Yangtze Patrol by Kemp Tolley

Author:Kemp Tolley [Tolley, Kemp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612511993
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Chinese fishing methods shared some of the bizarre aspects of their ways of capturing game, but of the two a far greater national effort was concentrated on the pursuit of the finny tribe. One got the impression that for every fish in China there were at least two Chinese scheming how to net it. Everything from a one-inch minnow on up was acceptable. There was no Fish and Game Commission to set a bag or size limit. Fishermen cast their nets along the river banks from dawn to dark, more often than not drawing them in totally empty. Occasionally a school would be hit and to the accompaniment of much loud and happy comment a haul of a half dozen or so glittering, jumping little things no larger than a sardine would be dumped in the sampan’s bilges. Shrimp no larger than a fingernail, a couple of hundred to the pound, were not unusual. Nothing edible ever really had a chance to grow up in a Chinese river.

In Chungking and Ichang, otters sometimes were used in conjunction with net casting. These squirming, sinuous little beasts went over the side of a fisherman’s cockleshell skiff, a leash around the neck tight enough to keep any chance fish from going down. From time to time this would be loosened and a small fishy reward offered to maintain the otter’s enthusiasm.

A slightly more Machiavellian type of fishing was confined to periods of bright moonlight. A low freeboard sampan would moor, athwart one of the smaller streams, its downstream side coated with whitewash. A version of the Chinese one-stringed fiddle played a crucial part in the drama. The instrument in this case had been altered by an extension which reached into the water. When the fiddle bow was sawed across the strings, not only were the usual hideous sounds produced, but the vibrations were transmitted through the wooden extension into the water, at a spot downstream from the sampan. The fish, whose appreciation of harmony could only be more discriminating than a Chinaman’s, apparently had one burning desire—to put as much distance as possible with minimum delay between them and the source of the vibrations. Rushing upstream, they would see shining in the moonlight the white sampan flank, evaluate it as a minor obstacle to their escape, and jump over it—into the boat. It was as simple as that. And unlike the hook and line method, none of the victims ever escaped to tip off their brethren on this joker in the Chinese Department of Dirty Tricks.

Carp, generally considered in the United States as fit only for feeding other fish, were a great delicacy in China and were raised in stagnant pools that would have had any less hardy fish floating belly-up in short order. Gathering the crop was simplicity itself; a quantity of mashed-up outer hulls of nuts would be dumped into the water at harvest time and very soon the carp would surface in a dazed condition, ready for easy netting.

The great fish mystery concerned the rice paddy eels.

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