Rídan The Devil And Other Stories

by Louis Becke

  SEA FISHING IN AUSTRALIA

  'Hi, mister, turn out, please, if you're a-comin' with us,' a gruffvoice called out to me one frosty morning in May, and then a hairy,good-humoured-looking face flattened itself against my window pane asthe owner sought to peer into the room.

  I jumped out of bed, opened the window, and shivered in my pyjamas asthe keen morning air rushed in to the warm room. Slaney, the coxswainof the Port Macquarie pilot boat,{*} was standing below me on the grassyside walk, muffled up in his great coat, and carrying a shin of beef inhis hand.

  * Port Macquarie is a quaint 'old' seaport on the northern coast of New South Wales.

  'How does it look outside, Slaney?' I asked.

  'Smooth as glass. Hurry up, please. I've just come from the butcher's,couldn't get any fish bait last night, so bespoke a shin of beef.'

  Five minuses later I had dressed, and was running up the hill to thepilot station with my fishing tackle, together with some sandwiches,some bottles of beer, and a tin pannikin, slung in a corn sack over myshoulder--not a very elegant turn-out, but the correct thing for suchrough and tumble work as schnapper fishing. At the top of the hill Istopped to give myself breath a minute. An impatient 'Hallo there, _do_hurry,' ascended to me from beneath, where the smart pilot boat layrocking on the waters of a little cove, cut out of the solid rock by thelabour of convicts seventy years before, her crew of six men standing upto their knees in the water, and holding her steady. Tumbling down thegrassy hill at the risk of breaking my neck, I waded out and clamberedover the side, and in another minute the crew were bending to their oarsand the boat sweeping round a clump of conical rocks that shelteredthe boat harbour from the long roll of the Pacific billows. Oh, what alovely morning, and how the blue ocean glinted and sparkled in the quickwarming sun. Away to the southward the high, thickly-timbered coast wasbroken up by jutting headlands and little, irregularly shaped bays, withsteep, rocky shores; and northward a long sweep of beach trended in acurving line for ten miles, till it ended at the purple sides of PointPlomer, beyond which loomed the misty blue outline of Captain Cook's'Smoaky' Cape.

  The wind was from the westward; so we hoisted our lug sail, and headedseaward to the sun. Behind us the noisy Hastings River bar clamoured andmoaned unceasingly; for though the sea was smooth, the tide was on theebb, and rushing fiercely out over the wide but shallow entrance tothe river, and short, angry waves reared, and tumbled, and fought theroaring current. But in another ten minutes the noise of the watersbecame lost in the distance, and we heard, naught but the gentle_lip-lap, lip-lap_, of the boat's cut-water as she slipped over theswelling seas. Three miles out we took our bearings from a mountaincalled The Brothers, and Camden Haven Heads, and then dropped our anchorin twenty-two fathoms on a rocky bottom.

  There is not much 'finnicking' preparation for schnapper fishing, andin five minutes every line was baited, and over the side, and at thebottom, and before another two or three had passed we knew we had struckthe right spot, for nearly every one of us felt the unmistakable tugof a lusty schnapper, and then the determined downward pull, strong andsteady, which he makes when once hooked. Slaney, who was using a line asthick as signal-halliards, was the first to haul his fish over the side,and drop him, kicking and thrashing like a young porpoise, into theboat; the rest of us, whose tackle was much thinner, were a long waybehind him, and Slaney's line was over the side again before our fishwere laid beside the first arrival. What a beautiful fish is a ten-poundschnapper--a brilliant pink back, sides and tail, dotted over withtiny spots of a wonderful, gleaming blue that sparkle like miniaturediamonds; the bream-shaped head a deep reddish-purple, with nose andlips of palish pink; the belly a pure, shining white. No wonder thatPhillip, the first Governor of New South Wales, spoke of the schnapperas 'an exceedingly beautiful and palatable fish.'

  For about an hour we continued to haul up fish after fish till ourarms ached. The smallest weighed about three pounds, the largest aboutseventeen pounds, and the average weight of the lot was about eightpounds. Then we knocked off for breakfast. That finished, we lit ourpipes and settled down to work again. Alas! a swarm of ugly brown andyellow 'leather-jackets' had arrived on the scene, and before our linescould touch bottom the brutes would either take the bait, or bite offthe hook snoozings with their keen, rat-like teeth. In a quarter of anhour we had caught but four schnapper and lost a dozen or more hooks;my own line was bitten through at about five fathoms from the surface--apiece of meat skin had wound itself round it and had been discovered byone of these predatory villains. No wonder that the Samoans and nativesof the Tokelau Islands term the leather-jacket _isumu moana_--thesea-rat. However, as leather-jackets make excellent schnapper bait, twoof us were told off to fish for them with bream-lines and wire-snoozedsmall hooks, and we soon had the satisfaction of catching a dozen of thethieves. These were quickly skinned and cut up; then we lifted anchorand pulled southward for about half a mile, knowing we should catch butfew schnapper where leather-jackets were.

  Our new ground proved a lucky one, for we not only caught some seventyschnapper--some of them truly noble fish--but two magnificent blackand white rock cod, a fish whose flavour is excelled by no other inAustralian waters. No leather-jackets appeared to disturb our pleasure,and not even the usual murderous shark showed his ugly face, and playedthe usual game of seizing every schnapper as it was hauled up, andbiting it in halves. Only the previous week half a dozen had followed usabout from ground to ground, breaking our lines, and taking five outof every ten fish we hooked. Two at last we succeeded in harpooning andkilling, and casting their bodies to their friends, who made short workof them and left us alone for the rest of the day.

  Schnapper in the winter months, on the Australian coast, retire to thedeep water, and can be caught in from thirty to fifty fathoms. Theytravel in droves like sheep, and prefer to frequent rocky or brokenground. Sometimes, however, they will enter the bar harbours in greatnumbers and ascend the tidal rivers. Twenty-five years ago they wereoften taken in nets in the Parramatta River, near Sydney, and werevery plentiful in Sydney Harbour itself. Nowadays one is rarelycaught anywhere inside the Heads. Steamboat traffic and the foul waterresulting from sewerage has driven them to the deep waters of the ocean.One peculiar feature of schnapper fishing on the northern coast of NewSouth Wales is that, be the fish ever so plentiful and hungry, theyinvariably cease biting immediately, if the wind should change to theeast or north-east. Yet on the southern seaboard, from Twofold Bay toGalo Island, they will take the hook during a black north-easter, asfreely as they do when the wind is blowing from any other quarter.

  From one end to the other of the coast of New South Wales, there isgrand rock-fishing to be had by anyone who once is initiated into itsmysteries, and is not afraid of getting an occasional drenching froman ocean roller when there is any sea running. Right from the southernboundary of the colony to the Tweed River on the north, are breaks inthe long sandy beaches, of rocky coast, which in most places are easilyaccessible to the fisherman; and the water in these spots beingdeep close under the verge of the cliffs, the deep-sea fish, suchas schnapper, blue and brown groper, the gigantic mottled rock-cod,trevally, king-fish, the great Jew-fish, sea salmon, etc., at certainseasons of the year cruise to and fro about the rocks in extraordinarynumbers. But, strange as it may appear, rock-fishing is almost unknownto the average colonial, except those living near the principal ports.The greatest ignorance, too, prevails as to the edible qualities of themany varieties of excellent rock-fish, except the well-known schnapper.The generality of the coast settlers look upon most coloured fish as'bad to eat,' if not 'poisonous,' and particularly so in the case ofthe delicious blue groper or blue-fish, the 'leather jacket,' and thescaleless bonito, which latter occasionally visit the shores of thecolony in large 'schools,' and take a bait eagerly.

  My boyish experiences of rock-fishing in New South Wales are full ofdelightful memories. Then, accompanied by one of the few survivingmembers of the Hastings River (Port Macquarie) blacks,
my brothers andmyself would set out for a week's camping-out on the wild and lonelycoast between Port Macquarie and Camden Haven--a stretch of twenty milesor so. Our equipment consisted of some very heavy lines and hooks forthe big fish, some fine tackle for beach fishing--for bream, whiting,flathead, etc.--a couple of spears for cray-fish, an old smooth-borearmy musket and ammunition (for shooting ducks on the tidal lagoons),tea, sugar, as much bread as we could carry, and a tomahawk. As fortents, such luxuries were unknown to us boys in those days; if it showedsigns of rain at night time we could soon put up a bark shelter, and,with a pair of light blankets under us, sleep in peace.

  One of our most favoured spots was at Tacking Point, a curious steep-tobluff, clothed on its sides with a dense thicket scrub, the haunt ofhundreds of black wallabies and wonga pigeons, and also a large variety,of brown and black snakes, with an occasional death adder. The summit,however, was beautifully grassed, and clear of timber, except for aclump or two of gnarled and knotted honeysuckle trees; and here, afterour day's fishing, we would camp, and, lying beside our fire, look outupon the starlit Pacific two hundred feet below. Although only fivemiles from the little town, we scarcely saw a human being during ourmany trips. Sometimes, however, some of 'Tommy's' sooty relatives wouldfollow us up, in order to gorge themselves on fish and game, which weshared with them cheerfully.

  My first groper was an exciting experience. Descending to the rockyshore very early in the morning with 'Tommy,' we clambered over somehuge jagged and wildly-jungled-together boulders at the foot of thebluff, and reached the edge of a large, deep pool of blue water in therocks, with a narrow opening to the sea. The sides were covered withlong streaming kelp and many-coloured seaweed, which moved gently up anddown to the rise and fall of the ocean swell. Only in one part could wesee the white sand at the bottom of the pool, for the depth of water wassome six or seven fathoms. Both blue and brown groper are very fond ofcrabs; in fact, when a big, wary fellow will not look at either a pieceof octopus or the flesh of the _aliotis_ shell, he cannot resist a crab.We soon secured plenty of crabs of all sizes and colours, and, baitingour lines with two of the largest, dismembered the others, andflung portions of them into the pool. A number of small parrot-fish,sea-bream, and mottled cod at once appeared and devoured the fragments.The size and hardness of the shells of our crabs, however, were too muchfor them, and although they snapped off a leg or two and 'worried'the baits considerably, our hooks touched bottom safely (we were usingsinkers of stone). Suddenly, just as my companion had thrown anotherhandful of 'burley' into the water, three big blue groper rose to thesurface almost together, and, swallowing the crushed-up crab, beganswimming round and round the edges of the pool eagerly seeking for more.This was my first view of this species of groper at close quarters, andthese three presented, a very beautiful sight, the very dark blue of thewhole of their closely-scaled, shining bodies, and the very light blueof their fins and tails making a pretty contrast. Two were about 15 lb.to 16 lb. each, the other about 35 lb. to 40 lb., and nearly four feetin length. They swam but slowly, though every now and then they wouldturn with some swiftness of motion as 'Tommy' continued to throwin pieces of crab. Meanwhile, by my black companion's whisperedinstructions, I had cut the sinker off a spare line, and baited thefour-inch hook with the two largest crabs left. Unreeving about sixfathoms of line, I handed the baited end to 'Tommy,' who deftly threw itjust before the nose of the big fellow. In an instant he had seizedthe hook, and, diving, made for the opening between the rocks. 'Tommy,'yelling to me to look to the other lines, held on like grim death andmanaged to turn his prize's head in time; the two others sticking closeto their brother in misfortune. I had just hauled up one of the othertwo lines, and was running round the jagged side of the pool holding theother in my left hand (so as to keep clear of 'Tommy's' fish), whenI felt a terrific tug that nearly sent me over. 'Look out! Look out!'shouted 'Tommy,' warningly; 'don't let that fella get underneath theseaweed; keep him clear of dat, or you lose him!' For a 16-lb. fish hepulled tremendously (for a boy of my size); but at last I managed toget a steady strain on him, and then his big blue head, with its thick,negro-like lips, soon appeared at the base of a slanting rock, up whichI hauled him, kicking and floundering. 'Tommy' meanwhile had alreadylanded his fish, and had cast his line for the last of the trio; butwithout success; he had made off to the sea.

  A few hours later, at low tide, we caught, in the same pool, sevenschnapper, averaging about 8 lb. each; a brown groper of 20 lb., a dozenor more of deep sea bream, beautiful silvery-scaled fish, with a palegreenish tinge on the head and back, and bright yellow fins and tail;and several huge cray-fish, which clung to our hooks and did not let gotheir hold in time.

  This pool was only one of many along this picturesque and rocky coast,along which, at the present time, fish are just as plentiful and as easyto catch; but four years ago I, on visiting 'the' pool of my early days,found it filled by a pile of soap-stone rocks, detached by the rainsfrom the sea face of the bluff above it. It was a bitter disappointmentto me, for the memory of that pool had remained with me since myboyhood, and I felt as one who, after a long, long separation in foreignclimes from some dear friend of his youth, at last returns home, hopingto meet his comrade once more, and is shown his grass-grown grave.