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This silly impression also prevails with regard to many other scaleless fish on the Australian coast, some of which, such as the trevally, are among the best and most delicate in flavour. The black and white rock cod is also regarded with aversion by the untutored settlers of the small coast settlements, yet these fish are sold in Sydney, like the schnapper, at prohibitive prices.
Steamboat traffic and the foul water resulting from sewerage has driven them to the deep waters of the ocean. One peculiar feature of schnapper fishing on the northern coast of New South Wales is that, be the fish ever so plentiful and hungry, they invariably cease biting immediately, if the wind should change to the east or north-east.
Two at last we succeeded in harpooning and killing, and casting their bodies to their friends, who made short work of them and left us alone for the rest of the day. Schnapper in the winter months, on the Australian coast, retire to the deep water, and can be caught in from thirty to fifty fathoms. They travel in droves like sheep, and prefer to frequent rocky or broken ground.
Five minuses later I had dressed, and was running up the hill to the pilot station with my fishing tackle, together with some sandwiches, some bottles of beer, and a tin pannikin, slung in a corn sack over my shoulder not a very elegant turn-out, but the correct thing for such rough and tumble work as schnapper fishing. At the top of the hill I stopped to give myself breath a minute.
Every now and then either of us would pull up a great pink slab-sided schnapper, a glistening silvery mullet, or a white-bellied whapuka; we were in a good pitch, and the fish were biting freely. Our minds were relieved from the anxiety of a possible shortness of provisions. The scenery around us is truly magnificent, if only it were possible to describe it.
The change was astounding. Up they came, two at a time, dozens and dozens of them kauwhai, cavalle, yellow-tail, schnapper lovely fish of delicious flavour and goodly size. Then one of us got a fish which made him yell, "Shark! shark!" with all his might. He had a small line of American cotton, staunch as copper wire, but dreadfully cutting to the hands.
Our new ground proved a lucky one, for we not only caught some seventy schnapper some of them truly noble fish but two magnificent black and white rock cod, a fish whose flavour is excelled by no other in Australian waters.
No leather-jackets appeared to disturb our pleasure, and not even the usual murderous shark showed his ugly face, and played the usual game of seizing every schnapper as it was hauled up, and biting it in halves. Only the previous week half a dozen had followed us about from ground to ground, breaking our lines, and taking five out of every ten fish we hooked.
I had caught when fishing for schnapper, in thirty fathoms off Camden Haven, on the coast of New South Wales, a mottled black and grey rock cod, which weighed 83 lbs., and was assured by the Sydney Museum authorities that such a weight for a rock cod was rare in that part of the Pacific, but that bêche-de-mer fishermen on the Great Barrier Reef had occasionally captured fish of the same variety of double that size and weight.
Then, when maybe they have caught schnapper, red bream and parrot-fish, they drift among the turtle, and the sport begins. In sight of the game the sucker which has been adhering to the bottom of the canoe is tugged off and thrown in its direction.
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