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Tangaroa on station for new millenium dawn

NIWA staff will be assessing hoki stocks on the Chatham Rise over the New Year period and Tangaroa will be about 80 kilometres northeast of Pitt Island on the morning of 1 January.

"It will be a working dawn — business as usual — because hoki move from midwater depths back to the seafloor at sunrise and our surveys start from the time each day that the fish are settled back near the seafloor," said the science leader for the survey, Dr Mary Livingston.

"Of course we’ll have a little celebration to mark the occasion. After all, our NIWA team will be making a little piece of history in carrying out the first fisheries resource survey of the new millenium."

Tangaroa will be about 200 kilometres west of the international dateline on the eastern extremity of the 800 kilometre long Chatham Rise that runs west-to-east off Banks Peninsula.

Hoki form New Zealand’s most valuable single species fishery, worth over $200 million a year, and they are a major target species on the Chatham Rise. The Rise is also the main nursery ground for hoki, so it is a key area for assessing the abundance of juvenile stocks. The survey will also assess stocks of hake and ling, which are among the other important fisheries on the Rise.

The 4-week survey is funded by the Ministry of Fisheries, and Tangaroa is due to sail from Wellington on 27 December and to return to the capital on 22 January.

The scientists and crew may first glimpse the dawn before millenium sunrise watchers on Pitt Island.

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