Net gain

BY NAOMI ARNOLD

The siren song of the whitebait is once again calling crowds of hopefuls to rivers and streams across the countryside.

'It's not quite the right time of year for whitebait," says Geoff McCleely. In the bottle shop of Takaka's Junction Hotel he flips the calendar to October and shows us his annual three weeks' whitebaiting holiday, already booked.

"You're going out with Leon, eh? He was over there the other day and only got three ounces and a wet arse. It's better later in the season."

It could be true: but whitebaiters can be dissembling, cagey characters, as skittish and suspicious as the elusive fish themselves. And everyone has an opinion.

Sitting on the rocky bank of the Takaka River, Leon Couper confirms the rumour.

"I only got eight on the first day." But, of course, he could be lying.

He has an easy banter, the mark of a lifetime spent yarning. He describes his days on the river during the tempestuous whitebait season as a mix of camaraderie and one-upmanship.

"I won't tell them that I got a pound. You have to lie a wee bit. Everybody knows everybody and we all get out and have a talk about it and tell a lot of lies. None of us tells the truth, really."

Once a commercial fisherman, he now manages Golden Bay Motels with his wife, Helen. He's spent this morning on the golf course and has just motored us down the Takaka River to set up his net a few metres from the river's mouth. Now we're sitting on the bank watching the tide filter through it, waiting for whitebait.

"Usually the best time is three or four days after a storm, when the water's the colour it is now," he says. Clear, greenish, but as yet no sign of the little fish.

He slides a length of white-painted tin into the water in front of the net, so we can spy the fish swimming over it, a rough estimate of the catch.

Like most 'baiters, Mr Couper has been doing this as long as he can remember. "My mother used to push me down in the pram. The first thing my grandmother taught me was to stay still because one small movement will frighten them. They're unpredictable little fish.

"When I was five or six, I would take a net and a bucket and we would fill that and come home. We would go down there morning after morning and we would be the only ones there. But now they're getting caught every day, right through the season."

Lifetime whitebaiters will likely tell you the same nostalgic story of colonial days with empty riverbanks, a one-tonne haul, a year's salary earned in a few months. Mr Couper doesn't think anyone earns that much up here. But when you can net them, the reward is delicious.

He confides his secret ingredient for fritters that are full of whitebait flavour with no mucky, floury taste. "Use instant potato instead. But you've got to be careful how you do it. Not too much, because it swells up and takes all the moisture out let it sit and then slowly work it in."

Whether a few patties banged up in a battered pan or something posh and contemporary, the craving for this delicacy whips us into a patriotic foodie passion every spring. Auckland restaurant Molten does a whitebait-crusted southern snapper with cauliflower nuggets, candied tomatoes and a lemon butter sauce; Daniel Monopoli at Nelson's Boat Shed Cafe prefers simple, Italian-style, lightly dusted in flour, quickly sauteed in olive oil and served with bread and butter.

As happens every year, there have been reports of illegal poaching in West Coast rivers before the season officially opened on September 1. Hunger for whitebait in the main centres can see the tiny delicacy fetch top dollar. In Christchurch, Cascade Whitebait is selling new season's West Coast catch for about $100 a kilo, although heavy rain this week dampened the start of the season. Unfortunate Aucklanders craving an early taste of the South Island will have to pay $160 for a frozen kilo.

While Golden Bay isn't as commercial as the West Coast, high prices can lead to jealous protection of prime spots, and sometimes a bit of argy-bargy. "It's a good pastime, but come down when they're running and every man and his dog's here," says Mr Couper. "There's a few dudes who break the law at times and put a second net in. A few strong words, or arguments might break out."

Two women, once: "Of all things! And one ended up with a bleeding nose."

In the height of the season with a tide at three o'clock, people will have been down the river since 2am to grab their spot. He wouldn't bother with that, but admits his two-trap Southland sock net can irritate die-hard 'baiters. "Some of them get a bit annoyed because they think you catch everything if you go in front of them," he explains. "But on a day like today, a scoop net's very hard work because of the ripples on the water. It's long hours for stuff-all sometimes. You can waste a lot of time doing it."

He prefers using the sock net to a simpler scoop net and bucket, not least because once the fish are in the net they can't escape. On a warm day, whitebait dumped in a bucket can start turning white, cooking themselves too early. With a net parked in the river, they're kept fresh and alive right up to the last minute.

Rather than a single type of fish, whitebait are the young of five scale-less native species of the ancient order of galaxiidae. Inanga make up 90 per cent of the run, but whitebaiters may also catch the threatened baby giant kokopu and shortjaw kokopu, as well as koaro and banded kokopu, depending on the river.

Whitebait swim up our rivers from the sea every year to breed in the wetlands, only there's not many wetlands left: and perhaps not that many whitebait left soon, either. Nelson Conservation Department freshwater ecologist Martin Rutledge says declining habitat, water quality and quantity and wetland drainage are major issues for the survival of future generations of whitebait.

"Management of stock around inanga spawning grounds is really important. If you've got stock in those areas during the spawning periods there's potential trampling of the eggs and changes to the habitat. Inanga are quite an unusual fish, laying their eggs on land when the water's really high they're actually depositing their eggs in the terrestrial environment and waiting for them to be submerged in the next spring tide."

Mr Rutledge says DOC is trying to make farmers aware of the habitats and habits of the fish and provide options such as fencing. Natural predators such as mice, crabs and little eels also eat whitebait eggs.

"When inanga spawn the water turns white from the milt. They used to be called cow fish because the water turned milky white from the spawning. You can still see that these days," says DOC ecologist Martin Rutledge.

And then there's whitebaiting as murder. It's as bad as killing kakapo chicks for dinner, wrote a recent complainant to The Nelson Mail. Fishing pressure was the target of a 2001 Niwa study on North Taranaki's Mokau River, which used dye-stained whitebait to determine the number of fish that escaped past anglers' nets. It showed that whitebaiters caught a relatively small proportion of the run: results suggested less than 30 per cent.

Mr Couper doesn't hold much truck with the decline of native fish species being laid squarely on the shoulders of whitebaiters. "There's a lot of other factors around it as well. They have to go through a fair bit of other stuff before they even get to us. All the swamps that have been drained over the years. A lot of my spots where I used to duck shoot have gone. I know for a fact that the whitebait used to breed there."

"Sock nets should be banned!" calls a voice. A fellow whitebaiter, Simon Page they call him Quiver is striding over the bank toward us, come to have a go. "You can write that," he throws at me. He's swigging from a 1.5-litre bottle of Sparkling Lemon, one buckle of his khaki waders unclasped and dangling down his back. He stuffs the bottle down his front and glares at the offending net. "They shouldn't be allowed. I like to give the whitebait a chance."

"It's under six metres, it's within the rules," says Mr Couper mildly.

"Sock nets are for old men and old women. You can sit up there and have a sleep while doing it."

Mr Couper, who admitted a few hours ago to enjoying a "wee kip" in his boat on a quiet, sunny day, harrumphs slightly.

"That's not what I call fishing," Quiver continues.

"You'll get over it."

Quiver has also been coming down here most of his life. "Since I was old enough to sneak away from school."

Sock nets, with their guaranteed catch, are cheating; he favours a simpler scoop net. It's more honest, he thinks.

But it hardly makes a difference today. He reckons it's not looking promising. It's too early in the season here in Golden Bay, which starts a week before the West Coast and finishes a week later.

"We start a fortnight too early here. Some years down the Coast they're that big" he stretches out a thumb and index finger "you damn near need to gut 'em. I don't think you'll get a feed today. I might go pig hunting."

He tramps off through the scrub with a parting shot, a fist shaking in the air: "Ban the bloody sock net!"

About 3pm, the gannets start diving in the river mouth. Mr Couper says they're not actually spearing the fish, not like you'd think. "They concuss them with a hit from their beaks and then snap them up while they're stunned," he says. The birds circle above the water before streaking straight down, disappearing for a second and then popping up again like corks. Gannets go blind from the constant pressure of the diving, eventually.

"A gannet'll usually die of blindness before anything else. They starve to death.

"I wonder what they're going for," he muses, but his mind turns back to the catch. "Sometimes when the birds start working like that it can be a good sign."

Three-thirty. A cold wind is whipping rain across the bay. A rainbow starts to beam in the sky, stretching from somewhere in the Cobb Valley to where the spit of sand meets the sea, where flocks of gannets, terns, seagulls and oyster-catchers tuck themselves into the wind. Almost time to take the net in and check the catch.

He unshackles the screens, unpegs the net and hauls it in, pausing to point out the didymo smearing his screens. "Horrible stuff."

Untying the end of the net, he shakes out a couple of cups of wriggling whitebait into his orange bucket. A few silvery pilchard glitter in the bottom. "Ah, that's what the gannets would've been diving for," says Mr Couper. He throws out the cockabullies, sea lice anything that doesn't belong in his writhing, glimmering catch.

From further up the river, another figure appears and lopes across the sand bank towards us.

"Gets everyone excited. As soon as the bucket comes out, they'll come over to see what you've got," he says as a man arrives and peers at the fish swilling around the bottom of the bucket.

"Not much then," the visitor grins, satisfied.

At the end of the day, heading back up the Takaka, Mr Couper nods at the Waitapu Bridge crossing the river as we motor underneath it.

"Last season, people got that annoyed about the sock nets they hung a big sign off the Waitap Bridge that said `Sock Nets Suck'."

He seems unperturbed. The whitebaiters lining the shore as we chug past are placid, lifting a hand in lazy acknowledgement. Perhaps they're muttering under their breath.

"Not so much aggro this year then?" I ask.

"No. Not yet, anyway."

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