A week or so before Maike Hohnen took the fishing trip that would change his life, he drove past a building site and spotted a sign that read “Free”. Nearby, on a patch of grass, were a hundred or so plastic buckets. Instinctively, Hohnen pulled over, grabbed eight or nine of them, and threw them in the back of his pick-up truck. “When I got home I put a couple in my boat,” he says. “I thought to myself, these will come in handy one day.”
Hohnen is a keen fisherman. Well, that’s rather understating it. He started fishing commercially when he was just 14, helping out in school holidays, before turning it into a 20-year career. He has fished on German trawlers, undergone long stints on factory ships in the North Atlantic and has spent the past 11 years working off the shores of his home country, Australia. When he’s not working? “I spend my spare time fishing, recreationally,” he says.
