Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

no cell-phones, and one had to contend with social isolation.
But the richness of the characters we came across
made up for that. A never-ending line of elderly folk shared
with us old world knowledge about fishing, native plant
medicines, and food available from the wild.
The set fishing-net was out every day and we camped
on the coast, for there are fish everywhere, especially off
season when all the holiday makers and their noisy boats
trot off home.
I ran my net twice a day, because many fish can see
the net in the moonlight, and won’t go into it. Nor can they
reverse away, because fish don’t swim backwards, especially
against a current. So they would often stay poised a
foot or so from the mesh, waiting for the tide to turn. I
would encounter this often. Wading into the sea I might
see half a dozen fish in the net already and two or three
waiting. By splashing the water behind them I could get
them to dive into the net and become entangled. I would do
this day in and day out all year around.
This would often get me out of bed at two or three in
the morning wading into the tide, even in the middle of
winter. It could be cold, certainly, but the cold didn’t occur
to me. After all, I had a job to do. If I had stopped to think
of the cold I would probably never have ventured in. I would
then get back into a lovely warm bed and my freezing feet
did not impress my wife.
It was in my interests to find out from the locals what
fish were running, coming up rivers to spawn at this or that
time of year, and where the good spots were. Very often we
would get misinformation of course, and you could gener-
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