Northland fisherman Cliff Barnes has had more brushes with death than most of us have had hot fish dinners.
He's fallen off his fishing boat and watched it chug off into the distance, he survived in a cave for a week with nothing to eat but rotting octopus, and nothing to drink but rusty water from his boat's radiator.
Cliff's story of growing up in the fifties and sixties in a struggling Kiwi household and then making it his way in the wild west of fishing around New Zealand is told in a new book by retired journalist David Hastings 'Hook, Line and Misadventure: Stories from legendary Kiwi fisherman Cliff Barnes'.
The book begins with a favourite line of Cliff's ... 'Fisherman ...are the greatest liars unhung'.
Photo: Supplied
