Country Living – Hunting down koi

Sliding into 2022 with a banger for you, guys. By a banger, I mean I haven’t done anything this bizarre for a while, but they do say stranger things happen. Take for instance “bow and arrow koi carp hunting”. Apparently, it’s actually a thing, so I set about to investigate this strange activity.

Most of us may have travelled north before and seen the roadside signs “Report koi”, but strangely enough in my weird imagination I had always seen these signs as some sort of lost pet goldfish hotline. A type of register for obese goldfish that ate one too many cans of fish food, outgrew their little glass bowls and somehow made it into a stream. But as it turns out my imagination had fooled me again.

I met up with father and son adventure duo Lee and Gage Laughton in Helensville, and after a quick coffee, we set off to find a waterway where these koi were flourishing and proceeded to hunt them down. Now, before anyone tries to fill my inbox berating me with animal cruelty emails, heed this message. While they may shine like tinsel in our waterways, make no mistake, these are a foul, imported menace that are decimating our waterways. Basically, they are opportunistic environmental thieves, eroding our riverbanks and destroying our native plant and fish habitats. A large female can lay a catastrophic one million eggs in spawning season, so let’s sharpen those arrows and watch these men do a valuable service to our country.

The day was hot, like really hot, and the grass along the riverbanks was thigh-high and riddled with thorny blackberry. It was at this point that I cursed myself for wearing shorts. The men were carrying 54lb compound bows and fishing arrows. These have this strange contraption on the bow that looks like a fishing reel full of string, and the end of the string is attached to the arrow. This allows the arrow to be reeled back in. Gage has killer vision for koi and spots something in the water from afar. Bang! It was game on, and they bolted through the grass along the riverbed with me puffing along behind. Standing still, Gage draws his bow and within five seconds has the fish in his line of sight. Got it! First shot straight through the ribs. He reels it in. By this stage I’m just freaking with excitement. Gage crawls down the riverbank and lugs this huge monster up from the water. He removes his arrow, and I go in for a closer look. Ewww, it’s ugly up close. It has these big whisker things poking out of its cheeks and is covered in this kanky slime stuff. The lads tell me they can’t even get eels to eat them, and given eels eat anything that thought makes me gag.

Anyway, we don’t have time to waste on just catching one of these jerks, we need to get as many as possible. Off we go again, moving through the long grass and blackberry with the sun belting down on us, sweating like you would not believe. The skillset and pinpoint accuracy required to shoot a moving target in muddied water from on top of a bank was utterly fascinating to me, so I thought I would give it a go. We crept up on a school of three fish feeding near the surface and the lads gave me a quick rundown. Seemed simple enough, I thought. However, I had never tried to draw back a 54lb bow. Gawd, I just didn’t want to be a failure in front of them, but sadly I was. I tried my absolute hardest to pull it back, over and over again I tried – teeth gritted together, legs firmly planted (even trying to pretend I was giving birth), but alas I just did not have the upper body strength to get the bow string over the pulley. This failure led me to the realisation that I was never going to cut it as the female version of the next Robin Hood, so I resigned myself to being the third wheel. We trudged along that riverbank for hours and culled out heaps, all the while feeling very gratified that we were doing something amazingly positive for our waterways.

Finally, content with our haul, we packed up and headed into town where we did what any self-respecting koi bow and arrow hunters would do. I grabbed my freezer bag from the car, ran into Countdown, purchased a bag of ice, a few beers, a cooked chook, buns and coleslaw, and we sat under a nice big tree in the park.

A couple of icy cold beers, a simple meal, and achievements discussed with virtual strangers – oh how I learned and loved that day. So, the way I see it is these are the rudest fish I have ever met. Nothing seems to eat them, they breed like cockroaches, and they destroy our waterways, so let’s just get rid of them. Lee and Gage are our good sorts, busy doing good things for our environment, while others just seem to just talk about it.