By Peter Tyldesley
In any environment it takes time to settle in and crack the codes. The time it takes you to become integrated and fully operational depends on how observant and aware you are, and often how many cracks you have had. Clips become cracks as you get older and you get cracks when you don’t get home on time.
In the heat of summer, there were no earthworms, so I had to find another easily accessible bait to catch the steenbras. There were no prawn pumps in those days so I was scratching for an alternative. I walked to the footbridge one Saturday morning when the tide was pushing. There was a fur seal lounging on the concrete bridge support under the bridge on the Capricorn side of the vlei. I watched him for a while and then walked on to the main bridge near the mouth. Over the course of the next two years I saw him in that spot quite often.
The water was exceptionally clear, and for the first time I noticed sandshrimps swimming in amongst the grass and weeds up against the bank. There were no reeds on this section at that time, and the waves pushed in past a large sandbank which was located in the middle of the vlei on the northern side of the footbridge. I went home and told my dad about the shrimps. He told me to wait for low tide. Four muscadels later my father turfed the last of the potatoes out of the hessian bag they used to be packed in in those days, and cut the bag open all along the seam. We had a net!
Together we walked down to the vlei and jumped in. With dad on one side and me on the other, we dragged our net along the sandy bottom and up under the grass verges. Shrimps galore, flicking all over the place, and in the middle of the net, a light brown pipefish. The first I had ever seen. It had a scalloped body, with a long snout and a tiny mouth. Just like a seahorse which had been stretched out on one of those medieval torture racks.
On about our fourth trawl dad stepped on a sharp submerged branch, and I got my first lesson in men’s talk. Apparently at eight years old you are ready to become a man.
For the next two years, that net produced endless excitement, because we never knew what we would find. Besides the shrimps and the pipefish which were routine catches, there were juvenile mullet and steenbras, and on rare occasions a juvenile leervis, with its black and orange body and prodigious lower jaw. It looked nothing like the streamlined silver superpredator it would morph into. Some of the steenbras we caught in the net were tiny, only five centimetres long. While working on a conservation project on the Eastern Cape Wild Coast many years later, I was shown some photographs of large white steenbras shoaling in an estuary and was led to believe that this was a tributary which needed special protection, as it was one of the few places that white steenbras came to breed. I was also informed that these fish only bred in the estuaries of the Eastern Cape. I have often wondered about that, as I netted so many of the tiny juveniles in Zandvlei. As a student and avid scubadiver, I occasionally cleaned the hulls of yachts moored in Simon’s Town harbour, to make a few bob to pay for the beers and tassies that the bursary didn’t cover. On occasion I came across shoals of large female (I suspect) white steenbras feeding on the extensive prawn beds on the soft sandy bottom stretching almost all the way to the bullnose. I have often wondered if these fish were not entering Zandvlei to breed. I have never really answered that question.
Besides the steenbras, harders (mullet) became a favourite fishing target. It happened quite by accident. I was sitting at my favourite spot one afternoon after school eating a peanut butter sandwich. The last crust of the sandwich contained no margarine or peanut butter and I turfed it into the water. To my surprise the bread was almost instantly attacked by a school of harders. The last little piece was engulfed by a sizeable fish, which immediately caught my attention. I went home quite early, tidied my room and made sure the kitchen floor was clean, and waited for dad. When he came home the first things he asked me were: “Have you been fishing again? Have you done your homework?” Aaai. I hadn’t thought about the homework.
After supper dad unlocked the closet and we scratched around for some thin fishing line, small hooks and a round float, those little red and white ones which you simply clip onto the line. We wound a considerable length of line onto the hasper (a piece of wood with notches on both ends used for handlines), tied on a small hook and attached the float and I was ready to go.
Catching harders became my favourite pastime for the two years we lived in Cromer road. Unlike the steenbras, which tend to prefer slightly deeper water which is a little murky or cloudy, harders seem to be happiest in the crystal clear fresh seawater pushing in on the high tide. They readily accepted bread as bait, whether it was squeezed onto the hook, or dampened and turned into a doughball. After several months I graduated from the red and white plastic floats to a porcupine quill, which if set properly on the line stood up vertically in the water and disappeared in a flash when you got a bite (or a “take” as it is known in fisherman’s parlance).
Catching harders took on a greater significance after I caught my first leervis, which again was quite by accident. There were some big harders near the footbridge, but they simply refused to take the bread I offered. Frustrated, I tried to foulhook them with a treble hook (we called it an angel –Afrikaans pronunciation). On my second caste a leervis of forty centimeters grabbed the treble hook. It fell off as I got it to the side but I managed to grab it and carry it home. My dad put it in the deep freeze, as he wanted to preserve it with formaldehyde. Three days later a fishing mad friend of my father came to visit us. He had never caught a leervis before and offered to take it home and have it mounted.
I never saw that leervis again.
But that friend did tell me that harders were the favourite prey of leervis. Then he showed me another trick. To catch a number of harders in one go, all you needed was a milkbottle and some bread. You took the bread, wet it and massaged it into a doughy paste which you squeezed into the mouth of the milkbottle. Then you walked along the side looking for a shoal of harders feeding on the bottom. Walking ahead, you carefully submerged the milkbottle, with the breadpaste on the bottom half of the mouth. In no time the harders would be crowding around the bottle trying to feed on the bread, and some would be pushed into the bottle by those behind them trying to get to the bread. You could catch eight in one shot!
Having taught young people for forty odd years, I believe that some children are born to be naturalists, others are born to be petrolheads, a few will naturally become academics, and a small unique group are Keith Richards clones, able to smoke forty Lucky Strike cigarettes a day at the age of twelve.
I was the naturalist who caught my first “snake”, a dwarf burrowing skink, at the age of four. I took it to bed with me and refused to give it to anyone – until my grandmother paid me fifty cents to flush it down the toilet. I have never forgotten that day – and never forgiven myself for that deed.
But then again you could buy four hundred chappies bubblegums for fifty cents.
