\u201cHis vessel and fishing gear were seized by the officers. The man is likely to face prosecution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Video sent to the Herald by a witness shows a large number of p\u0101ua being sorted and inspected by an officer.<\/p>\n
The witness said he was at the beach and \u201chappened to drive past the tarpaulin with all of the p\u0101ua spread out on it\u201d. <\/p>\n
He estimated the largest p\u0101ua was about 70-75mm. <\/p>\n
According to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), the minimum size of an ordinary p\u0101ua must be 125mm, while the daily limit per fisher in the Auckland-Coromandel area is 10.<\/p>\n
A man was caught with about 200 undersized p\u0101ua in Castor Bay. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was quite frustrating and sad to see something that was still so juvenile be taken from the Hauraki Gulf where you didn\u2019t think that they even existed,\u201d the witness said.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We need to] start protecting our beautiful resource here in the Hauraki Gulf just a little bit more than this or else we\u2019re not going to have something soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
The witness said the man had chosen \u201ca very obscure place to launch from\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just looks like he\u2019s trying to avoid or be able to get out of the water with as little attention on himself as possible. So I think [Fisheries New Zealand] has done a fantastic job here.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell done to the [Fisheries] guys. And to whoever shared that information too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blackwell thanked the public for the information, saying it helped protect our kai moana resources. <\/p>\n
Fisheries New Zealand encouraged people to report any suspected illegal activity through the MPI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHis vessel and fishing gear were seized by the officers. The man is likely to face prosecution.\u201d Video…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[78777,2840,74,3952,1561,206265,9525,1359,127948,27917,42,24176,78,46660,5158,43,529,23421,16509,81396,18484,35108,206266,40,38,41,39,54252,102,3603],"class_list":["post-399503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-78777","tag-across","tag-after","tag-aucklands","tag-bay","tag-castor","tag-caught","tag-described","tag-fishery","tag-frustrating","tag-headlines","tag-hundreds","tag-in","tag-intercepted","tag-man","tag-news","tag-north","tag-officers","tag-pua","tag-sad","tag-shore","tag-spread","tag-tarpaulin","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-undersized","tag-with","tag-witness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}