Maori Fishing Calendar for June, July August 2006 . good luck regards Bill.

Here is an article I wrote recently about the calendar you might find interesting:

We caught some excellent snapper on a calm day at the 40 meter mark, drifting.  The best fishing was around 12 noon, in the blazing sun, and flat calm sea. Some say that catching fish in this situation is not very likely.  Well it happens to me all the time, and its all about the bite times really, when its time for the fish to start eating, they don’t really care about how hot the day is, whether it’s lunchtime or not, or what the sea is doing, its time to eat so that just get on with eating.  This brings me to my topic for this week, comparing what the different fishing calendars have to say about fishing predictions. I noted an article in one of the fishing papers the other day talking about how different the fishing calendars are, and in particular some Maori fishing calendars.  My Maori fishing calendar is below, and it’s solely based on my research and notes from fishing over the past thirty five years or so using the cycles and phases of the moon.  Most fishing calendars are based on the phases of the moon.  Maori fishing calendars have been passed down through the ages, and where ‘written’ by fishermen who had the time and patience to note what was happening with the fishing in relation to the moon, and the seasons.  Each tribe had their own version of a fishing calendar established by fishing ancestors probably centuries ago. Over a lunar month (about 28 days) some days were good for catching fish on a line and hook, some days were good for netting, some days where good to go after eels and flounder, and some days where just a waste of time fishing wise.  You need to remember that when these calendars were being developed the fishing would have been 100 times better that it is nowadays.  The estuaries, harbours, and beaches would have been full of fish, the shellfish beds plentiful, and basically the bottom line here is the fish food chain was still intact.  No commercial pressure what so ever.   The people who caught them ate the fish caught.  A few may have been traded with inland tribes, but by and large fish was the staple diet of the coastal tribes.  They also knew how to conserve their fish stocks, and a fishing protocol was established and adhered to to make sure things stayed that way.  The fishermen of the tribes established the Maori fishing calendars, and there are many tribes around the coast of New Zealand.  And this fact alone means that not all the calendars will be the same, communication in 1552 would have been by runners.  You didn’t fax information to the tribe 100 miles up the coast to compare notes on fishing.  No fishing was and is a very serious business.  If you find that great fishing possie, you keep it to yourself, tell no one, it was like that then, and it’s like that now.  I very much doubt that any of the current fishing calendars in the fishing papers, on yearly calendars that people buy, or in any other media have been researched fully by the people to have produced them.  By that I mean they have taken a set period of time, 5 years would be a good comparison, gone out each day, and night for that matter and recorded the fishibility of each day in relation to the phase of the moon, and recorded how long the fish bit for, which phase of the moon fished better than others, and published their findings? The people who did go to all this trouble to establish a fishing calendar were around centuries ago, and their finding have been taken and turned into print by the people who followed many centuries later. This information wasn’t because the local people wanted to know when it was a good day to go fishing it was done as a matter of survival.  In the 1920’s a man called Elsdon Best wrote a book called ‘Fishing Methods and Devices of the Maori’ and it was published in 1929.  This book is available in Public Libraries, and if you’re really interested in the Maori Fishing Calendar, get this book out and have a read.  It talks mainly about eeling and how they relate to the moon phases, but the overall principal is there.  Mr Best spent many years with the Maori mainly in the Wanganui region, interviewing the elders on fishing, and after many years of doing this, came to publish his very interesting book. 

The Bill Hohepa fishing calendar has taken information from a variety of historical sources, including Mr Best’s book, and combined this with actual fishing research taken over the past 30 years on when and long they fish bite in relation to the moon phases, and come up with what I consider to be a reasonable result. There are so many variables with fish and their feeding habits and the affect the moon has on that; to say that any one fishing calendar is the absolute gospel of fishing is like saying that the weather forecast for 2 days time, will happen exactly as predicted…year right!

So to conclude, the fishing calendars good, fair, bad etc are only a prediction and that’s all they ever can be.  It’s up to you the consumer of this information to decide which calendar has the most merit given how many times it produces fish on the day and times predicted.  So there you go, happy fishing.