Intercontinental torpedo to Australia??
Torpedo Australia?... Well... sort of!! - With the first bit of good weather for while, and with my outdoor gills starving for a breath, the call was made to finish up at work early on friday and 4 wheel drive up the West Coast of Auckland, NZ, for a spot of Torpedo Fishing, or “ Konitki fishing” on the Westcoast.
Muriwai beach is located roughly 35kms from Aucklands CBD and is an iron sand strip of beach, roughly 50kms long.
4wd-ing, horse riding, fishing and ocean swimming are among a few of the activities around Muriwai that people enjoy (here's me up behind the muriwai sand dunes in my 4wd last year)
Muriwai's also home to a huge Australasian gannet colony
We drove around 25 minutes from the beach entrance to our spot, before baiting up the 25 longline hooks needed to catch a good amount of Snapper or Gurnard ( they're the target species and great on the table !! )
The baited 25 hooks are set at around 1500 - 2000m ( 1 – 1.2 miles ) out from the beach in around 30 -35 metres (100ft) of water, we mostly use squid for bait.
Kontiki fishing is done in a “longline” style, where a central line of hooks is dragged out by a battery operated torpedo for around 30 minutes and weighted down by large sinkers.
At the end of the “soak” time, the line is hauled in via a large winch which takes another 30 minutes be bought back in.
The winch in allows for some serious contemplation time to think, and also a few carefully selected cold beverages ;)
We get a lot of sharks on the westcoast of the north island - these small sharks were released.
Here's a Snapper and Gurnard we caught.
Muriwai is a black sand beach ( iron sand ) with large sand dunes, the iron comes from NZ’s many volcanoes, and access to the beach is via 4wd only.
After about 3 hours and a few beers later, we finally got the haul in and were greeted by 8 snapper and 4 gurnard! The kids ate well that night :)
All in all a great afternoon on one of the north islands most well used beaches, and we even came home with dinner!
Roll on our Kiwi summer
Wow, catching sharks is always tricky, even when they are small, nice catch!
Thanks, we get a few on this beach
That's some awesome photography. The one of the gannet nose diving. ... epic did you take that one?
Overall fun looking adventure :)
And Your 4wd looks impossibly stuck lol
Thanks Chelsea, Muriwai i a great spot where I spend a bit of my time. Yup, my 4wd took about an hour to be hauled out from that position!!!
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