Torpedo Australia?... Well... sort of!! - With the first bit of good weather for while, and with my outdoor gills starving for a breath, the call was made to finish up at work early on friday and 4 wheel drive up the West Coast of Auckland, NZ, for a spot of Torpedo Fishing, or “ Konitki fishing” on the Westcoast.

Muriwai beach is located roughly 35kms from Aucklands CBD and is an iron sand strip of beach, roughly 50kms long.

4wd-ing, horse riding, fishing and ocean swimming are among a few of the activities around Muriwai that people enjoy (here's me up behind the muriwai sand dunes in my 4wd last year)

Muriwai's also home to a huge Australasian gannet colony

We drove around 25 minutes from the beach entrance to our spot, before baiting up the 25 longline hooks needed to catch a good amount of Snapper or Gurnard ( they're the target species and great on the table !! )

The baited 25 hooks are set at around 1500 - 2000m ( 1 – 1.2 miles ) out from the beach in around 30 -35 metres (100ft) of water, we mostly use squid for bait.

Kontiki fishing is done in a “longline” style, where a central line of hooks is dragged out by a battery operated torpedo for around 30 minutes and weighted down by large sinkers.

At the end of the “soak” time, the line is hauled in via a large winch which takes another 30 minutes be bought back in.

The winch in allows for some serious contemplation time to think, and also a few carefully selected cold beverages ;)

We get a lot of sharks on the westcoast of the north island - these small sharks were released.

Here's a Snapper and Gurnard we caught.

Muriwai is a black sand beach ( iron sand ) with large sand dunes, the iron comes from NZ’s many volcanoes, and access to the beach is via 4wd only.

After about 3 hours and a few beers later, we finally got the haul in and were greeted by 8 snapper and 4 gurnard! The kids ate well that night :)

All in all a great afternoon on one of the north islands most well used beaches, and we even came home with dinner!

Until next time, keep on steeming!!