| Scientific Fishing -- page 2 |
| Yes, we are going to start on the scientific fishing now. Equipped with a new boat, a handline and a few lures, I set out to catch fish. I would troll back and forth in deep water close to likely-looking reefs. Occasionally I would catch a fish, maybe a trevally or a small barracuda. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, while using an Abu Killer lure, I had a tremendous strike. Fifty metres or so behind the boat a black marlin, weighing perhaps 100 Kg, reared waist-high out of the water. Then the line slackened. I pulled it in to find that the 40 Kg stainless-steel trace had broken. After that I went to 60 Kg. traces, but never again hooked a marlin, nor even saw one, although we often saw sailfish leaping out of the water. The next step on the path to scientific fishing was meeting David Theobald. Like me, he enjoyed water-sports and had plenty of spare time. We soon became good friends. He and I would go out trolling after work once or twice a week, with no more success than before. We knew there were fish out there -- we often saw large Spanish mackerel rocketing out of the water like submarine-launched Polaris missiles. Other people were catching them. Wewak's most successful fishermen at that time were cousins Richard and Stephen Seeto. They always caught fish and usually caught plenty. David and I would speculate whether they were using oriental magic, or possessed some kind of secret knowledge handed down through generation after Chinese generation. In other words, we were jealous of their success, and we wanted to emulate it. We realised that the Seetos caught fish because they knew a lot more than we did and, even more important, they were serious about their fishing, whereas we would fish when and where it was convenient, using whatever gear was easiest to get hold of and use. Nor did we take advantage of information that others were, it turned out, quite willing to give us. And so scientific fishing was born. We wanted to catch mackerel or, to be more precise, narrow-barred Spanish mackerel, known in game-fishing circles as the tangigue. First, after watching how the Seetos did it, we learnt how to rig baits. When trolling for Spanish mackerel, the Seetos would always use whole fish baits. The preferred variety was the lala, a twenty or so centimetre long relative of the mackerel canned in vast numbers by the Taiwanese. It was readily obtainable fresh from the local market. Three ganged hooks were fed into the mouth of the lala. The distal hook (I'll use the medical term because we are now getting into the medical field, as you will see in a moment) poked through a slit cut under the belly. The slit was closed with a blanket-stitch and the sutures continued forward to close the mouth and tie the eye of the hook to the fish. We found that a stainless-steel post-mortem needle and 2/0 black braided silk were ideally suited to rigging the baits in this way. Don't ask where the needle and thread came from. Before each fishing trip, we would rig up ten or a dozen of these baits and suspend them in the freezer with a length of steel trace attached to each set of hooks. On the boat we would keep the baits in a small foam cooler until they were needed. If we were lucky and the fish were biting -- and they usually were -- we would need to rig up more baits while we trolled. An essential item for our fishing trips was another small foam cooler containing six or eight stubbies of SP. We had a bottle opener and gimballed stubby-holders screwed to the gunwales port and starboard. I was nominated purser or, to be more accurate, barman. |
