I caught a parrot fish
And I put it back
I caught a fish this week. A parrot fish which was my one serious catch for a four-hour session around the southern islands of Singapore on Wednesday. I caught a small baby grouper as well but it was tiny. These baby groupers have big mouths. They bite into prawns almost the same size as themselves.
I suspect the really big old groupers are those that learn their lessons young, are lucky enough to live through a few encounters with a dumb-arse fishermen such as myself, get thrown back and learn to live, eat and grow large while the waters around them are fished and fished and fished out.
As we start this newsletter, if you’re looking for insights, I’ve got few. As fisher people, me and my mates are performing worse than when we started at this game some months back. We’ve tried to build out capabilities and these advances have only resulted in poorer performances. But we’ve learned a few things about the logistics of fishing in Singapore, made some contacts, learned a bit about boats, marinas, clubs and a little about where to fish.
Live bait is a good example of our lack of competence. These days I start fishing early with a run out to Dash Fishing tackle on West Coast Highway. I usually text Ginny Ho, who runs the joint, a day before to let her know what I’m picking up. (So far with up to four of us fishing we’ve never used more than half a kilo and there’s always some that get put back at the end of the day.)
I get these lively prawns, put them in a mobile bait well with a little battery-operated bubbler to keep them alive until the inevitable gruesome conclusion to their lives. This isn’t something I like particularly, but fishing is about catching fish, usually with bait that is, or was once, alive. And the end result if it is a good fish, is the death of that fish.
I’m going to take a little dive into the ethics of fishing in a second, but my point on live bait was everyone was telling us this was the best way to catch fish but actually we caught more earlier in this journey when we got some prawns from the wet market, shelled them and chopped them up into bite-sized pieces that were easy to attach to hooks.
Back to the ethics.
I took my five-year-old son out fishing some weeks back and the first one we caught we put back, so he thought that was how fishing worked. The second one was bigger so we kept that and he was distraught that we didn’t put it back. By this time though, the fish was dead. We didn’t want it to go to waste but my son kept asking all afternoon when we would be putting it back. It’s heartbreaking to think of his gentle nature being taught this brutal lesson.
I was initially of a mind that he needed to learn how the meat he eats comes from animals that were once alive and were killed to sustain us. He does for instance see whole fish on our dinner table and his mum and grandparents picking them clean (I’m more of a fillet person myself). My dad ran a farm school in Tasmania where part of the educational objective was to teach the city kids where their milk and eggs come from. But I’ve back pedalled significantly from this view. I talked to my mum about it and she said she was the same as Alex when she was little, grieving for the death of these animals. She grew up on the water. Her first ocean-going voyage was when my grandfather, Colin Philp, sailed her up to Sydney from Hobart at just five months old on his yacht Southern Maid to compete in the second Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race in 1946. I love my mum’s gentle nature and it’s good her early compassion despite growing up in a home of fishing hasn’t changed over the intervening years. I hope my boy retains his compassion too.
The Singapore fishing journey continues with questions about what we’re doing wrong? Are the conditions wrong too? The waters are probably largely fished out. And of course I continue obsessing about buying a boat. I think my mates are going to tire of my focus on this when we have a pretty good thing going renting a self-drive speed boat that does the job. You’ll no doubt here more about this.