Recently, Sir Robert Jones came up in discussion. For the uninitiated, Sir Bob is a well-known New Zealand property magnate, boxing afficionado, author and one-time politician. But it is for a single act that he is perhaps best known in this country.

In 1985, after some intriguing decisions by his political party, which we won’t go into here, a journalist team was particularly keen to talk to him. As a keen flyfisher, Sir Bob had escaped to his Tūrangi home for some peace and quiet, which was completely ruined (along with everyone else’s on the river no doubt) when the journalist used a helicopter to find him on the lower reaches of the Tongariro River.

What followed became legendary. After the chopper landed on the riverbank, Sir Bob – well, just Bob at the time – emerged angrily from the river, told the crew to bugger off, and in the ensuing ruckus, punched the journalist squarely on the nose!

Now, we certainly don’t condone violence here, and Bob was subsequently convicted of assault. However, fishing is a sport often used to find solitude and peace in nature, so the first reaction tends to be: “the journalist bloody well deserved it”!

Just to top things off, when Bob was fined $1000 in court, he was heard to say: “If I pay $2000, can I punch him again?”

Anyway, that’s just a short story to get closer to my point.

As a reader interested in rivers, I’m sure you’ve likewise had your peace shattered by all manner of things. As a fisherman, here are my top five roll-cast, eyeroll and steam-coming-from-the-ears triggers:

• Dogs – especially locals taking their dogs for a swim, saying hello before they throw a stick in the water just upstream for Brutus to lumber after. Bugger.
• Cars – while I’m fortunate to have the Hutt River close by, it does mean that the local bogan habit is to drive their prized vehicles down onto the riverbed. I’ll admit to a sly smile when they need assistance to extract their lowered utes from the gravel.
• Rafters – just as you’re casting a tiny nymph hanging from the smallest possibly indicator, around the corner emerges an orange behemoth carrying a chanting workgroup slicing your prime run with their paddles.
• Swimmers – squealing kids, having oh so much fun, and oh so much splashing!
• Stone-skippers – that may be a world-record number of skips, and I know they skip best aimed upstream (top tip right there), but did it really need to whiz past my line?
  

But the thing is, all these things have a place on the water. No one person, or thing, owns the river.
And I’ve been many of those things. As a youngster: skipping stones, throwing the biggest rock I could manage to make a splash, throwing in a stick to try to hit with stones, drifting down on a Lilo, and many, many swims. These are things that made me fall in love with rivers in the first place.

But we were also taught to be courteous and share the river with others. To find your own space, not to throw stones where someone was fishing, to control the dog.

And so, I have finally got to my point – sharing the water.

Recently I turned up at a small tributary of the Hutt River which I hadn’t fished before and had high hopes. It was mid-week, so I hoped to have the place to myself. After parking and gearing up, someone else pulled up. He walked over to chat, saying he was down to take his dogs for a run. I said that was fine, I would just head further upstream. Not a fisherman himself, but he said he’d seen fish at the start of the track, and that he would drive to another spot. What a legend.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen that way, so when your relaxing river trip is interrupted, take a deep breath, have a chat, but always remember that this is water to be shared. After all, nature is being kind enough to share it with us.

Unless a helicopter buzzes you of course – that’s just rude.