Yes! I love it Geoffrey. You love it? Of course I love it! We are lucky to live in
a country where we can head out and catch a feed of fish just about any time we like,
but with our fisheries coming under increasing pressure, it's important
that we take only the fish we need, and return the rest unharmed, particularly small fish.
Unfortunately they often swallow the bait and are hooked deeply, injuries which are usually fatal.
I'm too good.
But we can change our approach, especially when it comes to the hooks we use, and one person who
studied this problem closely, is Paul Barnes. Now Paul, you've been doing a lot of research on
hooks, haven't you? Yeah I certainly have, I've done two projects for the Ministry of Fisheries
(now MPI), the latest project we've caught over ten thousand fish, so yeah we've got the numbers.
Got the numbers, ten thousand snapper? Yep. I wish i was there! And this is a regular hook,
a Jarvis Walker hook which is what most people use a hook of the shape, but the your ones are totally
different aren't they? Tell me the difference. Yeah these, the ones that we found are a better
hook are actually ones that are recurved, where the point points below the eye. One of the main
things the Ministry of Fisheries was interested in is reducing gut hooking in snapper. About 30 of
our catch can be gut hooked, and when that's under size you release it. Ninety eight percent of gut
hooked fish die, so we have these incessant arguments about how can we have more fish.
I think that what the Ministry wants us to do, is actually kill less, but still take as many home.
Okay well that's obviously something we should be aiming at is to reduce the gut hooking, and these
fish though have a better hook up rate in the first place too don't they? Yeah now you've got to
remember that we've done our tests on long lines, so probably the results that I'm about to give
you would be appropriate if you've got your rod in the rod holder and you're just stray lining.
The recurve hook catches three times as many as the J shaped hook that you've just shown.
So we figured well these are obviously the hook that we want to start with.
Another incidental difference is that the J-shaped hook has got gut hooking rates up to 30 percent,
these ones gut hook about 18, so it's still significantly high,
but it's a hell of a lot better than the previous ones. One of the other things is that these,
as they come straight out of the packet, they seem to catch more small fish, which was an
issue that we had to deal with later on in the project. Okay, so what was the solution to that?
The solution we came up with Geoff, was we put these wires on the back,
and these are similar to what we came up with some years ago for the commercial sector,
and when the Ministry of Fisheries done a major analysis, I think they spent a hundred
thousand dollars, they went out and run tens of thousands of hooks. By putting the wire on the
back of a normal long line hook, it reduced mortality in released fish by 98 per cent.
The other thing that happened, was it reduced the catch of undersize fish by
50 percent, and we found a similar outcome with these hooks that have the better catch-up rate.
Put the wire on, halves your catch of small fish, and you you're still getting 20
more than a Jap hook, and still two and a half times as much as your J-hook. They're a great
hook. Well that's obviously the way to go, if we can cut down the numbers of small fish we catch
also cut down the number of fish that swallow it, more hooked in the mouth, you can release
them whatever the size. So these will be available soon to the fishermen? Yeah they will, and I mean
the thing is you kill only what you want to keep, everything else you can just let it go.
Time to put these new hooks to the test, and we wanted to see how such small hooks would
perform on good sized snapper. Will they catch big fish as well as they hook the smaller fish?
And where will the fish be hooked? Will it be in the corner of the mouth? We decided that a
trip to Great Barrier Island would provide plenty of action, and a good workout for Paul's hooks.
Of course on such a trip, where it's purely for research, we had no trouble finding a crew
prepared to do the hard work on the rods. Ray, Butch, and Paul were into the fish straight away.
We figured that having fishermen who know their stuff would be an asset, and they caught fish.
I think I'm hooked.
Good fish, the system works nicely, works beautifully!
It's a pretty small looking hook for when you catch some big fish on it,
but how do you put the bait on? We actually got a 32 pounder during our trials Geoff.
I like to use big hanging baits on these hooks, particularly if I'm fishing them off of a rod,
for example if you're putting a squid on fairly important have the bait
hanging below the hook. I normally just pop it on like that, and put it through twice.
Put it through twice. And that's exactly the same as the tuna fishermen use for their big eye tuna.
Obviously their squid's a little bit bigger and their hooks are a bit bigger, but yeah that works.
You can see how that would give you plenty of movement, You know you jiggle it, looks like it's
swimming. Well you'd have a tricky job putting your pilchard on those little hooks wouldn't you?
Well we've thought through that one Geoff, and what I've done is I like to just snell another
hook a little bit up in front of it, and I just hook one through the head, which is a tough part,
bring the other one down, straighten it up. Always get in under the backbone there,
and that's it. Simple aye. Yes simple, beautiful. Yeah I like it when you can put them on quickly,
because you lose them quickly when you're fishing you know, and you've got to be able to get it
back in the water. That's easy. Absolutely, and they always go for the guts, and quite often if
you miss the fish you, wind up with it with them just biting straight through there, you've still
got a bit of head still on there. Yeah they'll come back and get it. Yeah a lot of those fish
yesterday were taken just like that. But these wired hooks are not the only innovation that Paul
has come up with, you always find fish over a reef or over kelp, but this can present problems. You
get hooked up on the bottom, lose a lot of gear, and the fish are not always right on the bottom.
He's given this some thought as well, and come up with an innovative system.
Now Paul, tell me about this new system of yours with sliding traces. How does that work? Well it
actually works a couple of different ways Geoff, but the critical thing is that you need to have
a swivel at the end of your line, a bead or something to protect the knot,
and then a little weight running up and down above it. When you're fishing over reef,
you just have like a drop line. Yep. But I always have clip-on weights so you can change them out,
whatever weight suitable for the rip, clip that on to the swivel and you can chuck that
over the side. As long as you keep hanging onto the sinker in your hand then we just take the
trace, and I've just got a normal sea harvester clip on the end of that,
you clip the trace over the thing (mainline) and it just runs up and down. So as soon
you drop the line drop over the side of the boat,
it just slowly drifts down to the bottom. This is how the system works. The main line with the
appropriate weight for the current and the depth, is dropped to the bottom. The bead protecting the
knot over the swivel follows. Then the trace is clipped on and slides down the main line.
The small weight above the clip is released, and the trace slowly sinks down in the current.
And how high you want a fish off the bottom can be controlled by the length of line between the
bottom weight and the swivel, and of course the length of trace can be varied too. Well the last
three fish that I caught Geoff, I put the pilchard on upside down and it seems to be working.
So I found the biggest pilchard, because we've got some bloody nice fish swimming around here.
Put the biggest pilchard I can find on, hopefully we'll catch the biggest fish.
Paul's been the number one fisherman today, the second day of the trip,
pulling them in and we want to try and get a big one to finish
up with. So he's put on a big pilchard, fingers crossed. See what happens.
Once again the sliding trace system did the damage. This time on another rod.
The big bait was barely down before the snapper was on, and it was a beauty!
Ray can you pull that off?
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I like the little reel (Shimano Calcutta)
Wow it's got plenty of sting in it. Just comes to a certain level,
and then seems to uh change his mind. There he goes.
Yeah I haven't got the drag that tight though, got some fraying on my mainline.
Ahh you should be able to pull him in on that trace. Just not that, the trace. All right.
Well done Paul, that's the fish of the trip.
Straight in the lip again. And he's on that little hook, just in the corner
of the mouth. He's bent the wire, he's trying to chew through it.
I've got it released. That's a good fish, beautiful fish. What do you think it would go?
15, 16 pounds. Ahh, 13 pound? Yeah Butch the expert reckons 13 pounds. We'll put him on
the scales later, thank you. Well done, see the sliding trace, the Target hooks, works magic.
You can get the new Target Snapper Hooks and catch fish like these. You will benefit from five years
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Results also show that snelling the trace instead of tying
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