Angling’s joys and dangers

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

Angling’s joys and dangers

Fisherman's Paradise By O. S. Hintz. 192 pp. Max Reinhardt. N.Z. price $7.95. The author returns to the Taupo rout fishery about which he wrote so persuasively in his first book, “Trout it Taupo.” published in 1955 and reprinted several times. The 20 years between have not blunted his singleminded devotion to the Waitahanui and its famous picket fence, but they have sharpened his awareness of the large and small joys of angling and polished his ability to write about them. Much of his recent time has been spent in activities directed at the preservation of the Taupo fishing, which he sees menaced from several sides, and his concern, which could apply with equal force elsewhere, is expressed with authority. Taupo fishing is almost exclusively with big lures or flies sunk deep, usually on special lines. Whether in the tributary rivers, in the current at their mouths, or in the lake itself the method can return reasonable bags for only moderate skill. The growing practice of trailing the lure behind a motorboat in fact requires no skill whatever beyond the ability to keep the engine running, but it can return good catches to the persistent man whose interest in fishing goes no deeper than an urge to fill the home freezer with trout. Easy fishing is a major part of the attraction of Taupo for the growing population of permanent residents, holiday makers, and transients who crowd its waters and raise angling pressure to a point which greatly troubles anglers concerned for the future. The Taupo fishery is regulated

by a local staff of the Wildlife Service whose members add to their professional skills a personal concern for the well-being of the fishery as genuine as that of the band of fishermen who have united to help protect it. The author’s discussion of current threats and future possibilities should set anglers everywhere to thinking of action more positive for the protection of their sport than the acclimatisation societies usually adopt. The current upheaval in the Waitaki Basin and that projected for the Upper Chitha cry out for protective measures to be taken before those remarkable fisheries are damaged. Engineers and planners concern themselves only perfunctorily with the complex freshwater ecological systems their operations disrupt. To protect the trout fishing, their operations need the supervision of a body with specialised knowledge of freshwater biology and angling, and with sufficient authority to ensure that provision is made for protection, perhaps even improvement, of this signifiicant asset Mr Hintz’s forceful chapter on the large-mouth bass and the trout farming episodes underline this need and should be made required reading for every citizen not already alert to the progressive insensitive obtrusion of Big Brother into his daily affairs. This is a fishing book of more than ordinary substance. It is the enthusiastic testimony of a mature angler to the delights he continues to draw from the sport and a discussion by a perceptive conservationist of the influences, administrative and natural, against which anglers must be continuously on guard.