A water safety course aimed at Māori who dive for kaimoana in the Bay of Islands aims to bring down the numbers who drown.
Of the 90 people who drowned in Aotearoa last year, 19 were Māori.
Water Safety New Zealand described the rate as "alarming and disproportionate".
"When the hui mate [funeral] happens you don't decide when people die. And we get a phone call in the middle of the night or something and we know that someone's passed away. And the calls are made out and sometimes you don't have a decision in terms of not being able to go, you have to go," explained the general manager of Waitangi Te Awa Trust, Te Maapi Simich-Pene.
They must also feed thousands during Waitangi commemorations at Te Tii Marae, which helps explain why leaders believe it's important to train rangatahi and young leaders like Sammy Ingley in water safety.
On the day Newshub joined a group of four freedivers on a boat driven by Paihia Dive's Craig Johnston, Ingley was going to be put through his paces in a simulated blackout.
"I'm excited, I'm real real excited," said Ingley. "When I first began my diving journey I could happily say that I was nervous."
In the exercise which counts towards his freediving qualifications, a colleague pretended he had blacked out and Ingley dived 10 metres to recover him and then simulated administering rescue breaths. He passed with flying colours.
"It's really important for me to learn these things, so I can take them back to my people and teach them," said Ingley.
The 30-year-old has two children, both of whom he wants to take out to the ocean to learn how to dive safely.
It's a far cry from the days when Simich-Pene began his journey fetching kaimoana perched on a tin dinghy in unsuitable attire.
"The old woollen bushman's singlet and the goggles and a knife. And that's what the old man threw us in the water with," said Simich-Pene.
Nowadays the focus is on personal protective equipment in a safety-first approach.
Veteran freediver Sam Judd, who runs a community-based shellfish monitoring project with citizen scientists, recognised that goes hand-in-hand with water safety.
"If you can connect people to nature and make it fun to learn skills like science and maths and make it fun to be safer in the water then people are going to be safer in the water."
Judd has taught water safety to scores of freediving rangatahi. It's his mission to help save lives.
He himself has blacked out twice and used rescue breaths to rescue a mate who had blacked out, a mate who has four children.
"In that moment, if I hadn't been there to deliver the rescue, he was going to die," said Judd.
Judd wants to expand the programme across the country and Simich-Pene says it's working.
"We're all in it for our tamariki and our mokopuna and the generations to come and trying to expose them to these sorts of things. But yeah, it's about the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next," said Simich-Pene.
Ingley agreed: "Safety is just paramount bro, you've got to look after everybody's safety when you're in the water - it's a dangerous place," he said.
A dangerous place but if you put safety first there are also many beautiful sights, experiences and taonga.
