For many, whitebaiting is as much a lifestyle as it is a hobby or profession. It’s a chance to escape from daily routines, nine-to-five jobs and ignore housework. Many hours spent waiting and watching gives time for contemplation, and whitebaiting, especially from a stand, has been described as a legitimate way to do nothing.
A group enjoys a hot drink on the banks of the Taieri River in Otago, in 1926. The man is balancing a scoop net across his shoulders. They appear to be occasional whitebaiters rather than the hardened types who spend days on end waiting for whitebait to run.
For those who whitebait far from home and stay “in camp” for the season, it is even more of an experience. The huts, the baches, the river, friendships and rivalries all make up a fabric of an experience that whitebaiters are reluctant to give up. They might moan about the weather, the sandflies and the lack of whitebait but they will come back year after year because of the intangible specialness of the whole experience.
The baches and their piers, known as stands, were selling for high prices on the tail of the property boom of the 2000s. In 2006 one stand on the Waiatoto River sold for $46,000.
This hut has been built behind a whitebait stand on the Matau branch of the Clutha River, in South Otago. Some stands are built on floating pontoons, but most are on stilts. They sit above the high-tide mark, providing shelter for whitebaiters. Small piers allow easy access to the nets. Some stands had droll names such as ‘The Ritz’, and doubled as shelters in the duck-shooting season.
For many, the whitebait season is a time of visits from family and a chance to catch up with friends who whitebait on the same river. Many families on the west coast have been whitebaiting for generations and the season provides an opportunity to share their passions and knowledge with younger generations.
Denness Gilbert waits patiently on the stream edge on the first day of the whitebaiting season in August 1996. His gear consists of a fine mesh net with steel frame, a spotter board (the white strip on the stream bed) and a plastic bucket.
In this 1931 photograph, published in The New Zealand traveller, a woman doles out her whitebait catch at the Kaituna River in the Bay of Plenty. In the era before plastic buckets, whitebait were often stored in old kerosene tins.
On the beach at Big Bay, South Westland, two whitebaiters and a pilot (standing on the wing) load whitebait stored in kerosene cans. Using planes to fly out the catch from Big Bay began in 1947 when three whitebaiters, Eric Midgley, David Weckesser and George Mitchell, were fishing the isolated Awarua River in South Westland. Before they established a radio for contact with the outside world, whitebait were kept in ‘live’ boxes in the river. When the men got their radio, they called in the plane and had the boxes ready for pickup as it landed.
What is Whitebait?
New Zealand whitebait are the juvenile of certain galaxiids which mature and live as adults in rivers with native forest surrounds. The larvae of these galaxiids are swept down to the ocean where they hatch and the sprats then move back up their home rivers as whitebait.
The most common whitebait species in New Zealand is the common galaxias or inanga, which lays its eggs during spring tides in autumn on the banks of a river amongst grasses that are flooded by the tide. The next spring tide causes the eggs to hatch into larvae which are then flushed down to the sea with the outgoing tide where they form part of the ocean's plankton mass. After six months the developed juveniles return to rivers and move upstream to live in freshwater.
Whitebait are caught in the lower reaches of the rivers using small open-mouthed hand-held nets although in some parts of the country where whitebait are more plentiful, larger (but not very large) set nets may be used adjacent to river banks. Whitebaiters constantly attend the nets in order to lift them as soon as a shoal enters the net. Otherwise the whitebait quickly swim back out of the net. Typically, the small nets have a long pole attached so that the whitebaiter can stand on the river bank and scoop the net forward and out of the water when whitebait are seen to enter it. The larger nets may be set into a platform extending into the river from the bank and various forms of apparatus used to lift the net.
Often a spotter board (a white plank) is placed on the riverbed at the mouth of the net. This allows the whitebaiter to see the fish as they swim over it. The whitebaiter then empties the net before the whitebait swim out again. For the same purpose, previous generations used to chop down cabbage trees, peel their bark to reveal the light-colored wood, and lay them in the water.
The tapering Fyke net, also known as a Southland sock, is a popular design – it is very portable and collapses flat. This one is on the banks of the Matau (northern) branch of the lower Clutha River, in South Otago
These whitebait stands are on the Ōkuru estuary in South Westland. Ropes and pulleys raise the structures above damaging floods. Screens placed in slots along the stand create barriers that baffle the whitebait as they swim alongside river banks where the current is slacker. Trying to find a way past the screen, the fish move to its outer edge, and enter a net.
Ok, so what do you do with it?
The New Zealand whitebait is small, sweet and tender with a delicate taste that is easily over-powered if mixed with stronger ingredients when cooked. The most popular way of cooking whitebait in New Zealand is the whitebait fritter, which is essentially an omelet containing whitebait.
Purists use only the egg white in order to minimize interfering with the taste of the bait.
Foreigners frequently react with revulsion when shown uncooked whitebait, which resembles slimy, translucent worms. Some whitebaiters sell their catch to buyers who supply fish shops during the season. But as whitebait runs diminish, many people keep their catch and give any excess to family and friends
The combination of the fishing controls, a limited season and the depletion of habitat as a result of forest felling during the era of colonization results in limited quantities being available on the market. Whitebait is very much a delicacy and commands high prices to the extent that it is the most costly fish on the market, if available.
It is normally sold fresh in small quantities, although some is frozen to extend the sale period. Nevertheless, whitebait can normally only be purchased during or close to the netting season.
I found this little gem in the frozen fish section at the New World supermarket
Settler fishing
The journals of early immigrants referred to shoals of whitebait swimming upstream, darkening the water. There were reports of cartloads being caught and supply exceeding demand, with excess whitebait used as garden manure, or fed to poultry until their eggs had a fishy taste. Such accounts indicate the quantities once caught. The waste was probably due in part to the difficulty of storing the delicate fish.
Europeans adapted Māori methods, but made their nets from cotton mesh instead of flax. Whitebait fed gold miners in the West Coast rushes. In the 1870s and 1880s enterprising Chinese miners dried whitebait and sent it to Otago and to China.
Once the season starts, you have no friends on the river
Whenever people are catching whitebait there are secrets, jealousies and disputes. Secrecy about whitebait catches is one of the most striking aspects of the activity. Whitebaiters are notorious for not telling anyone what they have and haven’t caught – rumors swirl and straight answers are rare.
The secrecy is caused by the desire to avoid causing jealousy about big catches (and attracting the attention of the tax man) or having to admit to poor ones. Those getting really good catches don’t want to broadcast the fact to prevent others from rushing to the river.
High prices and some good seasons lately have seen an influx of “outsiders” keen to join in the bonanza but whose lack of knowledge of west coast whitebaiting “rules” has led to an increasing number of altercations.
Newcomers sometimes have difficulty understanding or accepting the local way of doing things. West coast riverside etiquette has been described as having an almost “Jane Austen-like complexity” with different unspoken rules applying on different rivers or even on opposite sides of the same river. For example, on the north side of the Taramakau River the rule is that one person will scoop for 50 meters and then pull out, while on the other side there is a continual chain of scoopers 40 meters apart.
Whitebait has always caused squabbles but in recent years high prices have led to the arrival of “professional” whitebaiters who are there entirely for the money. Their arrival has seen the emergence of some really ugly behavior.
The days of catching cartloads may be gone, but each spring, translucent shoals can still be seen in many rivers, doggedly swimming upstream. Word soon gets out that the whitebait are running.
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