How much fish do we harvest?
Excluding aquaculture, recreational fishing conservatively represents –
Recreational harvest has a significant impact in some shellfish fisheries and a few inshore finfish stocks such as snapper and kahawai on the northeast coast of the North Island and blue cod at the top of the South Island. Most other inshore fish stocks are dominated by commercial harvest.
Existing controls have proven to be effective in managing recreational harvest. Generally, harvest is less than the allowance set aside by the Minister to provide for recreational fishing. Many fish stocks do not have an allowance set aside by the Minister because they have not been reviewed since at least 1986.
krow wrote: Niwa were doing survey at Tutukaka on Sunday. All species even puka, Bass, bluenose, Tarakihi and Gemfish got measured and counted. Surveyor said we'd done a lot better than most others that day. Personally I believe rec fishing is a drop in the bucket compared with the tonnage caught commercially. When I see one net haul and compare with how many recreational boats it would take to capture the same quantity I can't see how they can be compared. I'd say we are way under that 20% above. |
Muppet wrote: Agree with krow. look at how many comm species recreational guys never go near hoki, whiting, orange roughy etc the real big money earners. You could take away snapper from Comms it would not hurt them. |
pjc wrote: 3 fish per angler once a week x 500 boats/anglers average through out year,1500 x 52=78000 fish at 1.5kg = 117 tonne conservative? sna1 only |
Tagit wrote: I think you guys are being pretty optimistic with a 1.5kg - 2kg average in the HG.A 30cm fish is around 0.75 kg and a 42cm fish is around 1.5kg. Whilst we are seeing a lot of bigger fish right now on the charter boats (normal Spring fishing) I am not sure that the average fish caught by the rec fleet will be 42cm. To average 2kg the average fish would need to be 47cm and a 47 fish would be the fish of the day on most rec outings over the summer. I would estimate that the average HG rec caught Snapper will be between 35cm and 40cm (around 1.3kg) over a 12 month period so would use around 1.25kg for calculations and guess that it might even be a little lower than that based on what I observe. Average number of fish per angler per day fishing is pretty low according to the NIWA ramp inspector I talked too last season. Might use 2 or 3 fish for doing these calcs I guess. As for the number of boats and anglers, I think the NIWA/MPI estimates are hopefully more accurate than anything we could guess. What we can do however is work backwards from the MPI estimated Rec take of around 3500 tonnes (or is the estimate higher now?) in SNA1 using the figures above. Do the maths and it goes sort of like this - Lets allow what is probably a generous 500 tones for the landbased and kayak etc catch which there aren't many figures for. So now 3000 tonnes for rec boaties. So using say 1.25kg average weight you get 2400,000 rec boat caught Snapper. Divide by say 200 days where people will be fishing (allowing for Winter, bad weather etc) and that is 12000 fish for every day of those 200. So then allow our optimistic 3 fish per angler trip average and you get 4000 anglers on the water for everyone of those 200 days. Then lets say the average boat has 3 anglers and you get 1333 rec boats on the water for 200 days a year. Now personally I have very serious doubts about that many boats being the average per day over 200 days, so what is the error in my calculation here? |
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