Tall tales and fishing lore from Kiwi fishing personality Cliff Barnes.

As he looks back over his adventurous life, Cliff Barnes muses that he must have used up eight of his nine lives while fishing along the Northland coast but, on a recount, concedes he has used up the lot.

Among his many scrapes with death was the time his boat was smashed against rocks and sank. Then there was time when he fell overboard and was left fully clothed and treading water as his pilotless boat 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 nothing to eat but a rotting octopus and nothing to drink but the rusty radiator water from his boat's engine.

'I must have been crazy,' is a thought that occurs to him repeatedly as he reflects on life at the grand old age of eighty.

He was certainly a risk taker and at times downright reckless, but in the end, he was one of the best, if not the best, fishermen of his generation. So much so that he was often asked 'where'd you get your fish?' But he always kept his professional secrets close. 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 the place.