thin king

Good morning to all,
Fancy going fishing?


The good old days.

This phrase always brings back the times when we did the things we
wanted to do very simply. Can anybody go fishing with just a string,
a nail and a hook?

Yes, that was all that we needed then!

Around the 1950s, I lived in a community across the East Coast Road
about 100 metres from the sea. And it was this sea and the beach which
took away most of my time from my school work. You see, my youthful
time was spent at school or at the sea; and if not for the education I had
I would have been a fisherman. It was so easy to live off the sea, really.

Just one example, all I needed was some 20 feet 20 pound nylon string,
a 2 inch iron nail and a No. 16 to No. 18 size hook to bring home fish.
What does an angler need for fishing nowadays? Fancy gears etc.!
For me then, the string was the line, the nail was the sinker, and the
hook was what it was; the bait I got from the beach. Spitting on the
lower part of the beach as the wave receded would get all the worms
wriggling an inch out of the sand, and all I did was to pull them out with
my thumb and forefinger. Sprinkling water from a stale fish would be
more effective than spitting. However, pulling the worms out of the sand
required a certain skill though. Extending the forefinger a little bit from
a clenched fist, thrust it below the worm and griped it quickly with the
thumb and forefinger and pulled it out slowly. The worm was about six
inches long, and each baiting required an inch of it. To keep the worms
from being wriggly, and alive for long, we would coat them with the dry
fine sand available at the upper part of the beach.

Our platform for fishing was the fisherman's big boat, about 30 feet long,
very stable, usually moored some distance from the shore. We would
swim to it. Fishing from this boat was very comfortable. Twenty people
could fish from it without fear of its capsizing. The water would usually
be about 10 feet deep at most, at the best of the tides, around the third
and eighteen days of the lunar month. The water at these times would
be so clear that we could see the fish and everything below at the
seabed.

The ikan pasir, a sand coloured cylindrical fish, about an inch in
diameter and eight inches long, would come in with the tide, very
hungry and voracious. Getting them was easy, but action had to be fast.
In an hour's time they would be well fed and stop biting. The seabed
has plenty of food. So, the smart thing to do was to use two hooks per
line.

Getting the fish home was also easy. All we did was strung them up with
the line we used for fishing, "coming home with a string of fish", so went
the saying.

Nowadays we can fish the whole day with all the expensive gears, and
what can we get? Lots of casting practice only, and perhaps a hook in
the ear, ha ha ha!

Have a nice angling day.
Ronald