We arrived at the Hokitika River at about 10:00 am and found a possie on a sub-branch of the main stream. It was 9 degrees, overcast, windy, and not raining, but only just. I managed fairly quickly to demonstrate to anyone watching that even at 42, I still can't back a blasted trailer. However we parked near the water and soon had all the bits and pieces deposited on the stony beach.
Paddy wanted to get our possie claimed sharpish, so there was a bit of a scramble into our waders and then we were into the water with the pins and sledgehammer. The first job was to make a sort of little fence out of the go-bys, perpendicular to the beach. It was hard yakka as the river bed was very stony, but Paddy put his back into it and also used cunning and angles. The pins are quite heavy strips of iron - not as chunky as warratahs. He used a combination of hammering and positioning to get the go-bys standing up neatish. We had to make sure that they were snug to the river bed with no gaps so that the whitebait couldn't sneak past us.Then we installed the net, tucked in a bit behind the last go-by, with its mouth facing downstream ready for those earnest little swimmers. The last step was to bash in the bucket holder. This is an iron peg with a loop that holds the bucket in the river close to the net, so you don't have to keep bringing the net back to shore to unload the haul.
Then we sat down on our picnic chairs and prepared to dig out some rations. There followed a funny moment when I looked up and the entire go-by had vanished - subsided 'neath the waves without a murmur; I blinked but it didn't reappear. The maestro expostulated and raced over to set it back up, slightly more cunningly this time.
And so, the day rolled gently on. Paddy showed me how to splash up to the net from downstream and pick it up quickly, before the whitebait have a chance to exit stage left. We spent most of the day catching whalebait - these look like tiny cockabullies that you wouldn't really want to eat. Paddy kept looking in the net and saying "I don't know what these are, dammit!" but he found out after interviewing our neighbours on the river in his usual, incorrigibly social, way. I remained snooty, with my nose in a book, or watching the swallows, but the friend-of-the-world splashed back and forth, chatting to the locals and finding stuff out.
At one point, while I was away on a pit stop, Paddy had to move our possie because a fellow arrived at his registered "jetty" (a rickety construction of rough-sawn planks and uprights that stuck out into the river) and said we were too close to him. By the time I returned, Paddy had set us up further down the river bank, at a much less convenient spot. I kept giving the new fellow hard looks, for making my aged parent move his gear. My aged parent was grizzling about the rules, and the number of metres a go-by can protrude, and the required distance between possies, and what he was going to look up when he got home...
But his irritation subsided, and he explained how beautiful whitebait is when it's in the net - "all golden", and I thought yeah, sure, whatever. And then, blow me down, the next time I emptied the net I saw what he meant because we CAUGHT SOME! and they do indeed shimmer goldenly, and we tipped them into the bucket (which is a bit tricky because you have to kind of pat them out of the net and hold the net up and over the bucket all at the same time - without knocking the bucket into the river - and plus, to add difficulty, the net has little sticky-out bits of wire that dig into your hands and leave you with nasty septic little wounds).
So then of course we were all Excitement and Renewed Hope, and I scooted back to the car for the thermos and another cuppa, and we settled in for another hour or so. And every so often one of us would check the net and sometimes there was more gold and sometimes there wasn't, and by the time the Excitement etc. had run its course we had about 30. Although, they're hard to count when they're swimming around in the bucket. But it looked like a two-pattie haul to me.
By then, about 4:00, the wind was freshening, and most of us on this bit of river were starting to pack up. Paddy splashed back to the car with the go-bys and admired the other fellow's massive haul, while I made several trips with the net, the bucket, the pins and all. And Paddy loaded the trailer. And, in the end, we discovered that the other fellow was actually a very good sort of chap after all, called Danny, who gave us a decent wallop of whitebait to add to our 30. So we brought these home triumphantly and made fritters, and they were absolutely DELICIOUS, and we'll have some more tonight.
And I went whitebaiting with my Dad.
