Labour Weekend

As far as is possible, we avoid 'labour' of most varieties for the duration of Labour Weekend. An orchestra rehearsal on Friday evening meant that we could not get away until early Saturday morning, but having prepared the caravan and made the bookings in the course of the previous week, we hit the road at 8am and headed for Kaupokanui in tandem with our friends Rudolf and Wilma - (who own a really spectacular motor home.) The campsite is tucked away behind a hill and overlooks the tidal river which runs into the sea. In the picture here, we are on the ridge sort of overlooking the other vans and set a bit apart from the long, flashy caravan in the left of the picture.

 

We expected really bad weather and had installed card games, needlework, sketching equipment, television and reading material in the caravan for days of torrential rain and howling wind. We certainly had a bit of both - (it is after all New Zealand) but there was enough time when the weather was mild enough to take walks on the black sand dunes and go down and watch the folks fishing for whitebait.

As with so many of the beaches and rivers beside the coast, there is an abundance of driftwood. These two chappies have been fishing for whitebait - more about that a bit later - and although they had been there for most of the afternoon, they told me it hadn't been their best day! We didn't see any whitebait in those fine nets, so clearly, it was most probably closer to their worst day if you ask me. Most of the whitebait fishermen have rubber waders so they can stand about in the water and hope to snag a school of these teeny, little squirmy worms with eyes - actually they are newly hatched fish and are a delicacy here - people pay inordinate sums for 'whitebait fritters' which look like potato fritters with eyes! Eeeuw! Jo has in fact sampled the aforementioned fritters and reported that they were absolutely nothing to write home about - he said, "like an egg/potato fritter with a dodgy fishy taste" - so consequently, we will not be investing in the regulation rubber waders and fine whitebait nets any time soon!



The 'sand dunes' really are black, volcanic sand and are amazingly covered with shrubbery which grows happily in what one would think to be pretty inhospitable conditions.

A very pretty part of the West coast of the North Island - not too far from Hawera (for any of you who might feel inclined to look for it on a map) and not too far from home, cutting down on travelling time. The weather has been very un-Spring-like for ages now, so we're hoping the Summer is firmly en-route!

 

Whitebait is a collective term for the immature fry of fish, typically between 25 and 50 millimetres long. Such young fish often travel together in schools along the coast, and move into estuaries and sometimes up rivers where they can be easily caught with fine meshedfishing nets. Whitebaiting is the activity of catching whitebait.

Whitebait are tender and edible, and can be regarded as a delicacy. The entire fish is eaten including head, fins and gut. Some species make better eating than others, and the particular species that are marketed as "whitebait" varies in different parts of the world.

As whitebait consists of immature fry of many important food species (such as herring, sprat, sardines, mackerel, bass and many others) it is not an ecologicially viable foodstuff and in several countries strict controls on harvesting exist.

New Zealand whitebait are the juvenile of certain galaxiids which mature and live as adults in rivers with native forest surrounds. The eggs of these galaxiids are swept down to the ocean where they hatch and the young fry then move back up their home rivers as whitebait. They are much smaller than Chinese or British 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. The other galaxiid species identified with whitebait in New Zealand are the climbing galaxias or koaro, and the species group calledkokopu.^[2]

New Zealand 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.

Whitebaiting in New Zealand is a seasonal activity with a fixed and limited period enforced during the period that the whitebait normally migrate up-river. The strict control over net sizes and rules against blocking the river to channel the fish into the net permit sufficient quantity of whitebait to reach the adult habitat and maintain stock levels. The whitebait themselves are very sensitive to objects in the river and are adept at dodging the nets.

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. The most popular way of cooking whitebait in New Zealand is the whitebait fritter, which is essentially an omelette containing whitebait. Purists use only the egg white in order to minimise interfering with the taste of the bait.

The combination of the fishing controls, a limited season and the depletion of habitat as a result of forest felling during the era of colonisation results in limited quantities being available on the market. Also, a lack of shade over waterways has been shown to kill the whitebait eggs.^[3]

^{So there you have it.}

^{Dis al!}