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FISHING GILLNETTERS, WTF! BY CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS Purse seining in the tropics.... hated by Greenpeace, but a hell of a lot better for the environment than the "greener" poling! I t was the summer of 2011 when a mate of mine whispered a nasty little secret in my ear... there was a gillnetter working the eastern Coromandel, and he was raping and pillaging his way up and down the coast from the Aldermans to the back of the Barrier. Oh damn, a bloody Gillnetter. Why the hell do we still allow this insane fishing practice in this country? OK, gill netting for species like flounder and mullet may well be necessary, but gill netting over reefs for every damn thing that swims, hell, that is just open slather pisticide. Ok, I admit it, as a recreational fisherman, I am not a huge fan of the commercial fishing thing, however, nor do I oppose it, people gotta eat and you can't have fish'n'chips without commercial fishermen doing what they do best. I mean to say, business is business, and a bloke has a right to earn a living, but come on, there have to be limits surely? I support long liners (even tuna longliners), I think seiners are fine (as long as they are not totally raping the resource), but hell, gill netting over reefs? That is just sheer bloody murder. Twenty years ago, when I was a regular charterer of boats operating out of Whakatane, heading for White Island and what not, we saw the effects on the fishery there of gillnetters laying their nylon webs of death over some of the worlds best kingfish fisheries, simply annihilating schools of kingfish, trevally... hell, everything, in an open slather raping of the resource. We used to head out of a winters afternoon to the 14 mile reef off Whakatane, where schools of medium sized kingies could be found any time for a fun jigging session... until the gillnetters claimed the area. After a couple of years of gill netting, no boats ever bothered going there again... the fish were dead and gone. This was one of the early lessons in gill netting ethics, the stated target of the gillnetters were warehou (off Whakatane? Are you kidding me!?), but gosh darn oops, their nets were being filled (surprise surprise!) with kingfish instead, which under those rules 50 Professional Skipper November/December 2012 in those days they then landed as oopsy bycatch. "Accidental bycatch", has been used and abused for years, it is an open secret, let's face it, the tuna longliners "Accidentally by-caught" just as many broadbill as they possibly could until these were brought into the quota system. The gillnetters were just a little more obviously ripping off the system is all. After wiping out the easy meat on the inshore reefs, the gillnetters then moved out to working the reefs around White itself... and then the fur really started to fly. These gillnetters, operating out of Tauranga at the time I seem to remember, were met with such staunch opposition from the Whakatane based charter fleet, that before long an "accommodation" was reached, where basically the gillnetters were told to sod off... and good riddance to bad cess too! Well, it seems that such an operator has now moved around to the 'Mandel, and is now operating out of Whitianga, gill netting the hell out of our (I fish Whitianga mostly, so it is "my" territory, you know how it is), reefs off the eastern Coromandel. When I was first told of these guys moving into the area, the story was that they were hammering the shallower reefs all along the eastern side of the Coromandel targeting pink maomao. Pink maomao, not one of the top line commercial species you'd think, but hey, nice white flesh, and even better NO QUOTA LIMITS! Apparently the guy was just mugging the reefs and cleaning up. Well, cleaned up now, pink maomao are strangely enough no longer such a common catch off the Coromandel coastline any more. And now they are moving focus back to that easiest of all gill net targets, the kingies. I tell you, it is enough to make you just spit. You have to ask, why is gill netting on our inshore reefs still allowed? Even more to the point, why should the processor companies, in Whitianga I guess this would mean OPC, feel it appropriate to deal with gillnetters? Just because it ain't actually