Txuomson.—Fish and their Seasons. 489 
At the present time (July, 1876), and for some months back, there have 
been employed in the fishing trade, in the Harbour of Otago, 32 boats, 
employing about 80 men. In the net fishing in the Harbour, 16 boats are 
pretty regularly employed, worked by 36 men ; most of the boats have only 
two men as crew. In the outside or deep-water branch of the trade, 17 
boats are engaged, with over 40 men as the crews. Most of the seining 
boats are out at work nearly every tide, while the others are more dependent 
on the weather, the state of the sea, etc., which causes give rise to 
long spells of enforced idleness, and also prevent the boats from venturing 
very far from the Heads, there being no place to run for shelter in case of 
emergency. As an example of this, the fatal accident of last week is a case 
in point: the men fishing near Cape Saunders were driven south, and ran 
their boat in on the rocks at Sandfly to escape drowning. The boat was 
lost, and one of the men killed attempting to elimb the high cliff there. 
Complaints have been frequently made during the past few months 
about the size of the fish brought to market. This is most apparent in the 
case of flat fish, particularly Flounders and Soles, which are often exposed 
for sale of a ridiculously small size. It is a wonder that this evil is not 
apparent to the fishermen themselves, for it is really destroying their means 
of existence. If the practice is carried on much longer, the Flounder will 
soon become a very rare fish in our waters. Legislative interference has 
been talked of, either by insisting on a close time, or by regulating the size 
of the meshes of the nets used. The first would bea very difficult matter to 
arrange, as the fishes are not all in season at the same time, so that a close 
time would simply mean a time when there would be no fish at all. Re- 
strieting the size of the meshes in the nets used would hardly do either, the 
system adopted in Otago Harbour and the various tidal inlets in the neigh- 
bourhood, being seine fishing, when a long narrow net with a deep bunt is 
used. This net is made to eatch all fish that are to be found in the Harbour. 
The meshes in the nets vary from an inch in the wings to about half an 
inch in the bunt. A much larger mesh would do to catch even small 
Flounders, but all other fish—Herrings, Trevally, Sandling, Garfish, and 
the like—would pass through and never be seen; the small mesh in the 
bunt of the net is the very thing for catching the miscellaneous shoals of 
fish which come up the Harbour with the young flood tide. I have seen 
over a dozen sorts of fish in one haul, ranging from Barracoota and Elephant 
Fish down to Garfish and Herrings—the smaller sorts all meshed in the 
neighbourhood of the bunt, causing no end of trouble ere the net could be 
cleared again for another haul. Now, any alteration in the way of in- 
creasing the size of the mesh would prevent all those sorts of fish being 
retained in the net; they would all escape through the wide meshes. 
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