Hunting Old Whitey

False Bay- South Africa, The Farrallon Islands-California, The offshore reefs off Port Lincoln-South Australia and the little old Chatham Islands-New Zealand share the dubious honour of being among the most white shark infested hells on Earth. Ever since the classic Blue Water, White Death of 1971, documentary crews have descended on these select hotspots to film the sharks that so enthral couch naturalists the world over.

In honesty the Chathams have only recently joined these other locations as infamous TV white shark hang-outs, for no better reason, I suspect, than that they are simply too isolated to appeal to a northern hemisphere film crew. For there is certainly no shortage of white sharks there; divers have been attacked and monsters are sighted frequently. Some of the offshore reef systems are so notorious for white shark sightings that even the lure of virgin paua populations are not enough to draw the paua divers.

The Star Keys, off Pitt Island at the Chathams, is one such place. Comprising one small sawtooth island, home to a colony of mollymawks, the rest of the keys involves a large area of low reef constantly boiling and breaking in the southern ocean swells. Here and there higher areas jut from the sea and it is on these that the fur seals make their rookeries, which in turn draw the sharks.

And it was the sharks that drew us. ‘We’ were a group filming a tele show called the ITM Fishing Show, in the Chathams to tackle these animals on rod and reel before they became protected by law and therefore illegal to target after 1^st of April 2007.

We had spent our first days fishing on a pinnacle that rises to 15m out of 30 offshore from the mouth of the gigantic Te Whanga lagoon, which occupies a significant proportion of the main Chatham Islands interior, and although we distributed 30kg of burley and a similarly significant amount of tuna oil in a continuous slick over the side, we did not draw a white shark. To fill in time we line fished for blue cod in quite literally their hundreds and took baracoutta and a couple of hapuku as by catch. The prospect of hapuku in 15m was enough to have me salivating at the thought of going over the side with a camera but tempering this was the presence of the burley slick and the insistence of the skipper that there would be no diving in any of the places that he considered sharky -or more accurately, very sharky, as the whole place is pretty much sharky.

So it was decided that evening that the Star Keys would be our destination, based firstly simply on their reputation but also on that other whites had been hooked or taken there recently in the clamour for a white shark jaw before protection was enacted.

Unfortunately, the next day the boat wasn’t available (I can’t remember why) so we did a bit of a tiki tour and went in search of some blackfish that had reportedly washed ashore a few days prior to our arrival. We had looked for them from the boat the day previous, assuming 30 black whales on a white sand beach would stick out like the proverbial but we couldn’t find them. This time we attacked them from the shore and eventually found them half submerged in the sand and very whiffy. They had obviously been there a long time but our guide explained that just because they were found a couple of days ago didn’t mean they’d only been there a few days. Apparently even sperm whales can go unnoticed for months; such is the isolation of some of these places. Eventually decomposition and a favourable wind will bring them to someone’s attention, as had happened with these.

While the topside cameras were rolling on the dead whales, I took the opportunity to duck away for a dump. . Finding a suitable depression in the dunes which afforded some privacy, I had just got down to the business at hand when a white piece of bone caught my eye and as I squatted there, lost in thought, I mulled over what it might be- what the concealing sand might reveal. Having stripped an unfortunate coprosma of all it’s leaves and thus concluded my ablutions, I dug around the bone to reveal a perfectly intact sperm whale tooth. Apparently there was a whaling station nearby so it could have come from there though whales have always come ashore on this stretch of coast. Either way it was a nice souvenir.

 

The next day we went fishing. In the two-hour steam from our base in the northern town of Kaingaroa, gear was checked and burley and baits prepared. Arriving at the keys we anchored in a likely looking channel and began the smelly and labourious task of setting up a chum slick. Woolly, who was to be the main angler, took to maintaining the burley trail while the rest of us lounged on deck in the warm sunshine or entertained ourselves sight fishing the innumerable monster cod that fed just under the surface on the chum slick. I had a creeping doubt that the chumming of a white shark would not be as easy as applying liberal dollops of macerated fish and oil over the side. These fish have an almost mythical quality to me which I think other divers would understand and I was confident that the approach we were employing was simply too basic.

A shout from Pete on the roof of our boat and a great swirl behind the hapuku frame teaser hanging out in the burley trail proved me wrong. Scrambling for our respective cameras or other necessary implements, we gathered at the back of the boat and intensely watched as a new teaser was employed from the stern. And then there it was, just as massive and sinister and yet beautiful as all the many docos on Discovery’s ‘Shark Week’ told you it would be. Carcharodon carcharius, the Great White Shark, as calm as can be gliding through our burley trail, slicing the clean blue water and rolling on it’s side to fix us with its jet black eye, as cold as the devils. For me what struck as keenly as anything else was the silence with which it went about its business. It sounds odd, I know, but it seemed unnatural that something so large could get about so silently but then it would take hold of the teaser and shake its head , then there was the noise of water churning and fins slapping and you could almost hear the teeth shearing as they glimmered oh so bright in the sunlight. The whole thing was bloody spooky. After enough shots were taken of the fish just swimming about, Matt pitched a kahawai baited with a circle hook and the shark inhaled it and moved off. We threw the warp over the side with a buoy attached and gave chase. After two hours the fish broke free and we returned to the float and resumed our trail. Not 15 minutes later a second shark showed itself in the trail, smaller than the first but still massive by any other standard. This shark refused our offerings and we returned to port without having achieved our goal.

The next day we returned to the keys, set our anchor and buoy but this time attached a sack of burley and some frames to it and left it in the channel while we trolled giant teasers and lures to try and illicit a leaping strike but the sharks refused to play. Returning to our float after an hour it was obvious something had slashed the sack open and severed it completely from the bouy. In short time the shark showed itself and wasted no time inhaling our bait but unfortunately he got tangled in the line rather than hooked and after a couple of minutes he freed himself. We got all the gear including the hook back. Much later in the day we hooked another shark, this one unseen, on a fillet of hapuku. All afternoon we had had teasers out consisting of half tope sharks and bundles of half a dozen or so blue cod and they had remained untouched. The fillet of hapuku was a last ditch idea based on the success of puka frames the previous day and it had paid off. The shark took the bait while it was still being set. He could well have been lurking in our trail a long time, waiting for an offering that suited his palette. Again though, after a couple of minutes he gained his freedom, doubling back on the line and slicing cleanly through the 6oolb leader. We had learnt though what bait to use and that knowledge would ultimately pay dividends.

 

That night, after more than a few beers, Nathaniel, one of our two skippers, suggested a weka hunt. Wekas are introduced on the Chathams and are not protected by law. So we drank more booze while we awaited the arrival of Nathaniel’s brother in law [sober], TC, who owned a couple of weka/pig dogs. When he arrived we kitted up in our polar fleeces and tramping boots and such that one would assume a weka hunt requires. We piled into TC’s 4wd van and were in the process of making space for his two mutts when Nathaniel took off, dogs bounding along beside us. It seemed they were in for some exercise. Nath cracked out the Famous Grouse and the first beer of a box of Canterbury Draft, cranked Bob Marley up on the CD player and off we went over private roads. I was just thinking of asking where we were headed when TC slowed to a stop, Nath in the passenger seat put his beer on the dash, leapt out the door to relieve his dog of a weka it had flushed and caught and bought back to the vehicle. Nath gave the confused weka a squeeze to make sure it was a ‘ fat one bro’ and satisfied that it made the grade, cracked it over the head on the vans bull bars. He jumped back in the van and we were off for another 20m before stopping again to relieve the other dog of his weka and to administer the coup de grace. This then, was weka hunting. For the next two hours we worked our way along the dune area of one of the huge beaches, worked through the CD collection and drunk our way through the other CD collection and the Grouse before making it back to base at some ungodly hour, some thirty wekas in tow. Then it was off to the Kaingaroa Social Club for some shots. It was closed but we had a key so just sat on the floor talking shit and getting wasted. I woke up next morning feeling very average, paid brief homage to the porcelain god and decided to fore-go pig hunting, instead opting for a shore dive for some pauas.

The Chathams is famous for its pauas and it’s easy to see why. Kaingaroa is the second biggest town on the island. It is solely a fishing town, dealing in paua, cray and bluecod mainly. Get this; there were legal paua on the piles of the commercial wharf there. Under the wharf were tractor tyres, which would’ve once been wharf fenders but had somehow come free so that they lay on the sand under the wharf. There were pauas all over these tyres; good ones too. Festooned also were blocks of concrete, derelict craypots tossed aside, a 10 speed bicycle. If ever an example was needed of how far fisheries on mainland N.Z have fallen, this is surely it?

 

In the afternoon we went to see the kopi trees at Hapupu, which the Maorioris had carved with strange images, often of human forms but also geometric shapes and some animals. The place has an eerie feel, like that in a cathedral, hallowed somehow. Quite what the symbols and shapes mean no one is sure. The Victorians had considered the Maorioris somehow sub human, like the Australian aboriginals and did nothing to stop the genocide being unleashed on them by the maori . By the time the Moriori achieved even basic civil rights, their culture was so fragmented than none left alive knew why their people had carved trees. People can be shits.

 

Our last full day on the island was meant to be spent at the Star Keys but the boys had some craypots still in the water up the coast that needed to be taken back to port before the next big storm. So we had a somewhat compromised day ahead, eventually settling on a couple of hours burleying a headland which, while not a home to a seal colony, had had numerous white shark sightings. It did not sound promising but we were able to catch some hapuku for bait, which gave us some confidence.

I was in charge of burleying what chum we had left. After a couple of hours with no sign of a shark, I was down to the last few cupfuls of burley when Kate thought she saw a swirl behind the teaser and sure, enough, a couple of minutes later, in cruised the shark.. He was the most photogenic of all the fish we had encountered, calmly taking the teasers and allowing himself to be dragged in towards the cameras. After we had the shots we needed, we pitched him a bait of hapuku which he took and hooked himself cleanly in the hinge of the jaw. This time we had substituted our rods and reels for rope and buoys as this would be our last chance to land one of these fish and we were looking to maximize our chances. After fighting strongly for 10 minutes, the shark got himself wrapped in the rope, allowing us to drag him in backwards. I was given the task of cutting off a small piece of fin for DNA analysis for a study being conducted by the University of Aberdeen. Once the sample was secured the trace was cut, allowing the shark to squirm free. He quickly righted himself and swam away strongly.

Our fishing was only ever going to be release fishing. If the plan had been to take the shark as a trophy I don’t think I would have gone on the trip. Though I’m not superstitious or religious or whatever, I guess when you spend long periods freediving in shark habitat, you maybe even subconsciously evaluate your relationship with them and my understanding of our deal is one of ‘I don’t hurt you and you don’t hurt me’, So far so good.