousers is no spectator sport but unfortunately, the removal of uncrimped flies from ones shoulder is always best done with expert help.
By the time I pitched up in the South Pacific I already had half an eye on the saltwater fly potential that would surround me. “I’ll get the odd cast” I thought, maybe there’ll be a couple of weeks hot action in the summer like the bass back home but if not, it’ll be easy enough to head south to Taupo or the Tongariro and bother the trout. The coral atolls, flats and bonefish of the Cook Islands wouldn't be that far away either, but just for special occasions of course.
That first weekend exploring my new island I saw the wake of what I assumed to be a small shark, steaming along the shore in just two feet of water. The bow wave suggested a sizeable head and the comfort in shallow water could only be from an apex predator, or so I thought. Experience has since told me that it would have been a very large kingfish, probably escorting a ray, ready to pounce on any baby flounder that it might flush. The next morning the same sandy bay erupted like a jacuzzi with a gigantic shoal of kahawai (Arripis trutta) attacking baitfish caught on the rising tide and later I heard that there was a guy who actually ran a salt fly charter boat on the island.
It appeared that I had found myself washed up on the shores of a salt fly fishers Disneyland.
Matt von Sturmer, guide and owner of Salt Fly Fish Waiheke has year round sport with kingfish, kahawai, trevally and winter snapper but very occasionally something exceptional happens like it did this summer.
The workups of kahawai and kingfish had been consistent for a period of weeks. The dependability of such sport can either make you complacent or experimental so as Matt and I pushed off from Matiatia harbour, bouncing over the wake of another ferry dropping its cargo of vineyard tourists, we had a toss of the coin moment. We could head south to Crusoe Rock with its dependable kahawai and the shallow bays of Whakanewha and Awaawaroa where a cruising kingfish would not be hard to spot or we could head north, past Oneroa, Enclosure Bay and Palm Beach. Around Thompson’s Point we would find the wide expanse of Onetangi Beach open up in front us.
We’d had days of casting at the revved up kingfish under the channel markers and I’d eaten kahawai for supper every night for over a week so we thought we’d go looking for something a little more challenging. Onetangi it would be.
The day before I’d had a walk along this beach and watched as the terns hovered over baitfish, picking off the injured and confused anchovy that had been corralled tight to the shore. One wave dumped hundreds on the beach and as the strand hopped and jumped with anticipation of the next wave that might return them to the sea, I pounced on one to make a mental note of size and colour. These anchovies, swarm into the Hauraki Gulf in huge numbers once the water begins to warm and everything that swims or flies surely follows. These tiny fish are the coal in the engine of the Gulf’s ecosystem, the biomass that underpins the fecundity which causes the spectacle of a boiling sea and diving birds as far as the horizon.
Some years, a rumour also makes its way into the gulf, to smash and grab at the tightly packed bait balls after allowing the more everyday fish to do the hard work of harrying and harassing them into concentrated shoals that appear like underwater storm clouds where tides and currents converge. Rumours can find a particularly strong foothold in anglers.
Something made us pause far off shore that day. We would normally have steamed towards the sheltered westerly end of the bay. There were fish all around us, the whole bay was frothing but we were looking for something very particular. We were looking for that rumour, the same rumour that was bandied about every summer by anyone that had fished the waters around the island for long enough.
Was that one? I wasn't sure. Neither was Matt. I’d only caught it out of the corner of my eye but something wasn't right about that patch of water over there. Even the birds, the petrels and gannets and gulls, looked confused. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for but every once in a while a work-up would look ever so slightly different, it would have an extra degree of energy to it as if the frenzy had been turned up to full volume. Had we not been out on the water every day for a fortnight we might easily have missed it and gone in closer, nearer to the structures of reef and cliff where the sport can be desperate but rumours have to become fact or fiction at some point in their lives and it might as well have been us that did the leg work on it.
One of the lads at work knew a guy who had seen a chap out on a kayak last week. He’d been out with a soft bait rod, trolling poppers for kingfish around the edge of the work ups when something took him right down to his backing before he had time to swap his paddle for the rod. It had spun his kayak right around before the line whined in the wind and then parted with a crack. He’d made his way back to shore fast, convinced that it had been a mako but it hadn’t been. It had to have been a tuna, it just had to be. Perhaps this year they’re actually here. A few marlin had been taken off the Coromandel peninsular recently. Just over on the horizon there. Marlin don't feed on kahawai, they chase tuna and here on the east coast that would mean skipjacks.
The kahawai that we’d been catching all summer are a bass sized fish averaging about three kilos. They’re frenzied, large shoal feeders that slash chaotically and messily, chomping at the surface like a fat carp in a private pond or a careless trout drunk on easy mayfly and when they feed high up in the warm summer water they are unmistakable. They’re usually accompanied by a jittery flock of terns and the occasional large boil of a striking kingfish.
Skipjack tuna are different to everything else in the gulf, they’re all speed and no turning circle. Galloping waves of sickle shaped fins and silent torpedo shapes break the water with little or no sound; it’s blink and you’ll miss it action in the middle of all the orchestrated chaos. They maraud through the boiling mess of fish and birds taking everything by surprise, anglers on kayaks included. The black petrels, half floating, half swimming along on the edge of it all, heads underwater looking for a morsel, look genuinely confused by the tuna. There’s a sense of hysteria to it all like a dog in the school playground or a bat in the living room.
Once we had noticed the difference between the two sorts of work-up, we wasted hours speeding from one patch of ruffled water on the bay to another, arriving just as the action ended, heads on swivels to see which way they’d gone. They were ghosts. From the shore we must have looked like we were searching for something we’d lost. Our minds probably.
It was becoming frustrating, we’d been out all day and I hadn’t even so much as had a sniff of a fish among all the commotion. Alone I might have retreated to the comfort of picking off easy kahawai but Matt had some serious anglers booked on the boat the following week, big guns from Australia and the US and he was keen to show the potential of the fishery around us so we dug our heels in and persevered with the puzzle in front of us.
There was more than a little pointing and theorising and frankly, making stuff up, when suddenly, they were coming right at us, the water all around the boat heaved with the push of hundreds of purple and blue backs. We managed three or four casts each but our clousers and wig hair bait fish flies were being ignored. I shook my head in disbelief. Shallow or deep it made no difference but at least we were now certain that we could at least get near them in this ocean that was becoming bigger and more lonely with the passing of every minute.
During a moment's reflection on what had just happened, I looked inshore and remembered my walk on the beach the day before. The anchovies dumped on the sand had been the length of my little finger, white bellied and dark backed with a huge great eye. I knew that somewhere I had something that would match them exactly. A gummy minnow. I’d bought a couple out of curiosity weeks ago but I’d been uncomfortable blurring the lines between flies and softbaits like that so they were still rattling around in an odds and sods box somewhere at the bottom of my bag. My confidence began to gallop like the tuna.
We waited in a likely spot, on the edge of an active boil up until they arrived again, they seemed to prefer attacking into the setting sun. With that worked out we could set ourselves up mid on, cast long and strip fast. Casting across a shoal didn't seem to work, they were so fast that anything on an acute angle to their own path would either not be seen or be well behind by the time it had registered.
I punched out the floating line in the general direction of the advancing fish and stood ready to go as soon as they were within twenty metres of the fly. Up on the casting platform, reel tucked under my armpit, I stripped faster than I could ever imagine needing to strip. It seemed preposterous to try to fool any fish with something moving so unnaturally fast but against all good reason, I had a take. A solid, everything seizing up, dead in the water take that stretched the nine weight line in the split second it took me to comprehend what the resistance actually meant and stop my stripping. The fish made two wide, full circle turns and then went deep, sounding the full twelve metre depth. For a moment I wondered whether I had managed to hook a heavy, lumbering kingfish but when the line began to head for the setting sun at a speed that no kingfish could sustain, I knew. I could feel the tail thrumming the line and in my head the sound of a ruler twanged on the edge of a desk played in time to the sensation in my rod. I nodded to Matt at the back of the boat and mouthed one simple, heavy, amazing, word. “Tuna”.
The reel hadn't ever made a sound like this before and surely the rod had to break with this sort of pressure. Mentally, I thanked the gods for the cast iron Sage warranty and the extra backing I had insisted on before a bonefish trip earlier in the year. Minutes, hours, it could have been days later, the skipjack was on the boat, flashing vivid purples and blues along its length, warm to the touch, it seemed alien.
The rumour was in my hands, the riddle unpicked. We would have weeks of this to look forward to and by god we had better make the most of it in case they're not in the mood to play like this next year.
Anthony fished with Matt von Sturmer. Please visit his website for more details http://www.saltflyfish.co.nz