A diver was allegedly caught with 249 pāua near Blenheim on the weekend, almost 50 times the daily limit.
MPI fishery officers patrolling the Kaikōura coastline say they caught a Blenheim man with the illegal haul in the Cape Campbell area on Saturday morning around 5am.
From the stash, 111 of the shellfish he had caught were undersize.
"Our people saw this diver – a local man from Blenheim, gathering the pāua and stashing it in 3 suitcases,” said Howard Reid, MPI regional manager fisheries compliance.
“When they approached him at his vehicle, he backed up the vehicle near the water, dumped the cases in the water before fleeing the scene.”
Police were then called in and he was pulled over in his vehicle shortly afterwards.
Reid said the man had been diving in the very early hours of the morning so had gone to significant effort to evade detection.
“The fishery officers recovered the pāua, which the man admitted gathering," he said.
The investigation is ongoing, and the man is likely to face prosecution.
The Kaikōura pāua fishery only just reopened on December 1 for three months, after being closed for five years because of seabed damage caused by the 2016 earthquakes.
The daily limit is five blackfoot pāua per person with a minimum legal size of 125mm.
"The long-term future of this important fishery is reliant on people following the rules – they’re there to protect the resource," said Reid.
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