I don’t know if the Kontiki is a New Zealand thing or not, but I had never heard of it or seen one until I moved here. I still haven’t seen one in action but I’ve been promised the opportunity this summer!
It’s a relatively straight-forward system in theory — the Kontiki itself is a motorized torpedo-looking thing with a propellor on the bottom. It has a long line out of the back with hooks on it that you bait and then you set the Kontiki in the water, point it to the ocean and off it goes. You wait some reasonable amount of time and then you pull the Kontiki back to shore and hope there’s a fish (or two or three) on it. Some people mount a winch on the front of their vehicles to pull the Kontiki back in and some people have portable cranks that they bring to the beach to help get the line back in.
It may not be the most efficient way of fishing, but it is nice and easy and can be done while camping on the beach and sipping a nice cold beer. There’s a video below that shows how it works and the featured picture for today is of my brother-in-law Paul and their Kontiki.
Wendy's Gone Walkabout 
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