scifish6

My most successful experiment in fishing happened when I was out in
Steven Seeto's boat one night, with Steven and one of his friends.
Steven's technique was to steam out to a well-know reefs, check the
depth on the echo-sounder, drop anchor, set up a pressure lantern on a
pole above the boat to give us a light to work by, and start
bottom-fishing. Mostly he would catch what were know locally as "red
emperor". These are not quite the same as the red emperor caught in
Queensland waters, but good-sized fish, and plentiful too. For some
reason, they were not so plentiful on this particular night.
As things were rather quiet I decided to rig up as if trolling for
mackerel, with a lala on ganged hooks, but without a sinker. I dropped
the bait in the water and gradually fed line out as the bait drifted
away from the boat on the slight current. More and more line went out
as the current seemed get faster and faster. Then I realised that
there had to be a fish taking the bait away. I let some more line out,
tightened the drag and sharply lifted the tip of the rod. I had hooked
a large fish. It turned out to be a good-sized mackerel, which we were
able to boat without difficulty. Steven and his friend quickly decided
to try this new technique and were just as successful. We were kept
very busy for the next hour or so. Sometimes we would have three fish
hooked up at once and there was great excitement as we stumbled around
the boat, passing rods under and over each other, or under the anchor
line.

We caught over 150 Kg of fish between us that night. Analysing this success
later, I worked out what had been going on. Our light attracted small fish --
we could see them zipping around the boat. They were probably feeding on
even smaller creatures that we couldn't see. Next up the food-chain were small
barracuda. We knew they were there because we sometimes accidentally
caught them as our baits were on their way to the bottom. At the top of
the food-chain were the mackerel, attracted by the light too, but loitering
twenty metres or so from the boat. What I found most intriguing in all this
was that at night the mackerel did not strike at the baits. They must
have just picked them up in their mouths and slowly swum away with
them. I've not been able to come up with an explanation for this
altered behaviour.

David and I had other ideas which we didn't get around to executing.
For example, the chart showed a place where there is a pinnacle rising
out of really deep water, hundreds of fathoms deep, to reach forty or
fifty fathoms at the top of the pinnacle. We talked about using metal
fishing line and motor-driven reels to get to this depth and bring our
catch back, but we didn't have access to gear like this. I'm sure the
results would have been phenomenal.

Eventually, scientific fishing came to an end. David went home to
England and, a year or so later, I moved to Lae, then back to Australia.
Now I live over a thousand kilometres from the sea. Sometimes I
rummage through my old tackle- box, reminiscing about those happy years in
Wewak and daydreaming about a time when I can once again apply the
principles of scientific fishing.

Howard Stephenson

22 September 1997