FISHING
YOU DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY
YOU ARE, SON...
BY CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS
A nice trout on a nice
day in a beautiful
setting... Totally
alien to Amy. China
doesn't have this
"lifestyle option"
T
his summer I have been faced with a few ideas about
fishing that are kinda opposite to those I used to have,
namely that fishing is all about landing huge fish, and
the hugerer the better.
Of course this is probably a result of me now being such
a hopeless wimp I only go out to sea on the glassiest of
glassy days and a reluctance to charge over the horizon to the
most distant reefs I can find – a mixture of wimpiness and
economics I guess.
In my defense, I will say that this summer has just been
a huge three-month burst of friggin' easterlies, so it has not
exactly been the world's nicest weather for exploring the
oceans blue.
The trips I have done however have been largely in order
to take a mixed bag of overseas visitors out to show them
around a bit. One of these, Amy, has been out trout fishing
with me on the local hydro lake, and has developed a passion
for fishing that is amazing for this jaded old salt to behold.
When she catches a fish, man, she screams like a banshee.
My right ear is still ringing in fact. It would appear that
Chinese anglerettes do not do the Kiwi bloke "good on yer'
mate" quiet congratulations thing. Oh no. They instead tend
to stand in the middle of the boat, screw their eyes shut and
scream at window-shattering decibels. Not very Zen if you
ask me.
Taking Amy fishing at sea out of Whitianga in January was
50 Professional Skipper May/June 2013
Milena with a tiny
snapper... To her an
amazing fish, and
you don't have to be
a millionaire to be
allowed to catch it
a similar pattern of screams and excited little happy-dances.
And all over a string of undersize snapper!
Now, we were not aiming for tiny fish of course, but
frankly, finding a legal size snapper in the middle of January
in Mercury Bay, with a honking little breeze scudding the
boat along at darn near trolling speeds, is pretty damn near
impossible. However, Amy was not to know this.
What enthralled Amy was that as soon as the small Sabiki
I rigged her light, bendy little casting rod up with hit the
bottom, she was hooking up on A FISH. Apparently the idea
of her, a 20-something year old girl from Shandong Province,
actually being able to catch such pretty fish, one after the
other, was just mind-blowing.
Being from a family that lives beside a huge lake, with a
cousin owning a fishing tackle shop, she was used to the sort
of fishing the folks back home would expect. A steady stream
of ANY fish seemed amazing to her. The same went for the
trout fishing.
Sitting in my little 14 foot boat, trolling the upper reaches
of Lake Karapiro in the afternoon sun with ducks, swans and
shags patrolling the banks, and bell birds and other songsters
burbling away in the bush-lined banks was just paradise to
this import from the land of eternal smog.
I asked her just how many of her friends or classmates at
home would be doing this? After some thought, she reckoned
that of the hundreds of classmates she had grown up with
