Making your fishing dollars go further

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After fifty-five years of fishing, Sam Mossman has settled into an approach that provides maximum benefits from minimum outlay.

Although I enjoy nearly all aspects of fishing, my breadand-butter these days mostly revolves around inshore table species such as snapper, gurnard, kahawai, kingfish and trevally. As well as catching fish, I like eating them, and the way I approach fishing makes much of my sport an economic one.

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When fishing inshore from small boats (as I often do), day-today costs are not really a controlling issue. Instead, aspects such as the wind, tide, sea conditions, moon phase and available time determine my fishing trips.

My personal boat is an aluminium Fish City 4.3m tiller-steer with a 40hp Merc on the back. On an average day’s fishing I seldom use more than $20 worth of oil and petrol, and if I don’t factor in the capital cost of the rig, I don’t have to catch many fish to break even when snapper is $40 a kilo in the supermarket.

Of course this is a mercenary way of looking at fishing, and costbenefit calculations don’t usually enter into my way of thinking about my sport. After all, I have often travelled halfway around the world at considerable expense in pursuit of specific fish – which are mostly returned after capture! However, if the costs are low, chances are you’ll be able to do more fishing in your local patch. And, in some cases, ending the day with a feed of fresh fish can help justify your sport to a non-fishing partner.

This aside, most people fish for a wide number of reasons: the pure enjoyment of being on the water; encounters with nature; spending quality time with friends and family; the challenge and fun of hooking, playing and landing fish; and, of course, satisfying deeply embedded hunter-gatherer instincts (and sometimes subsistence requirements) by putting a feed of high-quality seafood on the table. For many people the mix of of these various motivations are inseparable.

Kill ’em and chill ’em

Another benefit of catching fish is the freshness and quality of the kaimoana harvested. The actual quality is in your own hands, of course, but most fishers these days understand the benefits of ‘kill and chill’. Spiking the catch behind the eyes kills it quickly and humanely. In conjunction with chilling the fish as fast as possible, spiking can make a lot of difference to the fish’s quality when it hits the table.

It is important to cool down the catch as soon as possible, too. To avoid buying bags of salt ice all the time, I keep plenty of old soft-drink bottles full of frozen water in my bait freezer. I throw a bunch of these in my chilly bin to cool the catch. If you prefer to slurry your fish, the addition of a bucket or two of sea water makes for a very cold brine.

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Some fish are also improved by bleeding them immediately after capture. In the South Island some people like to bleed blue cod, and kahawai is another example: cut the throat-latch immediately after capture, then snap the head back to break the neck. Be careful where you point the neck; it can be a little like a Tarantino movie. As soon as the fish stops bleeding, chill it down.

One of my favourite ways of eating kahawai is as kokonda or ika mata – trim off and discard all the red meat, cube the fish, then marinate it in lime or lemon juice followed by coconut cream with sliced onion, chopped capsicum and your choice of fresh herbs.

DIY

I do a lot of lure fishing for inshore species. Using artificial lures and light tackle increases the challenge and pure fun of fishing. But I am quite happy fishing with bait when the situation requires it. Bait fishing is an area where a DIY approach pays dividends.

My regular fishing buddy, Mike, and I are always on the lookout for bait supplies, especially skipjack tuna. These fish are gold: we cut down the fillets to bait-sized pieces and salt them to make a tough, oily bait that many fish love. Bought by the 25kg sack from a hardware store, pool salt is a fraction the price of the supermarket’s eating salt and works great for preserving bait. The skipjack frames, heads and guts are minced up to make topquality berley.

When deployed, the berley will attract many species of fish, especially snapper, kahawai, trevally, gurnard, kingfish and (in the north at least) a heap of jack mackerel. The mackerel that the berley attracts to the boat in turn help to attract predatory fish such as snapper, kingies and john dory. The mackerel can then be used as live baits and big, tough baits, used whole or cut in half, helping to sort out the larger snapper from the little guys.

Another thing Mike and I are always on the lookout for is old roofing lead or lead pipes. We have built up a good collection of sinker moulds over the years, and a sinker-making session is a very worthwhile activity when it is too rough to fish. Neither of us has bought sinkers for years.

After the fishing is done…

At the end of the day, there is a lot more that can be done with the catch than just filleting it. Archaeologist Foss Leach, in his excellent book Fishing in Pre-European New Zealand, reports that studies on the calorific value of different parts of fish show a much higher oil and fat content in meat that is ‘close to the bone’ than in other parts of the fish. These fats and oils make the fish particularly attractive to the human palate.

The throat and head have a lot of very tasty meat; if the fish is of a reasonable size, I like to put the throats through the hot smoker. Hot- or cold-smoking fish is a good way to go – a smoked fish can be picked clean with little waste.

The meat close around the frame, likewise, is often discarded after the fish is filleted. But frames can be cooked or smoked quite quickly. Again, if the fish is a worthwhile size, I will separate each vertebra after filleting, leaving wings of bone and flesh extending from each vertebra. With the addition of a few herbs and 30 seconds each side on the BBQ plate, you have delicious finger 
food to suck from the bone.

Smoked fish roes are another favourite, and even the skin of small-scaled fish such as gurnard can be crunchy and delicious when crisped in very hot oil.

If you’re not up for the ‘alternative’ style of eating, there are other people who are: contact Matt Watson’s initiative www. FreeFishHeads.co.nz to get your heads and frames to those who want them.

Or, you can just bury any fish waste in the garden. My mate Mike (also my back neighbour) has a fish-cleaning bench right by his vegetable garden. It takes just a couple of minutes to dig a hole and bury any fish waste when we are cleaning the catch. After about 30 years of doing this, Mike has the richest, blackest soil in the district, and anything planted in it grows like a rocket! You can then eat the resulting veggies, fruit and herbs with your fish.

You can probably see the advantages of this circular, DIY subsistence-based approach to fishing: costs are limited (so you can afford to do more of it), there is considerable satisfaction to providing your own fresh, healthy meals, and a lot of enjoyment to be had in doing it. Win-win-win. You have reached the end of the cycle. Now repeat until you are tired of life! 

 

   This article is reproduced with permission of   
New Zealand Fishing News

October 2016 - By Sam Mossman
Re-publishing elsewhere is prohibited

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