SEA FISmNG 



Throughout the Mediterranean, the grey mullet, like the red, 18 an 

 important fish, and it is a great favourite with such native anglers as 

 love to spend their summer dangling bamboo rods of great length over 

 quays and parapets, content if, once an hour, they can swing a mullet 

 overhead, landing it, as often as not, among the audience, which is usually 

 large, since for every lazy fisherman in these countries there are generally 

 a score of still more lazy onlookers. Spaniards, Provenpals, Italians, 

 Greeks and Turks all love to catch the mullet, and fishermen may be 

 seen lining every quay from Marseilles to Smyrna. Ordinarily speaking, 

 it is a fish of shy habits, easily scared; but that there can be exceptions 

 to this rule is demonstrated by the fact of my having on one occasion 

 caught a brace from a steamer off Mogador Island, on the coast of Morocco, 

 at the moment when the anchor was being taken up and there was great 

 turmoil with shore boats. 



Small mullet, like bass, go in shoals, and the sociable habit seems to 

 survive until advanced years bring a preference for solitude. Even the 

 largest fish are commonly found in couples. When a shoal is enclosed in 

 a seine, care has to be taken lest one fish escape over the ropes, else the 

 remainder are safe to follow, like sheep going through a gap in a hedge. 

 The fishermen in most countries cherish the belief that the leader is a 

 veteran; but on two occasions, once in Cornwall, and once in Asiatic 

 Turkey, I saw a small fish deliberately lead the way, and on the latter 

 occasion, indeed, there was not an old fish in the catch. Among its other 

 peculiarities, the grey mullet is frightened of shadows, and this weakness 

 is turned to account by the Greeks of the Levant. They stitch together a 

 number of light fibre mats, and these are spread on the water, any bright 

 moonlight night, just outside a shoal that has been seen playing in the 

 shallows. Men hold it at the four corners and gradually draw it towards 

 the land, and it is a fact that, rather than swim to safety through the shadow 

 cast by the mats, the mullet prefer to be stranded in an inch or two of 

 water, in which position they are easily flung ashore. Though capable 

 of varied tactics when hooked, the mullet's nerve seems to desert it in 

 the nets, for it is well known that a second seine shot outside the first 

 effectually bars retreat, as the fish never try jumping over the ropes 

 a second time. Finding themselves prisoners still, they give it up as a 

 bad job. 



To the angler, however, the mullet does not often show any such limita- 

 tions, being equally difficult to deceive, and, when hooked, to coax within 



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