| Scientific Fishing -- page 5 |
| I have no time at all for the type of fishing becoming popular these days: catch and release. To me, bringing the fish home and eating it is part of the game. Even worse than the catch-and-release fisherman is the big-game fisherman who catches a giant marlin, brings it back to the wharf so that he can be photographed standing beside it at the weighing gantry, then having the fish ignominiously dumped at sea the next day. What a disgusting waste of such a beautiful creature! Perhaps I have a not-so-latent cannibal streak: for me, eating the catch is part of fishing. Of course, as we weren't able to eat all the fish we caught, we would freeze and sell much of our catch, thus performing a useful community service and paying for our running expenses. We continued to refine and extend our scientific approach to catching fish. For example, we would often see schools of mackerel tuna. No matter how much we trolled lures through the schools, we would never get a strike. Obviously, they were feeding, so why would they not strike at any of the various lures we tried? Eventually the answer came: they were feeding on very small fish, perhaps only two centimetres long. So we rigged very small lures, two or three centimetres long, with small hooks. Sure enough we started to catch mackerel tuna. We used two kinds of lure with success. One had a lead head and a skirt made of dyed feathers. The other one was simply a few strands of white cotton tied onto a small hook. There were other experiments with lures. The one most easily available to us was the plastic squid, in various sizes and colours. We rigged this with a bullet-shaped sinker inside it and one or two hooks in amongst its tentacles. Although it was reasonably successful at catching certain types of fish, such as large trevally, it was not very successful with mackerel, partly because it rarely survived even one strike -- the mackerel's teeth would tear it to shreds. And lures seemed to attract smaller mackerel than those we caught trolling whole fish. Reasoning that this was because most lures have no swimming action when towed through the water at the slow speeds we considered necessary, I made up a Kona-head lure, using a ten centimetre or so length of broom-handle whittled to shape and painted yellow. To this I bound a skirt made from a scrap of yellow cloth, which was not the ideal material: something like feathers or tufts of fine monofilament nylon would have been better. On its first outing I ran it just behind the boat to test its action; it looked good. I let out some more line and in hardly any time at all there was a strike. It turned out to be a smallish wahoo, a species we rarely saw around Wewak. Although this was a promising start, I didn't persist with this lure because we were having so much success with the lala. |