480 MODERN SEA FISHING 



with egg and breadcrumb ; soused ; and, better still, as 

 mayonnaise. 



The best of schnapper fishing is that you leave off con- 

 tented. It is hard work : the fish range between five and twelve 

 pounds, and it will be a very bad visit indeed to the Flat Rock if 

 the poorest fisherman does not get ten or a dozen schnappers. 

 The best of the fishing lasts not more than two hours, and 

 much of the time is occupied in steaming, after the drifts, up 

 to the rock again. Yet we return with two hundred and fifty 

 schnappers on board besides other fish, making a total weight 

 of not much less than 2,000 Ibs. It is no uncommon thing 

 for six hundred large schnappers to be taken on one of these 

 excursions. 



It is not, however, schnapper alone we take. At one of our 

 halts we catch a very strange collection of fish indeed. First 

 there are three varieties of the parrot fish, shaped something 

 like a carp, coloured a brilliant scarlet, and armed with four 

 ivory teeth, protruding like those of a rabbit. A small fish, the 

 exact image of a thick-set trout in bodily form, and about half 

 a pound in weight, falls to my share. How it could have taken 

 the schnapper hook is a mystery to this day ; but there it is in the 

 Brisbane Museum, admirably set up and preserved, and taking 

 its place among the natural history specimens, with its scientific 

 classification, and my own name as the distinguished donor, 

 duly set forth in intelligible characters. The fish is designated 

 ' Diacope octolineata ; family Peresidei? The colours fade 

 somewhat after death, but I make a memorandum with fishy 

 fingers before it gives up the ghost, and thus it reads : ' In 

 shape not unlike a Wandle trout ; fins and tail bright gamboge ; 

 belly ditto with vermilion spots ; sides deep yellow, with 

 four lateral stripes of bright blue rows of turquoise on cloth 

 of gold.' A king fish is also taken, a blue and white gentleman 

 apparently of the bonito persuasion. A perch, own brother in 



