Easy Fishing

In the Shade of the Sago Fronds

The natives of Uardo Lakes, off the Aramia River, Western Papua, have devised an ingenious way of catching fish.

Every day after the sun is well up, the women paddle out on the lakes in their weirdly carved and painted dugout canoes to where reeds are growing around small floating islands. Here, placed carefully by the natives, and attached to grass by lawyer cane, are lengths of sago fronds, with the concave side down in the water. These fronds entice fish to sheek shelter in their shade from the hot sun.

By the time the women arrive, the fish are sleeping underneath the fronds, and the natives obtain their haul by passing a circular net of co conut fibre under each one. The twenty to thirty fishing canoes return to the village, by noon, with a hundred or more good-sized cod.

A method more common among the coastal natives in that locality is the use of “sardi,” or native dynamite, as it is known by the whites. “Sardi” is a shrub, the root of which is pounded up and thrown into the pools among the rocks. The powder immediately turns the water milky white, and temporarily stuns the fish, which rise to the surface and are gathered in by the natives.

The “dynamite” does not affect humans. ———