The Kontiki: New Zealand’s Most Relaxing Way to Fish

I wrote this in 2016 or 2017 during the two years I lived in New Zealand. Some details — prices, hours, what’s open — may have changed, but the experience and my love for this place haven’t.

I had never heard of a kontiki before I moved to New Zealand. Turns out that’s not surprising — kontiki fishing is uniquely Kiwi, and the rest of the world has been slow to catch on.

The name comes from Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage, when he crossed the Pacific on a hand-built balsa raft to prove that Polynesia could have been settled by voyagers from South America. By the early 1950s, Kiwi beach fishers were already calling their homemade contraptions kontikis — early versions included a storage pallet with a plywood sail and an inflated tractor tyre. Only in New Zealand.

The modern motorized version is a relatively straightforward system in theory. The kontiki itself is a torpedo-shaped device with a propeller on the bottom. It has a long line trailing behind it with baited hooks, and you set it in the water, point it toward the open ocean, and off it goes. You wait a reasonable amount of time, pull the kontiki back to shore, and hope there are fish on it. Some people mount a winch on the front of their vehicle to retrieve the line; others bring a portable crank to the beach. The latest models have GPS guidance systems and can travel up to 1,800 metres offshore — a long way from the inflated tractor tyre days.

It may not be the most efficient way to fish, but that’s not really the point. The point is that you’re sitting on a New Zealand beach with a cold beer while a small torpedo does all the work for you. That is a very Kiwi approach to a problem. There’s a video below that shows how it works.