A keen fisherman with one arm has taken it upon himself to design a revolutionary surf-caster.

DaCinka is the brainchild of a one-armed New Zealand fisherman who needed a sinker that is easy to bait, easy to cast and one that would lure fish.

It took Dave Lenden, who is nicknamed Captain Hook, decades to perfect the design that has now been patented and just released for sale online.

“The average fisherman with a 12 to 15 foot rod with bait attached and a four ounce sinker, will probably cast somewhere between 55 and 70 metres. With DaCinka you can reach up to 40 percent further when casting,” the Coromandel man says.

“It's easy to use. You set DaCinka up as a running sinker or as a ledger rig. It comes with a breakaway grapple system or non-breakaway. Once you place the bait inside the sinker, you pour burly oil into DaCinka and tape it, it's ready to go. There are no bare hooks going around your head when you're casting. And the bait doesn't get released from the sinker until it's hit the bottom.

“I've tested them at 90 Mile Beach where the West Coast fishing is renowned to have quite a current and they sit in that really well.”

DaCinka are unique as they are suitable for rock fishing and drone fishing too, Lenden says. “They've got advantages – when you retrieve them, they lift off the bottom and come up to the surface, so you're not dragging them through the weeds and the rocks.

“The way they behave, when you retrieve them they come to the surface and they look like a fish in distress. I've had kingis and kahawai attack them.”

Lenden lost his arm, has an artificial shoulder, and a plate attached to his skull after being involved in a helicopter accident in the Vietnam War.

His physical recovery was slow, and fishing became his mental rehabilitation. However, learning to fish left-handed, with a hook for his right arm, was not easy.

“Doctors told me I’d never lift my arm above my shoulder height. I’ve got a pretty high threshold for pain. Now I can lift my arm up just like anyone else, but I don’t have a lot of strength in the shoulder. I tried to start fishing again but couldn’t cast a surf caster as well as I’d like to.

“I’m a bit of a thinker,” he says, “so I started playing around with using all different types of techniques and different weight fishing gear.”

Lenden teamed up with fellow fishing fanatic Zane Nicholson, who helped hone the final design and ready it for market. The life-long fisherman who has fished in Africa and north and south America, as he travelled the world, and he immediately saw its potential.

“When I first saw the concept of DaCinka and how far it casts, and how it acts on retrieval, I was absolutely blown away. I think it is an amazing invention.”

Rob Parker, one of New Zealand’s most successful snapper fishermen, has trialled DaCinka and declared it an absolute game changer. His first cast went approximately 180 metres, impressing him with “the way it flies and retrieves”.

DaCinka is available in a 4oz or 5oz sinker, with or without a grapple. They are made from a non-biodegradable acetol plastic compound that will not disintegrate and leave micro plastics in the ocean, but will instead wash ashore intact. And the surfcasting tape is 100 percent biodegradable.

“It protects the bait and it gets to the bottom of the ocean floor and sits there for about 90  seconds while the water dissolves the adhesive off the tape and lets the bait out. It's been a dream for years. I’m really quite proud of the product because it really does everything we say it does.”