July 31st, 2025Hook, Line and Misadventure: Cliff Barnes

Fishing was part of Cliff Barnes’ life from the beginning. He muses that he must have used up eight of his nine lives along New Zealand’s Northland coast but, on a recount, concedes he has used up the lot.
“I must have been crazy,” is a thought that often occurs to the father of The Local’s Kyle Barnes, as he reflects on life at the grand age of 80.
Among Cliff’s many scrapes with death was when his boat smashed against the rocks and sank. Another time, he fell overboard and was left fully clothed, treading water as his pilotless vessel motored away into the distance. On yet another occasion, he was stuck in a big marine cave on a distant archipelago for a week waiting for a storm to blow itself out, with no sustenance but a rotting octopus and the rusty radiator water from his boat’s engine.

Cliff is widely regarded as the best longline fisherman of his generation, said to have the Midas touch. But he never let anyone winkle out his secrets for the best spots. His answers ranged from evasion to outright lies. “Over there,” he would sometimes say, keeping his arms crossed and thus giving no clue to where “there” was. Other times he would say “at such-and-such an island” when he had been nowhere near.
He started with nothing – no money, no schooling, no training and very little support. What’s more, fate dealt him a few unfavourable blows on his voyage through life. Through it all, he remained buoyant. Cliff’s adventures and innovations are a testament to his intelligence, flexibility, courage – some might say foolhardiness – to take great risks; the character to pick himself up and start again when things went wrong; an immense capacity for hard work, and an intensely competitive spirit – and why he guards his secrets so closely.
His story also presents an insight into the social history of life on Struggle Street, New Zealand, in the fifties and sixties and how much times changed as the fishing industry went from being a wild-west free-for-all to the highly regulated export industry that it is today.
Cliff sees the sea – and life – with a fisherman’s eyes. His self-deprecating humour and positive attitude helped him ride out numerous hair-raising ordeals, and in the end, look back on his life as a ‘bloody good story’.

“Fishermen,” says Cliff with a chuckle, “are the greatest liars unhung”.
Cliff grew up in Wellington and Wairarapa, before his family moved to Waiheke Island. He later plied his trade as a fisherman in Northland. He knows everything he knows through trial and error. He lives in Whangerei, and on the road in his camper.
Author David Hastings is a retired journalist, historian and language teacher. He has perviously written four books: Over the Mountains of the Sea, Extra! Extra!, The Many Deaths of Mary Dobie and Odyssey of the Unknown Anzac.
Pictured, two legends at the 2015 ChillOut Festival, Daylesford’s Max Primmer and fisherman, and father of Kyle, Cliff Barnes | Image: Kyle Barnes
Below, Cliff in his fishing days in the 1980s
Hook, Line and Misadventure, published by Harper Collins, is available at Paradise Bookstore in Daylesford. For a chance to win one of two copies, head to Kyle’s Rant on page 22.
Or make the old bugger happy and just buy a copy…