| The day I inadvertently became a trans-hemispheric poacher |
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The day I inadvertently became a trans-hemispheric poacher was memorable in the annals of the Odyssey. Deciding to get back to the garden and my Scottish Borders fishing roots, I packed the car with newly acquired camping and angling gear and headed for the northerly Malborough Sounds. Newly acquired gear had become a necessary evil after the experience of my last unfortunate foray into NZ camping. Making the mistake of cutting costs and corners I'd borrowed a tent from an elderly Kiwi colleague with a penchant for the more rugged aspects of this island. Alas when I assembled it in the pitch black night by a windswept beach I discovered it to be little more than a tarpaulin held aloft by two sticks roped together with string. The combined effect was reminiscent of an oversized Toblerone Tube with the ends and bottom cut off with crimping shears. Fortunately the weather and sandflies (NZ's more tolerable version of midges) were both kind, however after one night in this wind tunnel I realised that even rugged Scots cannot man up (or in Kiwi parlance "be staunch" enough) to endure the rigours of a 1960's NZ Boy Scout's Brigade relic. With a brand spanking new, still in the box, two-man (or one Scot and his Kiwi lass) "Stockman Weekender" in the boot we took to Kaikoura costal road, my belligerent ipod as badly in need of a refresh as my battered car speakers, which made the bass of Kris Drever's "Honk Toot Suite" sound like it was recorded with a ukulele inside a giant bath sponge. After a 5am-2.30pm shift at work I was badly in need of some caffeine by the time we rolled into a darkened Blenheim (irritatingly dubbed "B-Town" by the Kiwis) at 10pm. Reminiscent of a night-gone-wrong in Galashiels, the only venue open was a dirty MacDonalds heaving with glazed, fast food enslaved youths who looked like they had just stepped off the set of Morgan Spurlock's "Supersize me". I was more looking for the kind of "100% NEW ZEALAND" experience lorded in those glossy 2-page spreads in magazines promising crisp blue skies, snowy blue mountains and healthy, tanned couples running barefoot through the surf. So we pressed on. Arriving in Picton and resisting the temptation to have 1 or 12 of Irish bar Seamus's best-pints-of-Guinness-yet-discovered-on-the-Odyssey, I though the worst of the drive was over. Complacency crept in yet this was soon to be dashed by a gruelling further 2 hours on some of NZ's most terrifyingly ill-kept roads. Our destination was a point on the map called "Cowshed Bay", about mid-way up a narrow spit of land which shelves North-East into the Cook Straight separating the North and South Island's of NZ, pitted with coves to the south filled with the turquoise waters of the Queen Charlotte Sound (Sea-Loch), and to the North by the placid Kenepuru Sound (Sea-Loch). After the turn off onto this peninsula however, all of this ceased to matter as sheer hallucinogenic exhaustion coupled with an increasingly narrow and dodgy road conspired to turn the drive into a waking 30km/hr nightmare. My lane seemed to have been victim to the ravages of a sea monster as chunks of it were simply missing, and the drop on my left to the Kenepuru sound became more menacing in the untold inky blackness. Gollum-like possums with wide saucer eyes suicidally stared down the Civic's full beams. Brief brakes in the thick native bush revealed a fairy-tale world of darkened jungle dropping to black, mill-pond flat water reflecting the light of an impossibly large and orange moon, a child's decoration on a Christmas tree. After what seemed like an eternity the relief of seeing the crooked signpost for the Cowshed Campsite was tangible. This was short lived as the "Campsite", far from being the moonlit beach-side location I'd envisaged, was a stretch of gravel with no other tents, within 5 metres of the road and surrounded by menacing and unfamiliar, dark forest. Nevertheless, I was so tired that I could have slept with the holy cows on a traffic island in New Delhi, so hastily assembled the Stockman Weekender in the beam of the trusty Civic's headlights and on the hard, unyielding earth. It was only once the lights were off and I was in my sleeping bag that my partner revealed she was scared as recently a couple had gone missing, never to be found, at the nearby Endeavour Inlet. A bit like telling a fellow swimmer you've just seen a shark when you're ten nautical miles from the nearest land, I did not find this information appealing, and seriously considered seeking some peace of mind by retrieving my filleting knife from the car and sleeping next to it, until I realised that this was exhaustion talking and I was not, in fact, playing a role in "Deliverance". The morning dawned bright and significantly less foreboding than the night before. We packed our gear and drove further on down unmetalled roads, seeking a remote fishing spot that might yield something other than my NZ fishing nemesis, the voracious and tiny "Spotty". Finally we settled for a turquoise, un-named bay north of the Bay of Many Coves, where a handy wooden jetty got us out into the deeper water. Soon we were catching fish, including some wonderful creatures I was reliably informed were "Blue Cod". I'd seen "Blue Cod" on menus around NZ restaurants, but had always assumed that it was simply a name. Let's face it, Blue Whales are not particularly blue, they're really more grey. The astonishing thing was that the fish that were landing at my feet were really, really blue. As blue as their surrounding pacific water and iridescent as a tropical parrot. The other thing that was weird was that they look very similar to cod you might catch in the Atlantic or North Sea, only blue and a bit more streamlined and spiny. Three blue bodies were already lying on the jetty (alongside my partner's saturated shoe which she'd kicked in frustration into the sea due to her erratic casting technique) when the boat drew up. A muffled and indecipherable kiwi greeting came from the cabin and a rucksack was ejected to land next to our catch, before the boat pulled off. Unperturbed, we continued fishing. An elderly gentleman appeared as if from no where out of the scrub behind us, presumably to collect the bag. He took a look at our catch before casually informing us that our car, fishing gear and catch could be impounded by the Ministry of Fisheries and Conservation, and, if that wasn't enough, we could be fined untold amounts of economically irrelevant, yet here sadly necessary Kiwi dollars. I considered launching into the defence I would use on my home ground of Scotland that no Government or Laird has bought and stocked these wild fish, therefore they should be considered fair game to fishermen much in the same way that a seal or heron would not be fined or have its assets impounded. However, not wishing to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, a stone's throw from where a couple mysteriously disappeared, with no food and no means of catching it other than our bare hands, my partner prudently advised aborting the fishing trip and leaving with assets, and catch, intact. Now an inadvertent poacher, in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, I left with my blue cod and feasted like a king, safer in the knowledge that with every bite yet more incriminating evidence would be concealed in my large intestine. And they tasted great. Catch you later down the folkie trail, Tom |