Download FAR 2024/51 National Panel Survey of Marine Recreational Fishers 2022–23

Correction November 2024 Row labels in Table 37 “Groper – Hapuku/Bass” and “Groper – Hapuku only” now correctly read “Groper – Bass” and “Groper – Hapuku”.

The National Panel Survey of Marine Recreational Fishers was undertaken with the primary goal of estimating recreational harvest of all species in all areas for the season running October 2022 to September 2023 inclusive. These estimates are produced through a series of surveys.
Firstly, 36 197 addresses were approached by interviewers between July and September 2022. The purpose of these visits is twofold. Firstly, all adults at the address are screened for age group, gender, ethnicities and fishing status. This shows what percentage of New Zealanders, both in total and as members of the each group in the previous sentence, consider themselves to be marine recreational fishers in some capacity. These addresses had a 79% response rate of being screened for this data.
Secondly, when there is at least one person at the address who identify themselves as a fisher of this variety, one fisher is randomly selected to take part in a monitoring process whereby they report the details of their fishing over the coming 12 months by a combination of text message and phone interviews. The former was used to find out if the individual had fished in a given period, the latter to record further details of their catch if they had. An initial panel of 5625 fishers agreed to take part in this process, which is an 86% response rate of recruiting fishers into the monitoring component of the research.
At the end of the season, the data collected by the text contacts and phone interviews is combined with the level of fishing claimed during the original process of screening for and recruiting fishers. This process produces estimates for the harvest by New Zealand’s marine recreational fishing population for the 12 month season, along with data about the characteristics of fishing activity (method, area etc).
The 2022–23 season was estimated to have had 1 122 588 fishing trips by marine recreational fishers, a drop to 62% of trips estimated for the last NPS in 2017-18. This was mostly due to both a lower proportion of New Zealanders classifying themselves as marine recreational fishers, falling from 20.4% to 17.6%, as well as a drop of panel members reporting at least one trip dropping from 55.6% to 47.2%. This was the main reason for the national harvest dropping from 7 million finfish and 3.9 million other marine species to 3.7 million finfish and 1.6 million other marine species. The estimated numbers harvested were also combined with the most recent mean fish weights survey to also produce harvest estimates in tonnage to inform stock assessments.