But unlike other fishing stories, this one is set to have a happy ending when a frustrated fisherman is reunited with his wandering crayfish pot.
Peter Lungley, of Mosgiel, told the Otago Daily Times he was fishing about 7km off Moeraki last week when he spotted a buoy in the water.
Mr Lungley, who owns a small crib at Kaik 2, at Moeraki, left the buoy where it was, assuming it marked a crayfish pot in the area.
However, days later he noticed the same buoy had washed into the bay at Kaik 2.
When nobody collected it, Mr Lungley eventually retrieved it from a tangle of seaweed and found an empty, collapsible crayfish pot tied to the bottom by a length of rope.
A name and phone number was scrawled on the side of the buoy, so Mr Lungley picked up the phone.
''I gave this guy a ring and said `are you missing a crayfish pot?'.
"He said 'yeah, I am'.
''I said `well where did you plant it?'. He mentioned some point, which I'd never heard of, and I said `where's that?' and he said `Stewart Island'.''
The buoy's owner, Phil Cotter, of Invercargill, said he set the pot off Bradshaw Peninsula, on Stewart Island, on Boxing Day.
He returned two days later to check it, but ''it wasn't there''.
It appeared the buoy and pot had been taken by big seas and then pushed by the current hundreds of kilometres up the South Island's east coast, Mr Cotter said.
''It definitely travelled a long way. It would have gone all over the show,'' he said.
Mr Lungley said a northeasterly wind appeared to have eventually blown it into the bay at Kaik 2.
''It's travelled all that way and the crayfish pot was good as gold ... nothing wrong with it.
''There's no crayfish in it, of course,'' he said.
Mr Cotter said a friend planned to collect the buoy and pot from Moeraki this weekend and return it to him in Invercargill.
Getting it back would be ''a bit of a surprise'', he said.
''I thought it was gone forever.''
