Worldwide Cookbooks

The Consumer Viewpoint

SIMPLE ITALIAN COOKERY

American Woman's Home

Art of Living in Australia

Cooking Eggs

Elegant Art of Dining

Guide to Marketing and Cooking

Italian Recipes

Meal Preparation

School and Home Cooking

Physiology of Taste

Tried and True Recipes

Library of Cookery

Hans Christian Andersen . American Fairy Tales . Grimm's Fairy Tales

Aesop's Fables - Tales with Morals . Mother Goose . Mother Goose in Prose

DRIFT-NET AND OTHER DEEP-SEA FISHING.


Important though the beam-trawl may be, there is another mode of deep-sea
fishing which deserves to be well known by us in Australia, and
which undoubtedly must come into general use before we can make any
pretensions with regard to our fisheries. I refer to that by means of
drift-nets. As the trawl is absolutely necessary, on the one hand, for
capturing fish which frequent the bottom, so, on the other, the drift-net
is essential for those whose resort is the upper portion of
the sea. It is by this method alone that fish like the herring, the
mackerel, and the pilchard--which may be termed surface fish--are
caught in great quantities for food supply.

Now, in Australia, we have vast shoals of migratory fish visiting the
coast at different periods of the year. During the winter season
enormous numbers of herrings come to these shores, and are permitted to
depart without any effort being made to capture them. Attention has
been repeatedly called to this strange neglect in our fisheries, for
this herring is plentiful and is considered to surpass the famous
Scottish herring itself in flavour. The mackerel, too, is to be met
with annually, generally about midwinter, in immense shoals, passing
near the coast upwards in a northerly direction. The sea mullet also
makes its appearance towards the end of the summer months, usually from
April to June, at the very time when it is in splendid condition and
full of roe. It is always observed to be proceeding towards the north
in successive shoals and in great numbers. Many consider its richness
and delicacy of flavour to be unequalled. The driftnet system of
fishing would be well adapted for it--if the meshes were larger than
those for the herring--as when fully grown it is nearly two feet in
length. And lastly, it will only be necessary to speak of the "maray,"
which is practically the English pilchard. As with the fish just
mentioned, it is met with about midwinter, passing up north in
countless numbers, sometimes covering miles of sea.

As the name implies, drift-nets are not worked from the shore, but they
are "shot," as the saying is, in the open sea, and allowed to drift in
whatever direction the tide may take them. Each drift-net will measure
about 180 feet in length by about 30 feet in depth. They are secured to
one another at the ends to form a long single line, perhaps two miles
in length. By means of floats the nets hang perpendicularly in
the water, thus forming a long wall against which the fish "strike,"
and get enmeshed by being caught in the gill opening. The nets are kept
on the stretch by being "shot" in the face of the wind, and the vessel
from which they are paid out, being to leeward of them, drifts more
rapidly than they do, and consequently keeps them well extended.

My object, however, is not so much to enter into the details of these
different methods of deep-sea fishing as to indicate their value and
necessity, if we are to have any fisheries worth speaking of. I shall,
therefore, do no more than briefly mention a few other modes of fish
capture. Thus, at the mouth of the Thames, thousands of tons of sprats
are caught every winter by means of the large bag net, known as the
stow net. In shape it is like an enormous funnel, 30 feet high, 20 feet
wide, and nearly 180 feet in length. By means of this contrivance the
yield of sprats is so great that there is often some little difficulty
in disposing of the catch. The renowned whitebait, too, which are
believed to be young herrings, are caught by means of a similar, though
much smaller, net.

Besides these and various other forms of net fishing, there are the
methods in which the long line is employed. For the capture of the cod,
both in Newfoundland and in the North Sea, what is called the bultow is
used. This is a long line many hundreds of-feet in length, and at every
twelfth foot shorter and smaller cords called "snoods" are fastened.
These "snoods" are about 6 feet long, and have the hooks attached to
their free ends. The bultow is "shot" across the tide to prevent
entanglement of the hooks, and is laid in the afternoon. At daybreak,
when the lines are hauled in, as many as 400 of the large cod sometimes
result from the catch. There are various other appliances used for fish
capture in different parts of the world, such as the purse-seine net,
the trammel net, the otter-trawl net, &c.; and, as I have
already pointed out, the most scathing satire on our fisheries is to
find all these necessary means for catching fish regarded as
curiosities. When they are no longer considered so, it will be a
fortunate time for Australia.