Room 4's Search for Whitebait

On Wednesday the 1^st of March we visited the Company Ditch with the Tasman District Council Waimaori programme co-odinator, Melanie McColgan. Waimāori is a free monitoring, education and action programme that encourages schools and communities to become kaitiaki (guardians) of their local streams. 

It was really cool learning about how to use the periscope to look in the water to measure how far you could see.    – Mason.

It was fun trying to see where the black circle was. I could see it to about one and a half metres.   – Samantha.

It was really interesting to listen to what Melanie was saying about whitebait. She showed us how to use the nets.   

  – Samantha.

We had three water snails in it, two were really small. They were sort of an orangey colour.    – Rosa.

There was a lot of slime. We put our nets down. There were lots of fish but they wouldn’t go in the net.   – Kate.

Mynaia and I were looking at the grey mullet.  – Lexi.

Liam was the best at catching the fish. These are grey mullet.    – Fern.

I caught a fish. The little grey thing is it in the bottom of my net. There were heaps but they were hard to catch.    – Nikau.

Melanie showed us where the eggs will be laid in the grasses.     – Ngaio

The fish were zooming around us as Melanie was talking to us on the bank.   – Samantha.

We loved seeing the fish in the river.     – Mason.