On Friday 10 February the NZ Herald featured “One in 5 retirees to leave the city.  Of 555 surveyed 24% will downsize.  Research by the ANZ Retirement Savings Barometer found 20% of Aucklanders surveyed plan to leave the city, but 49% don’t know where they will live.” 

So look out Turangi, although any walk along the banks of the Tongariro River will confirm this little slice of heaven has already become a retirement village literally! 

Turangi is one of the few retirement tourist towns where residential property is still affordable at sensible prices.  Holiday accommodation like motels are even more under priced. 

Anglers are very selective and discovered the perfect place to retire yonks ago.

The biggest demographic of them all comes from Tourism Business magazine which features an article claiming this population aging is without precedent and is “a process without parallel in the history of humanity“.  In NZ those aged 50 and over make up 34% of the population.  It suggests targeting those older visitor requires a different approach as older visitors differ in both their physiology and their psychology.  

But any statistical survey of anglers confirms this fly fishing has already developed into the perfect sport for geriatrics – confirmed by licence sales data.  (See report last Monday on TRM inmate, Bill Hawkins – 84 years young…) But it does not make sense that the significant increase in elderly pensioners fishing licence sales has not stopped the huge decrease as licence sales which have fallen by almost half in the last 12 years? 

So TRM asked DOC and F&G for any analysis from licence sales to confirm the pattern of increasing age of anglers – which you may find interesting – as follows:

Reply from DOC: I have extracted what I could using limited data from our angler licence database.   Note: This is a sample of the first 20,000 licences sold from the 1 July 2016. It is difficult to clearly differentiate the proportion of fly fishers versus lake anglers but the below charts should be relatively indicative based on the time of year purchased (winter). Reply from Fish & Game: