Bow Fishing.

Bow fishing is an awesome way to spend a few hours.
For me it is the almost perfect combination of hunting, archery and fishing, and I love all three of those!

You don’t need much to get started, and you certainly don’t need fancy equipment either.
I started with a basic recurve bow and simple bow fishing kit comprising of a fiberglass fishing arrow, and a bow fishing reel with a line holder bottle and 20m of braided line.
I don’t know what poundage it is, probably about 50pound line, its fairly strong.
We’d all like to imagine ourselves fighting huge fish and needing such high poundage line, but in reality its so that when you miss the fish and shoot into a weed bed, or a log, you can drag out half the weed bed and get your barbed arow back without going swimming.
Although I’ve had to go swimming once or twice too…

The fiberglass arrow is solid and heavy, and has a barbed point on it. There are different designs, but basically it just needs to not pull out of a fish so you can retrieve it.

I started off shooting “off the shelf” and trying the "instinctive" aiming method, which worked ok but requires a bit of practise if you want to hit anything. When aiming you also need to remember to account for the refraction of light as it leaves the water on its way to your eye.

Simply speaking the fish is not where it looks like is it, it is actually deeper and slightly closer to you, so always aim deeper. I usually aim for the stomach or just below it, depending on the depth of the dish and how close it is to you. If it’s right at your feet don’t compensate much, but if its 8meters from the bank, aim low.
The best way I can describe this is if you have ever cleaned the bottom of a swimming pool, as you push the brush further away from you the pole appears to have an angle in it as it enters the water, it suddenly bends further away from you then continues down towards the brush. You know that the pole is as “straight as an arrow” (pun intended) and that it travels from your hand to the brush in one straight line, but there is an optical illusion as the light coming off the underwater section of the pole exits the water on its way to your eye. After a few missed shots you’ll figure it out.

After trying the instinctive route for a while, the OCD part of my brain took over and demanded that I have some sort of aiming point. So I made myself a very crude sight pin out of a TipTop ice-cream tub. Works like a bomb and I still use it today.

The reel is not for fighting fish, its just for getting the line back into the bottle. Once I’ve shot a fish I drop the bow and hand line the fish in. Once I’ve killed it with a good knock on the head, I take my arrow out of it, and then reel the ‘no tension” line back in to the bottle.

I find the bottle (line holder) that the reel comes with is a little too small and sometimes the line gets knotted up as it gets pushed back into the bottle. This causes a problem the next time you shoot as the line needs to flow freely as it comes flying out the bottle. The way I solved this was to get a slightly bigger bottle. Lewis Road Creamery chocklet milk bottle is the perfect size and the thread matches perfectly to screw in to the reel.

With my stupid long 32” draw length I was always worried about stressing the little recurve past its limits, so I kept an eye out for an old compound that could take my long draw length.
After a while my patience paid off and I found a 30 year old Hoyt which I picked up for a hundred bucks. Those 30 year old cams are small and round, and so nice and smooth and easy to draw, I think its set at about 40 pounds, which is 23 less them my usual Mathews, but still more than ample to easily shoot through a carp at any bow fishing distance. A friend of mine who is a bow exert made up a new string for it and we managed to squeeze an extra inch of draw length out if it just with the new string, and its now the perfect bow for bow fishing!
I’ve named her “The Cougar”.

To practise bow fishing I have a small foam block used for stopping normal archery arrows.
I take the barb off the point so it can be pulled out of the block, then I put the block on the grass and I climb up onto my outside garden table, so I’m shooting at a steep down hill angle, just as you would be if standing on the river bank. With my single pin TopTop sight, I can hit that block from 2m out to 10m. Realistically 10m is a long shot at a fish with a basic bow and wonky heavy arrow. Most shots will only be around 5m.

When it comes to actually fishing, you can walk the bank, or fish from a boat, as long as its stable enough to stand up in.

From the legal side, as far as I know you can bow fish for any marine species, as long as they are over the size limit. When it comes to fresh water species, game fish, i.e. trout, and indigenous fish like kokopu and ells are not on the menu as they are protected. (Ells might not be protected, but they should be!) The only freshwater species I know of that you are legally allowed to shoot is carp, often called koi carp, and the big introduced species, grass carp. I’m sure the introduced brown catfish that is found here in Waikato and Auckland would also be acceptable.
Luckily for me, the Waikato river downstream of the Karapiro dam is full of carp, and the further downstream you go the more there are!

I love bow fishing for carp from a boat in the lower Waikato river around the islands at Rangariri and lower down, but my all-time favourite is wading (anything from knee deep to waist deep) through flooded grasslands and trees when the river is up, “sight fishing” for carp. You move very slowly and keep a good lookout for cruising carp, then you stalk them while wading, and shoot them.
It’s the ultimate “walk and stalk” hunting, fishing, shooting combination!

Its considered poor form to leave dead rotting fish on the river bank, so I have a “stringer” that I thread them onto which I tie onto my belt, and drag a line of dead fish along behind me while I’m shooting. We usually bury them all at the end of the day. I used to take them home and burry then in the garden, but my wife has not forbidden me to bring any more carp home. Actually she has forbidden me to bring any more dead things home, period.
But I take that as meaning they are not allowed in the house.
So just remember to take a spade along with you when you go bow fishing.
If you fillet them and freeze the fillets they make excellent bait for snapper. My son caught a huge snapper on carp fillet! And yes you can eat them but they taste like mud.

From an environmental point of view, carp are INCREDIBLY destructive, and are a major invasive pest. They have bread into the millions and have caused the seemingly irreversible destruction of most of the shallow peat lakes in central Waikato, as well as major degradation of every river system that they are found in, so get out there guys and shoot em! There is an annual bow fishing carp classic in the lower Waikato every year, and the bow fishers take out 3 or 4 tons of fish over a weekend, but of course that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to whats still out there.

Sweet review Pete.
Catfish, carp, rudd, perch and few others cannot be returned to the water at all, and are not allowed to leave the bank alive.
Catfish are in the Waikato river. I have caught many and eaten of over at lest 10 years, get them about a km up from huka falls. Where the water is fresh and clear and moving. I don't eat lake or dam fish cause of that muddy taste.
Some good tips in the review and some very nice fish.
Hopefully I'll make it next years carp shoot.
Cheers Pete, great post. Obviously a great bow fisher as well.