In our modern world, fishing has developed into an international money making operation that is undertaken by giant ships with mechanized equipment that swoop up hundreds of fish in one attempt. However, fishing can still be a very simple process. It is often regarded as one of man’s simple pleasures. My little host brother showed me a first hand example of just how simple (or complicated) fishing can be.
He is a 9-year-old boy and doesn’t have many possessions, let alone a fishing pole and all the goodies to go along with it. The other day he asked if I wanted to go fish with him down at our dock. I said that it sounded like a great idea, but I didn’t know how we were gonna do it. We didn’t have any equipment or bait. He spewed some quick Chuukese phrases at me that sounded like jibberish and tried to tell me not to worry about it. I trusted his instincts and followed along.
He rummaged through some old stuff in a shed and pulled out a line and hook. That was good start. No rod, no reel, no worries. This is Chuuk, we don’t need those kind of luxuries, haha. We sauntered down towards the ocean on our way to a little fishing expedition, but I couldn’t help be a little bit worried that we didn’t have any bait. How were we gonna catch fish with no bait?
Well, he had an idea. He wandered around on the rocky sand for a bit and started picking up little rocks and shells. I didn’t really know why he was doing this, so I didn’t bother to help me. After a few minutes, he came back to me and showed me his bounty. These weren’t just little rocks and shells, they were hermit crabs! Now I started to comprehend his logic.
We then walked out towards to the dock and on our way, we spied a smaller hook on the ground. This hook was much better suited for our purposes. We scooped it up and settled down on the dock to begin our operation. Unfortunately we forgot a knife, so we had no way to cut the line and put on the new hook. I tried to bite it off, but the line was fairly thick and my teeth couldn’t snap it. Of course, my little brother had a solution. He found a pointy rock and smashed it on the line a couple of times. It snapped off nicely and we were back in business.
In spite of this success, we had another issue to deal with. The hermit crabs were encased in tiny carbon created fortresses that were impenetrable to our bumbling fingers. Well, he also had a resourceful way to solve this problem. He discovered a heavy rusted piece of iron along the shoreline and used it as a hammer to crack the shells. The baby crabs’ homes were smashed and they were left wriggling on the ground exposed to the light for the first time. My brother picked the wormlike crab up and ripped off his pincher claws; then he tore the body in half and was left with just a itsy-bitsy morsel of soft flesh to use as bait.
We skewered the tiny chunk of crab on the hook and tossed it into the water. Immediately, we noticed another issue that we had overlooked. The line wasn’t heavy enough to sink to the bottom. He resolved our dilemma quickly by fastening a small cylindrical piece of hard coral to the line. Now we had a sinker.
We dropped the line into the water below our feet and a flurry of miniature fish swarmed around the false food. We were looking directly down at the fish and could see every one of their movements. When one of the unsuspecting fish would attempt to grub the crabby tissue, he yanked the line and snagged a little fish. We repeated this process a few times with other pieces of cracked crabs and had our selves a catch of a few tiny fish.
This was satisfactory, but the fish were almost too small to be edible and weren’t very impressive. However, I had not yet seen the full extent of his plan. He killed the little fish by biting through their brains right above their eyes. This ceased their struggling and made them easy to work with. We didn’t have a knife, but again he had a plan. He found a shard of broken glass and cracked it a bit more to give it a sharp edge. He used this razor sharp portion of glass to filet the baby fish and produce two little chunks of fresh fish flesh.
We then used these little pieces of freshly caught fish as our new bait to try to catch real fish. We now used the 50 foot length of line to cast out as far as we could. The best way to cast without a pole is to swing the line around like a lasso and let it fly. This actually works surprisingly well.
The sun went down shortly thereafter and we didn’t have time to pull in a real big fish, but I was thoroughly impressed with the operation. We went from absolutely nothing to a full fishing enterprise. We used discarded lines and hooks. We used rocks and glass as knives. We used hermit crabs and baby fish as bait. We used all of the ingenuity that a couple of amateur fisherman could scrounge up.
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