A man stands on the edge of a rocky outcrop on Wellington’s coast clutching an armful of black shells to his stained black T-shirt.

He’s been told not to, that he’ll only make things worse for himself, but he starts flinging them back into the shallow waters regardless.

Their return to the ocean can barely be heard over the waves breaking gently on the shore.

Two Fisheries officers, Allan Gilmour and Korban Aitken, watch on. Gilmour holds a blue plastic container he had planned to put the pāua in before the man took matters into his own hands.

It’s midweek in the capital. We’re on Great Harbour Way, a narrow road that snakes around Wellington’s south coast. We’ve pulled up in the white Fisheries ute in an area known as Little Beach between Mahanga and Scorching Bays.

The two officers approach a group of friends milling around a black SUV to check on their catch. Two others are still diving in the shallows.

After a bit of a chat, the officers ask to look in the car boot. Inside are two containers holding wet gear, scuba fins and what the officers believe are between nine and 13 undersize pāua.

“Whose pāua are these?” Gilmour asks.

“What pāua?” the man replies as he gets out of the front passenger seat and comes around to see what’s grabbed the officer’s attention.

He says he doesn’t know who the pāua belong to. And he tells them he hasn’t got his driver’s licence on him.

After further discussions, he scoops up the pāua and wanders towards the water’s edge.

His efforts to dispose of the evidence, his refusal to give officers his name and his general demeanour escalate the situation. Police are called.

A standoff develops as everyone waits.

At the same time, divers emerge from the water in short wetsuits and booties, one holding a green sack of kina. They place those in the back of the black SUV. One of the group cracks open a beer.

As the wait continues, two cars pull up, one with a tino rangatiratanga flag. A passenger winds down the window and calls out.

“Hey bro, what’s the viz like?”

“Good,” one of the group replies.

“A metre?” someone in the car asks.

“Yeah,” someone in the group responds.

Police sirens can be heard approaching, the cars do a U-turn and head to another bay further up the road.

The Fisheries officers speak with police who they called for assistance after finding a man suspected of having undersize pāua on Wellington's south coast. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The first police car arrives. Aitken approaches and explains the situation to the officer.

More police arrive. Now there are four police cars with eight constables.

Gilmour explains that if it looks like overkill, three are part of the team policing unit, and always travel in a group, accompanied by a couple of community cops from the Kilbirnie station.

Police soon work out they aren’t all required and, after assessing the situation, half of them leave.

The man gives his details to police, but by returning fish to the sea, he has escalated the incident from a fine he would have received in the mail to being summonsed for an interview with Aitken and Gilmour the following week.

Destined for Auckland

There are eight Fisheries officers responsible for policing Wellington’s fishery which runs from Whanganui on the west coast to Lake Ferry on the east.

In monitoring both commercial and recreational fishing in the area, they concentrate their efforts on the large natural harbour, where there’s ready access to pāua, kina, crayfish and scallops. There’s also butterfish by spear and kahawai and snapper can be caught with a hook.

The officers’ work is both sea and shore based and is largely weather dependent. But even on a bad day, it’s still possible to get out on the water.

In a northerly - Wellington’s predominant wind - there’s always the south coast and Petone. In a southerly, they can head towards Eastbourne, Evans Bay or Mana Island.

Weekends are busier than weekdays. However, some of Atiken’s biggest seizures have been in terrible weather during the middle of the week, or at night.

“People who are seriously poaching they’ll go out usually when it’s quieter and the weather conditions are worse, because there’s fewer people out and they’re less likely to be seen.”

Allan Gilmour, left, and Korban Aitken are two of eight Fisheries officers in charge of a huge area from Whanganui to Lake Ferry. Photo / Mark Mitchell

In 2023, he had his biggest prosecution - three men were caught with 393 pāua.

It started after a routine patrol to Eastbourne where he noticed a man in the bush, which he thought was strange.

He waited for the man to come down and inspected his catch of five pāua. With a legal catch and no reason to hold him, he sent the man on his way.

But something didn’t quite add up. He’d given the same man an infringement for exceeding his quota two weeks earlier.

Aitken retraced the man’s steps back into the bush. There he found sacks of pāua and scuba gear he’d been using to collect the haul. It’s illegal to dive for pāua using scuba gear.

“They had their dive gear sitting in the bush waiting, and then they’d go and harvest large amounts of pāua into sacks and then presumably they’d come back at night to pick up their booty.”

In another instance, Aitken was part of a search warrant that found 682 pāua in a freezer. The haul was destined for a distributor in Auckland. On the black market, pāua fetch about $10 each, about half of what they retail for.

“At the moment what we’re finding is a large market in Auckland. A lot of people will poach down here and then it’ll get stockpiled for a week or two in a deep freeze somewhere and then transported to Auckland.”

There’s also gang involvement, especially in Wellington. “It’s another commodity for them, another way of making money,” Gilmour says.

Those who break the rules typically fall into two groups. They either make a small mistake, maybe taking one or two undersized pāua, or they set out to blatantly rip off the system.

And because all interactions are logged with the communications centre, the officers are able to check if they’ve dealt with someone before.

Facing some ‘argy-bargy’

A Fisheries officer’s kit includes stab-proof vests and body cameras. While they’re trained to defend themselves, their first priority when they encounter hostility is to de-escalate the situation.

Allan Gilmour, left, helps Korban Aitken put on his stab-proof vest as they prepare to head out on patrol. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The cameras prove useful in court, providing a verbatim account of interactions.

“They are hearing how you are trying to de-escalate the situation and all you are getting is abuse,” Gilmour says.

Aitken says he is surprised more Fisheries officers haven’t been assaulted in their line of work.

While calling police is rare, the officers say that’s indicative of some of the people they deal with. They are increasingly facing “argy-bargy” and would like pepper spray in their kit as another tool for when people get aggressive.

‘I didn’t know the rules’

In the first 11 months of 2024, 431 people were issued with infringement notices nationally for breaching fish and seafood size limits, while a further 30 were prosecuted. In the same timeframe, a further 257 infringements were handed out for breaching daily catch limits and 115 people were prosecuted.

The most common excuse officers hear is that people don’t know the rules. To which they ask, “What effort have you made to find out the rules?”

The limits are well publicised, and every species has a particular limit, even baitfish. Limits vary from region to region.

Other common excuses include people gathering seafood for someone else, or the measuring tool they use must be faulty.

In the central and lower North Island, there’s a limit of five pāua per person per day of a certain size.

Undersize pāua and those caught with less than twice the daily limit attract a $250 fine or a warning. It’s up to the diver to ensure their catch complies with the legal limits.

If the catch is twice the daily limit, but less than three times the daily limit that’s a $500 fine. Anyone caught with more than three times the daily limit – 16 pāua or more – faces losing the gear used to harvest their catch, including their vehicle.

Fisheries officers Allan Gilmour, left, and Korban Aitken say species limits are important. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The carpark at the officers' Petone base has half a dozen impounded vehicles, including a church van. There’s also a boat and a jet ski, both on trailers.

A judge decides if a person gets it back once their case is concluded, unless they can prove extreme hardship, in which case their vehicle is returned.

Any fish and shellfish seized are laid out on tarpaulins, measured and recorded before they are returned to the sea. Even those that are seized and placed in an exhibit freezer are eventually returned to the ocean.

Gilmour believes that without catch limits, there would be no fish at all. He uses the example of pāua where the limit was halved from 10 to five in 2023. With the amount of poaching that goes on, the lower limit is working, he believes.

“It’s open season,” agrees Aitken. “If everyone goes out and they’re like, ‘well everyone else is taking 50, then I’m going to take 50 as well,’ then it’s all gone. Whereas if everybody knows that they can only get their five pāua, then they can work with that.”

Even so, the pair agree there are some offenders who, no matter how often they are caught, wil keep offending. They rattle off the names of several offenders who have done prison time or are on home detention for continued breaches of the Fisheries rules.

‘I panicked’

A week after police are called to Little Beach, the man is interviewed by Aitken and Gilmour in their Petone office.

The 47-year-old tells them he panicked that day and threw the shellfish back, fearing his gear would be confiscated.

From there, the officers prepare a file which will be sent to the Ministry for Primary Industries legal team, who’ll decide whether to charge the man or not.

If charged, the man’s likely to appear in the Wellington District Court later this year.

Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.