The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4
OF ALL THE PLACES IN THE WORLD: Jetty Hopping the Chatham Islands
Words and Photos: Jeff Forsee 2022-06-24 10:13:25
The small fishing village of Kaingaroa is home to a primary school and a social club and is the site of HMS Chatham’s first landfall in 1791. It’s a remote and wild settlement inhabited by a humble population of self-reliant, kind and enduring human beings.
The 45th parallel south lies about a 20-minute drive from my home on New Zealand’s South Island. That puts me right in the heart of the roaring 40s, a real perk for the early mariners from which the blustery namesake originated but not so much for the modern-day fly angler. It was mid-September, the start of spring on this side of the equator and an unreliable time weather-wise. The South Island had been inundated with wind and rain so fierce that it made my house shake, downed trees and power lines in the neighborhood, and blew out rivers across the region. Still, the news of a drop to level three COVID restrictions was a welcome change of fate. Level three meant we could venture beyond the grocery store or the pharmacy and could even get on planes to fly places again—domestically, at least—places like the Chatham Islands.
A territory of New Zealand situated about 500 miles off the east coast of the South Island, Chatham and Pitt are the largest of 12 odd islands and home to the 780 inhabitants who call themselves Chatham Islanders. The islands are prone to a level of exposure somewhere between what we experience in Aotearoa and what the leopard seals and penguins put up with on the treeless, subantarctic Campbell and Auckland islands to the south.
Weather charts for the week ahead were mostly covered in splotches of red and purple, with isobars so tight it was hard to distinguish one from the next. An Australian friend assured me via text that though the first couple days of our trip might feel like a tornado, the rest of the week should be fine. The day before we left, wind gusts on the South Island overturned two tractor trailers. And just to keep us on the edge of our seats, on the morning of departure my travel partner and the brains of the operation, Nick Reygaert, received an email warning that our flights would possibly be delayed or cancelled due to the high winds.
Nevertheless, we boarded the turbo prop ATR 72 on the tarmac in the “Windy City” of Wellington and violently lifted off toward our destination with nine other passengers in the back of the aircraft. The forward two-thirds of the plane were laden with cargo bound for the fridges, freezers and shop shelves of the Chathams. It was a curious setup; the flight attendant informed me cheerfully that Air Chathams was the only commercial air passenger service in the world that hauls both freight and humans in the same cabin.
After an hour and a half of my tightly fastened seat belt keeping the top of my head from meeting the roof of the aircraft, we gained our first glimpse of Chatham Island. As rugged and barren as expected, it reminded me of flying into coastal western Alaska for the first time. Those initial moments were enthralling, but also a reality check: the island didn’t look inviting to any form of life, let alone a couple of flyfishermen from “the Mainland.”
The small airport took a very DIY approach to arrivals, luggage and shuttles. The Chathams are 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand and a sign out front proudly proclaimed: “First to see the sun.” The faded yellow illustration of a beaming sun felt like a con considering the current conditions. The sign also had an outline of the island itself, with its oversized inner lagoon. If you took the destination on the merits of this sign alone, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d just arrived somewhere a bit farther north—say Kiribati or Fiji. Our shuttle driver, a veteran of clever small talk, assured us, “It never rains on the Chathams. It never blows on the Chathams either. It’s just like Hawaii—without the palm trees.” Paradise found.
The main settlement of Waitangi is situated on a hillside overlooking Petre Bay, a vast and wild body of water inundated—on this day at least—by an onslaught of waves and wind from the open ocean to the west. Waitangi and the port are tucked in behind a small peninsula in the sheltered southern corner of the bay. Upon stepping out of the shuttle into the cool, fresh air our senses were greeted by a pungent mix of sea and diesel engines and generators. We unloaded our bags onto the damp gravel driveway of the only hotel, restaurant and bar in town and made our way inside to find someone who could tell us what to do with ourselves.
Moments later a disheveled but confident woman wearing fluffy white slippers, accompanied by a fluffy black dog, welcomed us to the island. Toni and Pipi deemed us harmless after a cup of coffee and a gentle interrogation and showed us to our room, a self-contained unit attached to the store on the hill above the hotel. We were also given the keys to a black Mitsubishi Triton named “Thresher.”
The Chathams have a relatively short and tumultuous history. Originally settled by Māori seafarers from Aotearoa sometime around 1500, in their seclusion these Māori later became known as the Moriori, a peaceful hunter-gatherer society. The first bloodshed—and the modern-day name—arrived with British colonists in the late 1700s. Whalers and sealers used the islands as a base for the next 100 years or so, introducing several intolerable exotic diseases that wreaked havoc on the local Moriori population. In 1835, two displaced Māori tribes from the North Island made their way to the Chathams to claim them as their own. The Moriori honored their longstanding peaceful customs during these land grabs and were quickly reduced to a fraction of their original population, the remainder of which were enslaved. Isolation, lack of resources and exposure eventually saw most of the Māori settlers retreat to the North Island in the late 1800s. Tommy Solomon, a farmer who was known to be the last “full-blooded” Moriori, died in 1933. However, many descendants of the Moriori are still on the islands and across New Zealand today.
A statue of Solomon overlooks the sea on the southeastern end of the island near the settlement of Owenga. This area features a jetty sheltered from the weather and, thanks to Toni the hotel keeper, access to a prime piece of ocean frontage through her sister’s property. Unlike mainland New Zealand where public access is almost a given, things on the Chathams appeared to be much more guarded. That said, the locals often deemed us unthreatening and viewed our puzzling approach to catching (and releasing) fish with good humor. They knew we couldn’t—and wouldn’t—do much damage. In a culture where a large percentage of the population earns their keep as commercial fishermen and divers, efficiency is key. We were not efficient. Casting a variety of saltwater patterns both large and small at a variety of shapes and smudges was more of a crapshoot than a tried-and-true method, but we had to start somewhere.
We knew moki fed on crustations and had caught the odd blue cod on the fly back on the South Island. The cod turned out to be pretty voracious feeders and happy to eat just about anything, from a crab pattern to a full-sized giant trevally brush fly, typically preferring the latter. A 10-weight with an intermediate line proved to be a nice middle ground for the variety of species and fishing we would encounter. We made plenty of blind casts to likely water, but sighting and “feeding the fish” from higher ground was the most productive and enjoyable approach. During tide changes, the moki went from disinterestedly swimming figure-eights through the jetty pylons to very inquisitive encounters with our flies. Every fish hooked seemed to prefer a different dance—sometimes short and twitchy, sometimes long and slow. I can only imagine that dance on a shallow, sandy flat.
During encounters with the islanders, we experienced a generosity and pride—and perhaps a bit of pity—that I’ve only ever experienced in places of abundance. The surrounding ocean is so vibrant and flourishing that, at low tide, we saw pāua (abalone) literally on dry land. Upon finding out that we had only caught one blue cod after several hours of fishing, the skipper of a vessel called the Sundance gave us a bag of blue cod fillets large enough to sustain us for the rest of our stay. That same afternoon another fisherman with a Nordic braid said, “You must have confused him” in reference to our single caught fish. He lashed a snifter pot full of squid onto one of the pylons at the end of the jetty for us—an admittedly welcome assist.
Later in the week we made our way across the island to the peninsula settlement of Kaingaroa, where our host, Stan, presented us with fresh crayfish. Another fisherman, who introduced himself as Doggie, gave us fillets from the biggest trumpeter Nick or I had ever seen, a massive fish pulled up from a depth of 80 fathoms. Doggie told us, “If you have fish on the Chathams and see someone fishing, you give them some to save them the trouble.” We were appreciative of the meal, but also happy to continue wasting our time.
Few conversations in the Chathams avoid the elephant in the room—the great white shark. The islands are renowned for their hefty population and generations of stories support the lore. The islands, it seems, have been a haven for toothy critters since the beginning of time, with fossilized megalodon teeth occasionally found in the inner lagoons. I traded a 12-year-old a couple of flies for a fossilized shark tooth—he had a jar of them, but none from the prehistoric megalodon. A commercial pāua diver from nearby Pitt Island told me plenty of stories, but the one that struck me was about his brother, charged by a shark that missed at the last moment. I couldn’t help but think of how many times a brown trout has refused my streamer at the last instant. I tried not to take these stories into the water when we went for a dive the following day. I managed, but I also kept to the shallows and close to cover, like any sensible baitfish would.
The water on the Chathams is as alluring as the tropics and just as bountiful. Harvesting a dinner of pāua for us and our hosts was a highlight of the trip—and the chance to see the fish we were targeting provided a much-needed confidence boost. Toward the end of the dive, I came across two large blue moki in shallow water. The blue moki is an attractive fish, symmetrical in shape, sporting a vibrant blue dorsal fin and lips as plump as a trigger. They grow to 10 weight-bending sizes, eat crustations and frequent the intertidal zones of New Zealand waters. The Chathams experience almost zero pressure from sport fishermen, are host to plentiful white sand beaches and—according to reports—masses of these fish. Ours was a fairly simple equation, one that Nick had been dreaming of for close to a decade. Within the first five minutes of standing on the jetty at Owenga, I’d spotted a moki mooching along a bed of kelp in about six feet of water, and the same again within 10 minutes on the main port jetty at Waitangi. The jetty in Kaingaroa didn’t disappoint, either. And yet we covered miles of coastline on foot without seeing so much as a rock that fooled us into thinking it was a moki.
Perhaps it was the time of year, the weather or just a long shot that didn’t pan out. Whatever it was, we decided to stick with the age-old tradition of not leaving feeding fish to find feeding fish, even if that meant we flew all the way to the Chathams to become bona fide jetty rats. By the end of the trip the only things we were missing were a couple of lawn chairs and a cooler full of cold beer. We ended up catching what may have been some of the first blue moki on the fly, but also tangled with or gawked at warehou, blue cod, spotties, large seven-gilled sharks, rig, moki, wrasse, a lone pink ling and an infinite number of other indecipherable shapes and smudges from our highfalutin’ perch on the jetty.
Our hopes were a lot closer to the tailing-permit end of the spectrum than the bait-fishing end, but upon reflection the result was not dramatically different. And really, how often do expectations and reality actually align? Of all the places in the world, the Chathams were one of the last I expected to find myself with a fly rod in my hand, but when I was there, not unlike the islanders themselves, there was no other ocean-bound rock on the planet I would have rather been standing upon.
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