Several threads in the recent past I spoke of big changes ahead with Seachange in the future .One major will be reserves,that will be big areas ,One that comes to mind is around Tiri and Whangaparoa Pens another is Waiheke .
Some prime fishing areas are going to be lost.Combined with fish farms out from Coromandel     
As long as Coms get restricted and Quota cuts to balance
Buffer zones from farming which include planting and fencing of all waterways,storm water treatment from the citys and sewage discharge ..this has a big price tag ..Guess what ??? user pays !!

We may have an issue with run off, but the real issue is run off has no longer any way of being handled by the marine ecology

Biggest thing that would help the gulf would be to top all dragging .. fish scallopes what ever.
Restore the sea bed.. which takes care of a lot of the run off issues... which restores the shell fish/ worm beds, which restores grass beds, which restores breeding grounds.....

And the terrible thing is , this sort of concept has been around for generations, and we just keep spending the money to do it on repeated 'research' using ppl with PhDs and no bloody common sense. We used to have a education system where only the brightest ended up with higher education..... now any Tom Dick or harry can get a degree... and its not hard... just attend lectures, write papers that the lectures want to hear....because most of them are also the 'new ' generation of higher educated , no common sense ppl.

The 1st thing that will kill a marine , or any enviroment ids the 'ground stuff' kill the reefs, kill the soil,  kill the microbes, the bottom of the food chain.....
And the most successful restorations are also built on restoring the 'soil'... from there nature basically does the rest....

Its not rock science guys, any old school home garden will tell u the same thing...

But we live in a society where unless we now have a PhD, and no common sense... which perpetually goes in circles feeding the bank accounts of PhD 'scientists'

Fix that, and we fix our marine environment... and u will be very surprised how fast nature does repair given a chance....

err sorry, my understanding is that the SNA01 fishery is improving and is in better shape than it has been for many years. (25% original biomass and growing - albeit slowly).  This is certainly my personal observation when I compare the size/number of snapper I am catching now at all my Spot x's compared to same spot x's using similar methods in the mid-late 80's.

To me trawling is a BIG one.

and yet another update,

Hauraki Gulf's fish stocks continue to fall

Dylan Moran

Updated 4:17pm: The fishing and farming sectors are being called on to do more to help the recovery of the Hauraki Gulf.

The State of our Gulf report is released every 3 years, and this year's iteration shows fish stocks are continuing to fall - including snapper.

Nitrogen loads carried by rivers and dumped in the Gulf and sediment are continuing to build up.

Hauraki District Council mayor John Tregidga is calling out the business sector, saying it is time it took a leading role in helping fix the Gulf.

He says it is "nonsense" for anybody to claim helping the Gulf's recovery does not make economic sense.

Dr Shane Kelly, who helped in creating the report, says a lack of unified approach by fishers who use the harbour is hindering progress.

He says the commercial and recreational sectors are keen to blame each other, but there needs to be a common alliance.

Birds such as the black petrel are increasingly at risk too.

The mussel seeding process has to be ramped up big time.  They make excellent filters and the hauraki Gulf needs as much help as it can get to combat run off.  Does anybody know if they (the organisations involved with this project) are still looking for volunteers to help with this process.

To say rec fishers have done all the damage,is like saying the moon is made of cheese. There are some out there that still believe that.

I am intrigued by a lot of these responses - they seem very defensive. Are we (as rec fishers) so worried about losing some of our fishing grounds/quota in the short term that we are willing to risk the state of our fishery into the future?

It seems there are a couple of separate issues that combine to cause a big potential problem:

1. Habitat loss, as the result of a) pollution and b) physical changes to the seafloor (eg dredging). Rec fishers are generally not to blame for these things, other than the odd little scallop dredge. Things like mussel reseeding might help in some areas, but we can't just keep piling on the pollution and hope to manage it with some shellfish.

2. Overfishing. There is obviosuly a lot of fishing pressure on the Gulf, from both recreational and commercial interests. Anyone who suggests that recreational fishers don't have an impact is dreaming - we take over 3000 tonnes a year out of SNA1. Commercial fishers take even more. It doesn't really matter who catches them (other than that certain methods are more wasteful than others) - what matters is how many are caught.

Counting fish is difficult, and they fluctuate a lot as they move around each year and so on. Any estimates of the number of fish are therefore always going to be a bit sketchy and must be regarded as a "best guess". I'm sure those "horn rimmed glasses" are well aware of that. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything: the question is what to do, and that is essentially a political question. Whether fish stocks are at 10% or 20% seems kinda irrelevant to me: while they don't seem to be getting worse they also don't seem to be getting much better outside the margin of error. I imagine that whether it's currently at 25% or 27% most would agree that the status quo is not ideal?

Improving the situation will cost money, either directly (eg reducing pollution, restoring mussel beds etc) or through opportunity cost (reduced recreational and commercial fishing). Simple as that. Reducing the recreational take spoils our fun, although perhaps means more fun in the future with a healthier ecosystem. Reducing commercial takes increases the price of fish (not everyone can catch their own) and/or just moves the problem somewhere else. Reducing pollution costs developers, farmers and ratepayers money, and central government action takes tax dollars that could be spent elsewhere. It's our responsibility to engage constructively in a conversation about how that money should be spent, what concessions will need to be made and how they will be spread, and so on.

That's the simple reality if we want a healthy Gulf that provides income, food and fun for a lot longer into the future. But this requires very careful management that most of us get behind. Looking into the future, for example, I personally would rather be able to take a smaller limit but catch it more easily in a healthier ecosystem. But achieving that means managing the system as a whole rather than piecemeal - just reducing the take for one group or another won't do that, and neither will a few habitat-focussed interventions that ignore the rest of the system. It'd be easier if the answer was "just plant some mussels", but even those very good ideas will have to be part of a much bigger, broader effort from all of us.

Yeah, absolutely, I didn't mean to suggest that you did. It was just a handy example of something that is probably very good but definitely not enough in itself. I guess I worry that in focussing on nice little projects like that it's easy to forget that there are hard decisions that do have to be made.

nice mmmword well written,
one major problem that can be sorted very quickly is this trawling on and on for species which there is not enough of to fill the allowable take they the Comms have been given to target...
two of those species are Gurnard and John Dory, if this was reduced right now to just below their catch history this would help no end,
its these two fish that are causing a lot of damage which could be avoided with the stroke of a pen and no pay out due to it impossible to catch something that is not there anyway.....