Santa Cruz Islands

The Kite-Fishers Of The

By Don Marsh

It was while I was steering the concrete yacht Adventure through the Santa Cruz Islands, in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, that I noticed what appeared to be a piccanniny flying a square-shaped kite from his dug-out canoe, Of course, it’s not such a strange sight to see a kite fluttering in the breeze anywhere in the world, but one does not expect to see the manipulator con ducting the sport from the seat of a canoe.

As I drew closer to the small island of Te Motu, I could see that the boy was actually paddling his canoe along while trailing the kite.

It seemed a rather odd way to fly a kite just for the fun of it.

I would have taken no more notice except that I saw him haul in a fish which was hooked to the tail of the kite. So that was it —kite-fishing.

Although I had heard that this most ancient form of fishing was still carried out among the remotest tropical islands in the world (where Japanese tin-openers and tinned fish have not arrived), I did not expect to see it in its natural setting.

Made of leaf

Any tourist or traveller has to pay to get subject matter for his camera these days—posing, dancing, tattooing, cooking, hunting; and it’s all so un natural when posed: even nose ornaments are only worn for the benefit of foreigners, and are not normally seen.

In New Zealand, some anglers use a kite to take out the line if they wish to fish further from the shore than they can cast the sinker; and the kite they use is quite an ordinary diamond-shaped one, but the kind used in the Solomons is a small square one made of dried leaf and slivers of bamboo.

There is certainly some skill needed to handle a dry-leaf kite, which seems to come naturally to the primitive man of the Santa Cruz Islands.

The fisherman has to choose a suitable sea surface and wind force, and paddle at sufficient speed to keep the kite just hovering over the water so that the tail, weighted with hook and bait, is just bobbing along the surface.

The usual clam or prawn bait is used on the hook; with no sinker attached because the bait has only to skim the water. .

Most kite-fishermen now use steel hooks (in preference to bone or

wood) and flesh bait, but I passed close enough to see that this one was using the old traditional cobweb ball: the web ball acting as hook and lure.

However, cobweb will not “hook” any kind of fish (although it will lure all the surface fish). It will only hook a species whose top set of pronged teeth fit tightly into the lower set. When such a fish snaps at the web ball, both sets of teeth are jammed together by the threads of web. And the teeth remained jam med because fish have very little opening power in their jaw« (That applies to crocodiles too, incidentally.

It is quite safe to hold them by the snout, as any crocodile hunter will tell you.) The same web bait can be used over and over again. The best of webs are provided by those huge spiders who spin their snares in the lime bushes: some threads are as thick as cotton and quite strong; and give one quite a scare if walked into unawares.

Quite a scare As soon as the proposed airfield is built on Ndeni to receive jumbo jets, the Santa Cruz Islands will be just as plagued by tourists as any where else. All primitive ways of life, such as kite-fishing and flying fox hunts, which tourists will come thousands of miles to see, will soon be no more; for tourism sees to it that customs are turned into mere imitations of former ways.

The very first batch of tourists, almost strangled to death by the sheer weight of their cameras, will be the lucky ones: there will still be plenty of genuine Islands life to focus on—and no broken glass on the beaches.

So far, Santa Cruz has been left alone by the commercial world: an oasis in the competitive sphere. But how long is kite-fishing to be with us before it, too, disappears, and the Melanesian loses his identity?