Going fishing

I’m not much into fishing for actual fish. I like my fish to arrive steaming hot, wrapped in crispy batter and surrounded by chips. However, growing up with a brother who was, and still is, seriously into fishing, means that I spent hours of my youth dangling lines from assorted wharves and sea-walls. Generally, by the time I noticed the nibbling on my line, the bait and the fish were gone. Either that, or I fell in the water. Iain’s a different matter – when he goes fishing, he catches fish, and he comes home dry. He once tried to teach me the art of fly-casting in the back-yard. I might have been quite successful standing with my back to the fish – I caught a number of things behind me, including the clothes-line and the garage. The only time I actually managed to get the fly to land in front of me, it was half-way up a plum tree – a useful technique for catching that little-known species, the flying trout. I think that’s when Iain gave up on me and the damage I was doing to his fishing gear. He packed up and headed off to the river, and I returned to my regular bookish pursuits.

These days, when I go fishing, I’m casting my lines in the deep ponds of online databases and websites. A family name like Norgrove is an excellent bait – in the first few decades of New Zealand settlement, our Norgroves were the only ones in the country, so any references I fish up are going to be family. Every now and then I pull up something odd, like one of those ugly prehistoric-looking monsters that people find in Wellington harbour – the sort of fish you’ve half a mind to throw back. One such fishy surprise was in an 1877 issue of The Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, an article entitled “On the Habits of the New Zealand Grayling”. The grayling was a small native fish that is now extinct; even in 1877 it was becoming rare, hence the author’s investigation into its habits. Among the sources cited was our William, who said :

I have taken the grayling in the Maitai, just where the tide breaks into the fresh water, in large quantities, and as much as four miles higher up always in shoals. About the month of March they go up to spawn. I have fished at the mouth of the same river at all seasons in the salt water and caught lots of so-called herrings, which are, I believe, a kind of mullet, but never caught a single grayling at any time. They remain about a month, and then not one to be seen higher or lower.

Well, knock me over with a Parson’s Glory, but I never thought of William going fishing. There are probably any number of other blokey activities that I haven’t considered William doing either, but I guess I imagined William spending what little leisure time he had drawing and painting. Now I have to get my head around the idea of him dropping a line over one of Wellington’s many wooden jetties, or wading into Nelson’s Maitai river with his boys and netting a huge haul of graylings.

Then there’s the thought of Sarah – how often was she presented with a flax basket or soggy newspaper parcel of fish to cook for dinner? At least grayling didn’t have to be gutted and filleted – another article from the Royal Society’s learned journal advises that they were boiled whole, and “in eating, the flesh is drawn off the bone by a sucking action of the mouth, the head and bone being thrown behind over the shoulder.” Fun for the whole family, cat included.