By Judy Schultz.

After a dozen trips to New Zealand, I finally get it.

When you live on a couple of islands with more than 15,000 kilometres of coastline, you’ll want to eat fish. Lots of it.

Which is how we end up at the Auckland Seafood School, where I manage to break a wine glass even before we start. Brilliant opener. My fellow cooks applaud.

“If you really want to get into fish, this is the place to begin,” says a fish-loving friend, Elle Armon-Jones. Through her company, The Big Foody, Elle explores every nook and cranny of Auckland’s vibrant food scene. Tonight we’ve both registered in a class called Thai Seafood, which is really about fresh, local seafood from the downstairs fish market, cooked Thai-style. It’s one of 14 different classes offered this month.

Before heading into the kitchen-lab, everybody watches a one-hour demo by an enthusiastic chef. She stresses fresh ingredients (cilantro stems, limes, galangal, basil, lemon grass, palm sugar, fish sauce) and how to combine them for authentic Thai flavours. On the menu tonight is prawn toast and steamed local salmon, from the cold waters of the Marlborough Sound. The flesh is deep red-orange, like wild North Pacific salmon.

Elle and I chop and grind ingredients for the prawn toasts while my husband, Ed, pins the bones from a side of Marlborough salmon, cuts it into pieces, lays it on a bed of sliced limes and smothers it with fresh herbs to steam. Eventually we all sit down for a long, convivial evening: eat, drink, and make new friends over a fish dinner.

So if the 5am wake-up call in our Auckland hotel seems a tad early, it’s OK. I want to be at the fish auction when the bell rings.

Auckland isn’t the biggest fish auction in the Pacific Rim, (Tokyo and Melbourne are bigger), but it’s the only one in New Zealand, and this morning, 40 to 50 buyers circle the bins with practiced eyes. The Dutch auction is based on declining price, so it moves fast, and a sale takes only seconds.

Most of the buyers are from fish and chip shops. Important chefs from busy restaurants send somebody over to shop, and the others are buying for fresh fish counters all over New Zealand.

The day’s catch is stacked in bins of chipped ice, each marked with the name of the fishing fleet, the name of the catch, and G for green (the entire fish) or D for dressed: headless, gutless. In a vast, cold room with a fresh, deep-ocean smell, the fish are beautiful to behold. This morning, many of them seem to be red, orange, or some shade of it, with flashes of silver and blue.

The longer I’m in New Zealand, the better I like eating fish, and maybe the infinite variety, 150 sustainable species in these waters, is the reason. This morning for instance, there’s gurnard (my favourite), tarahiki, kahawai; ling, moki, mullet; monkfish, sowfish, spud, leather jacket; red scorpion fish, pink maumau, and gorgeous, ruby-red alfonsino; a bin of skate, with giant graceful blue-gray wings and close-together eyes. I love to watch these guys swim past a dock.

A flat gray fish, John Dory, has a pronounced mark on the side, like a thumbprint. “It’s the fingerprint of St. Peter,” says a fisherman. “When this fish spots a predator, it turns sideway. The predator thinks it’s an eye, and backs off.”

Speaking of predators, we have sharks. A massive fish, dressed, but still hanging out both ends of its bin, is a bronze whaler, a fairly big shark often seen basking in Manukau Harbour.

There are rumours that a Great White was recently spotted in a bay near us, on the Awhitu Peninsula. A woman was cooling her dog when the shark suddenly appeared, lunged at the dog, and missed. Or so goes the story.

I have my doubts. I’ve seen Jaws, and I met a man in the Chatham Islands who lost his left arm to a Great White. He had a knife and a spear gun. Great Whites don’t miss.

There’s this young fisherman. His green hoodie is rumpled, his wellies are flopping (no socks). Cell phone in one hand, coffee in the other. He’s been at sea overnight, probably longer, and he’s a happy man. The weather has been good. So has the sea.

“Beautiful!” he says. “Blue, calm…beautiful!” He talks about the ocean as a poet would. He free-dives for kina, holding his breath, staying under until he finds what he’s looking for. What he sees down there enchants him, as it has four generations of his family before him, fishermen all.

Kina is spiny sea urchin, of which only the creamy yellow roe is edible. Kina-lovers eat it raw, or warmed on toast. It tastes of melon, they say. Of mango or fruit salad. (They lie. It tastes fishy.)

“If you find a good patch, you’ll soon have your limit,” the auction manager tells me. He spear fishes for fun. Me? I won’t be paddling around down there with a little mesh bag, holding my breath and praying not to meet a Great White. Not in the near future.

Auckland is chock-a-block with fishmarkets, fish restaurants, ubiquitous fish-and-chip shops. Upmarket, downmarket – fish for all, and all for fish. After a morning of bouncing around town with Elle, who is part foodie, part fisherwoman, we end up for a late lunch at the Viaduct Harbour, where Kermadec is one of Auckland’s premier spots: service, wine, view, fish. Especially the fish.

We start with squid, soaked in goat’s milk to tenderize the flesh, then fried. It’s golden, crispy. “We used to bash these on the rocks to tenderize them,” Elle recalls. She used to work in Greece, in a restaurant on the beach. Thus the bashing.

Here comes the chef with the main: golden pan-fried skate wing, stuffed with fresh herbs, garnished with small white clams under a kafir lime foam, in turn garnished with clusters of tiny perfect sea grapes. They look like jewels and taste like the sea. The texture is poppy, like the best caviar, and every nibble produces an explosion of deep-sea flavour. It’s like eating the ocean.

If you go

If you’re off on the Hobbit trail, with only 24 hours for beautiful Auckland, the Big Foodie can provide a whirlwind introduction to regional seafood and wine, including the fish auction, the world-famous Auckland Seafood School and the Big Picture Wine Experience. Advance booking is essential.

One of Elle’s favourite waterfront activities is The Big Picture, a new wine attraction in the same building as the fish market. It’s a fast introduction to New Zealand wines and winemakers, a flight of six wines paired with food samples.

Check out thebigfoody.com for details; also see thewinexperience.co.nz; and afm.co.nz.