Slip sliding away into sea
Rock fishing is wicked dangerous, unless you treat it that way. Because the sea sucks. We intuitively understand that danger abides in its darkened depths, or in roiling open waters. But we’re less intuitively alert to how hungry it is around the edges.
In effect, not intent. There’s nothing malevolent about this. It’s just the practical upshot of a combination of forces. Water makes rocks slippery. Tidal actions include the occasional overachieving wave which arrives powerfully and retreats the same way.
So the rock, or even gravel or sand, underneath the fisherman’s feet can be lubricated to the point of tractional treachery as the hapless human figure is swept away.
The unwary and ill-prepared may drown; most recently a couple fishing from rocks at Auckland’s Muriwai Beach.
Mu Thu Pa, in her distress, held out a fishing rod to her drowning husband Kay Dah Ukay, and joined him in losing her foothold on land and life.
A loss bitterly felt by their family. No less so for it being part of a familiar dynamic.
Auckland’s west coast has long been a problematic area for coastal fishing safety. Earlier this year it was reported that drones would be used helping locate fishermen in strife and to figure out the fastest, safest way to get to them. And – far more old-tech – there’s been some provision of what our Australian friends would call angel rings, but we would recognise as life buoys attached to a stout piece of rope near the water’s edge.
None of which remotely addresses the need for the people to approach their recreation with an educated sense of caution. And that applies as much to southerners as anyone else.
About this time last year 29-year-old Invercargill man Shan Norton McLauchlan, fishing off jagged rocks at Black Point, near Slope Point, disappeared into the sea.
It’s a good place for blue cod but truly dangerous in rough seas. And even when things look comparatively placid, the normal safety calls need to be made.
Take a lifejacket or belt. Show an intelligent interest in swell and tide information. And the weather.
More than that, though, spend at least 10 minutes observing sea conditions before approaching the rock ledges and if waves and spray have obviously been sweeping over them, forget it.
And don’t turn your back on the sea.
Then we have gumboots. How often do we see that? All going well, they’re gumboots. If all isn’t going well, they’re water-filled sinkers. Sports shoes are better.
If any or all of this sounds more familiar than compelling, consider that the same could perhaps be said for the annual roll-call of rock fishing fatalities which average about four a year.
If that strikes you as unscary, factor that against the numbers who actually go rock fishing, and those who are able to save themselves, are rescued, or merely bang themselves up with a good hard, damaging fall – the concussive sort rather than the rock-rash inducing ones – and the sanguine approach starts looking shaky indeed.
‘‘Spend at least 10 minutes observing sea conditions before approaching the rock ledges and if waves and spray have obviously been sweeping over them, forget it.’’