Love them or hate them, no one can deny how tough kahawai are for their size – and that alone makes them worth targeting at times. Craig Worthington offers a few insights on the type of conditions preferred by these fish…
We had camped out, thanks to the landowner, on the edge of a secluded Northland beach. It was late last year, the air was crisp – it wasn’t quite summer yet – and the sky was blue.
We had snapper on the menu for dinner, so the boys gathered sticks for a fire on the beach and pulled up a few logs for seats. It was a great evening.
Out at sea, there were terns working and general signs of fish activity. As the light started to fade, a rippling patch of water materialised from beneath the birds and began heading our way. We didn’t quite know what to make of it at first. It looked like nothing more than a wind ruffle, but it was definitely moving inshore.
Soon we could see an occasional fish cart-wheeling into the air from the middle of the disturbed water. A kahawai school for sure. They continued moving directly toward the beach as though they were on some pre-determined mission, coming right in to within a few metres of the sandy shore.
This caught us all a little by surprise. Dinner was soon forgotten and a scrabble for fishing tackle began...
There wasn’t much to be had. The hike in had kept fishing tackle to a bare minimum, with heavy casting lures among the first items to be culled from the pack. Luckily, one of the kids had bought his ‘lucky’ lure with him. This was cast over the dumping shore break towards the fish. A kahawai took hold almost immediately, but jumped off in a gill-rattling leap.
A second fish connected on the very next cast, but also removed the hook on a jump. Then the whole school became wary, moving out of casting range and quietly carrying on their way down the coast.
So we missed out on adding any kahawai to our beachside fryup, but did gain a wonderful insight into kahawai behaviour: these open-ocean coast fish had obviously made a conscious decision to move into the safety of this shallow beach gutter just as night fell.
It re-confirmed some kahawai observations I had made many years ago showing that kahawai really do use shallow, sloping beaches, surf gutters and rugged breaking reefs as safety zones. Staying offshore at night is obviously dangerous for them.
This insight was reinforced on a later visit when, from the top of a high hill, I noticed a dark mass of kahawai in the very same beach hole. Dolphins could be seen patrolling the hole’s seaward perimeter, going backwards and forwards in a fairly unhurried manner, and obviously not being game enough to risk the shallow waters in which the kahawai were holding. For the moment they had them trapped, though at the same time the kahawai were safe. I wondered what carnage the high tide might bring.
This got me thinking about the range of habitats in which shorebased anglers can find kahawai and how difficult they can be to track down sometimes.
Kahawai move around a lot, and too often there seems to be little reason as to why they have done so. Unlike some of our other dominant coastal species, kahawai are almost ubiquitous, but at the same time sometimes a little bit random.
For shore-based anglers to catch kahawai regularly, it pays to fully appreciate what their favoured habitats are and when they are likely to be found in each different locality.
Here’s a run-down of some of the best places to look:
The magic elements in most of these hot kahawai locations are current, safe habitats for kahawai to live in and feed, and things that create large and accessible baitfish accumulations (such as wharf lights at night). Find some of these vital elements and the kahawai won’t be too far away.
The size range of inshore kahawai can be everything from tiny to monstrous. Juvenile kahawai stay inshore for their first three years of life, and by the time they begin to venture further afield they should have grown to about a kilo and half in weight and maybe 45 centimetres in length. These young fish have a selection of larger yellow and brown spots along their side to quickly identifies them as immature fish. While they are young they will dominate this inshore environment.
You may hear the biggest kahawai referred to as ‘ocean-going kahawai’, but you don’t always have to get out on the ocean to catch them. They do school out in open water, but can be caught right inshore around the rocks and up estuaries, and are often found off big river mouths on the open coast.
The general trend is for smaller kahawai to be found in the protected waters inside harbours and estuaries, and along the shallowest margins of surf beaches, while the big fish are found on the open-coast locations or around those current-rich harbour spots where plenty of baitfish congregate.
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