Norfolk Island...potential unlimited......

Well, I am just back from a week up at Norfolk Island with my good mates, Bill and Linda Hohepa. The aim of this trip was for Bill to snag his long-held wish for nailing a 40lb-plus snapper...something Dave Bigg, our skipper, has done twice already himself.

Norfolk is a great little place. It really is the very essence of "Nice". The pace of the place is island-laid back, where the folks are friendly and, in an increasingly suspicious and wary world of delinquents in hoodies and urban paranoia, a place so relaxed and convivial that you do not even have to bother about locking up cars or houses, and where life is not too expensive, certainly not in tourist spot money terms anyhow.

OK, I grant you, it is not Party Central. If you are looking for all night partying at bars and discos, Bali is for you. But if you want a place to kick back and relax in a welcome, Kiwi-friendly environment a few degrees warmer that NZ is at the moment, then the $500 return airfare is quite probably a darn good option for you to explore.

We shot over on the regular Sunday flight to be met at Norfolk’s small air terminal by Jacqui Bigg, partner in Charter Marine, running the boat Amberjac, her husband Dave being out at sea at that time.

A short drive later (being Norfolk, all drives are perforce short drives, unless you wanna get very slightly wet and very substantially drowned) and we were in the house we had rented for the week – a nice tidy Kiwi-style home. After dumping our gear inside, we cruised off for a leisurely afternoon and evening, teeing things up with Dave for the morrow.

Next morning, up bright and early, we headed down to the Kingston jetty to wait for Dave to rock on up with the boat.

Amberjac is a great boat for up here. Newly-built to an old Pelin design hull, she is a long, relatively narrow boat, ideal for comfortably slicing and riding through the almost perpetually choppy waters around Norfolk. After a short kerfuffle, we were all loaded aboard, sorted out and launched.

A brisk bounce or two over the waves at the entrance to the Kingston Bay, and we were off, heading south to hunt for Bill’s Big Snapper.

The snapper reefs around Norfolk, the haunts where the truly big fish hang out, are around 30nm south of land, where the islands are a small bump on an otherwise flat horizon. And big fish there are aplenty here, with a standard size snapper from these reefs being in the mid-20 pound range, and many well, well over that.

After an hour or two steady cruising over the jobbley sea – a ride made much more comfortable by the excellent Pelin hull – we reached our spot, a mark in some 50m of water where a small pin was just loaded with fish sign.

With simple two hook ledger rigs, tied on 150lb trace and a decent 12oz sinker on the bottom, one calamari quality squid per hook, (A short side note here, I had bought these baits in NZ, at Baitworx in Mt Maunganui to be precise, and had brought them with me to Norfolk. There are no problems doing this as far as customs are concerned, as long as you declare them, and this is a great way to ensure you have plenty of really good, top quality squid baits. Supplies in Norfolk can be very limited and often non-existent)… we soon had these ultra nice baits heading for the bottom and Snapperville.

Bill, seconds after his hoped-for snapper suddenly became a MUCH larger shark.....

( Hamachi Nano Xylimum PE2-5 5'6 )

Sadly, my baits had to go to Snapperville via Ravenous Kingyton.... I was nailed half way to the bottom by pesky kingfish, mostly rats – undersize for New Zealand but fine in Norfolk, where fish like these largely fill the niche occupied in New Zealand by Kahawai.

Dave also dropped his rig, and wham! Rat-kings for him too. But Bill, being the lucky Guru he has always been, managed to get to the bottom, where after a seemingly interminably long wait of about two seconds, loaded up on something very large indeed.

With a huge weight and a dull thud-thud-thud of a large tail stroke, Dave predicted this would be the first giant snapper for the day.

Showing all the patience of an experienced snapper fisherman, Bill pumped and wound the rod, lifting the fish to the surface steadily.

I was just about to tell him that a slight degree more urgency may be appropriate, when his line thrashed around for a second, went incredibly tight, and after a seconds’ sudden acceleration, went slack.

Any guesses folks?

A passing submarine maybe? A wayward crocodile perchance? Nope. A poxy, mongrel, bastard bronze whaler shark.

This was the start of seven hours of tackle donations.

We caught piles of the excellent Norfolk Island Trumpeter (AKA Sweetlip Emperor in most places in the world) some true thumpers of well over 4kg.

One of the nice little 15kg kings I snuck past the taxmen...not easy to do!

The larger they were the smaller they often were. Eh? Well, a really nice big one took just a few seconds longer to get to the boat, which meant they often arrived pre filleted, with just a sad head left for your troubles. Sharks again.

I was using a great little 37kg set, a heavy jig set up, so I could just slap the reel into gear as soon as the baits hit the bottom – at which point I almost invariably got nailed by the trumpies, and then cranked the reel hard out to lift the fish.

No sporting action, no letting the fish run, no calm, relaxing pump-and-wind option. If you messed about, your fish got eaten, and you would have to tie on yet another rig. God knows how many rigs we went thru. Must've been a dozen or so at least. Possibly each.

“It’s amazing,” Dave said repeatedly, in this kind of desperate, ‘Just-look-at-the-lovely-silver-lining’-style Mantra. "It shows just how healthy the fishery must be!" As if having swarming packs of ferocious sharks nailing any fish within seconds of touching your hook was in some way a good thing. Whereas I, in my normal-for-me “kill-em-all” way of thinking, was far more inclined to wish for some hand grenades that I could "accidentally" lob at the damn things.

Healthy fishery my big bouncy buttocks. What they need up there are some hunter-killer shark finning boats mate. (In a perfectly organic and gaia-loving, Greenpeace-approved way of course).

We did manage to skull-drag past the sharks about 50 or so mixed kingfish and trumpeter though. We filled up two huge ice boxes of fish.

Dave with a nice typical Norfolk Island “Trumpie”.

But no big snapper. They were just too long in coming up, and although we all had some seriously good, heavy, suspiciously giant snappery-feeling fish on, they all ended in a desperate thrashing followed by slack line.

The best fish landed was a brace of kingies of 15kgs or so I got in just ahead of the toothed brigade.

If you think I overstate the sharks complaints here, listen to this, pal. On one mark, after two drops in which we landed exactly zero whole fish, I counted SIX 2m–3m bronzies circling – just on my side of the boat!

I must say though that Dave is right. As far as healthy fisheries go, they certainly have it going on up there.

We had huge dolphins chasing our boat around as we cruised here and there. There are Humpback Whales all over the place, birds work schools of some kind of fish pretty much everywhere.

I just wish we had been able to troll gear for the Yellowfin and Wahoo that are present up there at the moment.

That is something I was far more keen on than chasing stupid snapper. Norfolk has a great little medium game fishing market sitting untapped pretty much on its doorstep. They have schools of Wahoo and Yellowfin that circle the islands themselves, free divers off South Rock, just below Philip Island, south of Norfolk Island itself by just a few miles, bagged several Wahoo between 20kg and 30kg, and saw further out, too far off to spear, groups of medium to large Yellowfin tuna circling. They don't even bother mentioning the kingfish which are just everywhere.

Last year, Dave took his boat down south to the bottom end of the huge shelf on which Norfolk sits, and loaded up with eleven Wahoo, all over 30kg, most of which went around or just over 40kg. The Yellowfin they were getting ran from 40kg to 60kg, the best being 75 odd kg –pretty damn impressive fish, fish unlike any we see here in NZ these days, that's for sure.

These are what I really want.... Dave and his team cleaned up last season with eleven awesome huge wahoo like this...I need to get there for that!

All it needs is some predictable, calm weather. We had the one day of 10 to 15 knot breezes, then for the rest of the week she blew 15 to 25 knots, and our enthusiasm for being tossed about, in even quite large trailer boats, just was not there.

Changes

Norfolk itself is going through interesting times at the moment. They are in the middle of being taken over by Australia. It is a process that a lot of the Norfolk Islanders themselves do not like, especially those descendants of the original settlers from Pitcairn Island back in the early 19th century, who cherish their independence and identity.

Australia is not particularly well-known for its sensitivity to the needs and feelings of minority cultures.

The Australian government declared over a weekend a wee while back that the island’s own administration was to be suspended and rule would be assumed direct from Australia. This plan was revealed to the islanders when Sydney-based media reporters telephoned Norfolk identities for comments before the actual announcement was made on Norfolk itself.

One such more obvious indication of Aussies’ hamfisted handling has been the decree that Norfolk, which is pretty close to the same longitude as Fiordland, would change to being run on NSW (Sydney) time.

So, at the moment, sunrise is around 4.40 a.m., sunset is around 6.30 p.m. It is stupid – by the time kids get to school at 9 a.m., they have usually been up and about for three or four hours in full daylight. Just plain wacky. However, this does nothing to change the fact the Norfolk Island is just a great little destination.

Folks, if you get the chance, Norfolk is well worth a weeks’ breakaway to go check out. It has a really interesting local history, and if you can get out with Dave on Amberjac (Charter Marine. Google it) I promise you the fishing will blow you away. Go on. Do it.