Learning perspective Part #1. Learning to bow fish...
Learning perspective Part #1.
Learning to bow fish...
I was 11 at the time, but never forget my first fish caught with a bow and arrow.
It was with 2 friends, one old now but my age then, the other a new friend but he was an older bloke, his name was Sollah, but I guess I will never know how it was actually spelled.
Back to the beginning My mate Milton or Milt and I had watched a doco with his father in which some native Americans were showing bow fishing, we thought it looked like fun, and easy, so we devised with our fathers how we could work off enough money to each buy a bow, Milts father even produced a black and white mail order catalog with various bows for sale from Canada, I still have mine.
I don't remember how long it took exactly, but our dads helped us fill in an order in the magazine and send away, a few weekends working with our fathers to earn our keep and some weeks/months later by the time we had worked off our debts they arrived.
Mine was (still is) a fibreglass "48 from a company called fleetwood archery, No fancy compound pulleys or anything just a horse hair string and it came with 4 arrows.
So with maybe an hours practice missing targets in the back yard we were finally off to a lagoon that is now part of a protected park/wetlands for a camping long weekend, Now we had yabby nets, minnow traps, we had line n hook fished this series of small billabongs before, even snared ducks.
However Bow fishing was different, at first we rushed walking the edges of the main lagoon, we realised we were stirring up too much mud, so we had to slow down, then we were seeing fish and taking potshots but to no avail. We had learned enough from the doco to draw and hold the bow with tip of arrow already in the water as we waded about between knee and waist deep, but that is about all. we spent 2 days in a row wandering around the lagoon and the billabongs and could not catch a fish to save our lives.
It was the 3rd day of our holiday in the area, all gone now, and we hit the Lagoon Milt was literally down to his last arrow with 2 broken and one lost, I had 3 after losing one.
We saw smoke from behind the reeds as we got closer we saw him.
There was a bloke sitting by a small fire with a backpack looked like he was boiling a billy, but it soon came to our attention, that every time we took a shot he would laugh, this guy was clearly laughing at us, at one point I got closer to him, about 25 mtrs away and took a shot at a fish, although I did not then know what type at the time, it looked like a catfish or jewfish we had caught via lines here before.
And he again laughed, I broke, "Whats so funny?" I yelled even though he wasn't that far away, he laughed harder.
"You pair" he said, "been out there for over 2 hours and still no tucker".
So I just blurted out, "what you think you could do better ?"
To wit he laughed and replied, "mate I am sitting here cooking my tucker".
He had a point and I paused, did look like he was cooking something. then he continued.
"you 2 blokes been here a few days avn't ya?" he half asked half told me.
"Yeah" I admitted, and he laughed again, Milt was by now headed over he could see we were clearly talking and curiosity must've been better than the fishing.
"I can tell mate, few days and you didn't even find my traps, one of ya's come within 2 steps of one and still didn't see it".
I thought what ?
Then he said it, "I know what ya doin wrong", and he laughed again.
So I bit "Ok what are we doin wrong ?", "Agh, well I can't really tell ya, I will have to show ya, but what will you give me in return ?"
I started to head over to him, Milt was out of the water now walking along the bank toward us both. "I dunno, what do you want ?"
"well, I have a long walk ahead of me, can you get your hands on some coffee ?" he asked.
Milt was getting closer so I yelled out to him just as I approached the bank, "reckon the oldies will give us some coffee ?"
"what for ? " he asked.
as I clambered up the steep bit of the bank I said, "this bloke here says he will show us how to catch fish if we get him some coffee".
"wait whats your name ?"
"Sollah" he said, and I still don't know how to spell it.
"guessin you boys will want your arrows back too".
Both Milt and i stood there looking each other, we looked at him...
He laughed loudly, again, then ushered us "sit down" he said and we did as he reached under his hiking style ruksack, and pulled out 2, not broken, missing arrows.
"these must be your then" and he tossed them over the small fire on the ground in front of us. We must've looked a right pair of stunned mullets.
He went on, "look I found these in the mess you left in the billabong when I was collecting my traps, which one of you went to the deep spot over by the rock?" he asked pointing to his left and over my right shoulder behind me, I turned to look and remembered, "that was me", "yep, your arrow was in the reeds right next to my trap, you were standing 2 steps away from my yabby trap, probably with that fish in it" he said pointing to a good sized fish he had split and spread across a stick, leaning over gently smoking away from the small fire.
Then he leaned over and began to stir his pot of what looked like soup or stew just as it began to boil, then using same stick with the handle moved the whole billy a bit to the side and off the coals to where the boiling stopped. "so how about it, You got your arrows back, and I will show you how to use those things if you can get me some coffee?".
Milt answered, " I might be able to get you some off my dad", ever inquisitive he asked "where did you find the other arrow ?".
again he laughed. He again pointed left but more directly to his left this time, "down through that thick patch of reeds in the next billabong" he said, "where the water lillys are, it was just floating there," he paused to laugh, Milt recognising the pond as the area he had lost it. then Sullah became dead serious. "it was right through the body of the fish you shot just floating there under a lillypad".
The look on Milts face was priceless, "you mean I got that one" he asked, Sollah just laughed. "nah, I got that one mate" he replied.
we chatted for a bit and the basic deal was struck, Milt went back to see if he could get some coffee, I was asked to tend the soup, after being shown the rhythm, a minute on the coals, as soon as it begins to boil, move off the coals and stir until boiling stops, let sit for a few minutes and return to coals repeat. and I noticed it very slowly get thicker.
Meanwhile Sollah used my bow and went into the lagoon barefoot, deadset milt was gone but 5 minutes, Sollah had waded no further away than I was when first yelled at him, took his first shot and bam, a 40 cm Tandan just like that. he came back and in Milts absence I learned a Tandanus is an eel tailed catfish or jewfish.
They no longer exist in said lagoon, pollution, introduced species and urban sprawl all around it pushed them out probably before it became a park zone surrounded by artificial ponds and housing.
I did learn a lot though, and thats before the bow fishing, Anyways, Sollah (who it turns out was half German half aboriginal) not that you'd know either to look at or talk to him because he just seemed a typical tanned Aussie to us, he boned out the fish and made another stick to smoke it, then we ate the soup.
Turns out it was fish, yabby and lilly root soup, quite nice and almost thickness of a stew.
Milt returned with our fathers in tow, they had half a can of coffee and in retrospect our dads probably wanted to check 2 things, 1 the coffee was not for us, and 2 to check out this stranger offering to teach kids to fish, Both our fathers being somewhat experienced outdoors/bushmen, neither had a clue on bow fishing, I think just seeing the fish there smoking was enough, and soll's appreciation for the coffee which he could not make a cup of fast enough.
At this point our dads headed off we entered the water with Sollah, He told us we need target practice, then he took an empty coke bottle, put some rocks in it and a few green reeds, filled it with water, put the lid on and let it sink, we were a bit over knee deep, in maybe half a meter of water. Staring down at it perhaps 4 or 5 meters away, and I remember he asked, "what do you know about refraction?"
We didn't know squat, I had heard of it but not a bloody clue really.
at this point he told us about our eyes lying to us, and the brain guessing on the images we see, which are not always as they seem. familiar with dipping the tip of the arrow in the water he asked us why?
We did not really know of course and he knew it. we saw it on TV, he also pointed out fishing arrows should be longer, but we went ahead with what we had.
Then the real epiphany, he just stood between us, held the arrow by itself pointed it down and a few inches into the water and asked, "is that aimed at the bottle?"
Well we just said -"well yeah, looks like it".
Then he held up the arrow in front of us, "is this arrow straight?" he asked.
We both replied, Yes..
Then he dipped it half in the water, "Now does the arrow look straight ?"
'look careful now"...
We looked and of course it doesn't, It appeared bent, Refraction it was explained to us makes objects in the water appear to be in places they aren't. That was the key revelation of the whole day, as much as we learned many other things, that simple realisation was pivotal.
Then we practiced on the coke bottle, it did not take much to grasp it once we knew, using the arrow as a guide you could judge the distances and differences, we then wandered off for a stalk around and after about 10 minutes I found another Tandan under a bit of a grassy overhang on the bank, I aimed against everything my eyes and brain told me, a couple inches below it, I mean is if to say I was not aiming at the actual fish I could see at all, and was convinced I was about to deliberately miss, but took the shot and bagged my first bow hunting catch a 22cm Tandan. That was another thing I learned, the water makes the fish look bigger, I could have sworn that fish was at least a foot long. (30cm).
Milt and I drifted off and got lost in the hunt, a few hours later and down in the billabongs we decided to call it, While Milt had done better than me with 4, his largest fish was 23cm, I only had 2 but my smallest was 22 cm, my biggest 37cm. Milt also had a different fish, a type of perch, and must admit they were the tastiest. we headed back to camp and on the way passed Sollah was already gone, fire out and otherwise not a trace he was ever there really.
Never even got to thank him, We made it back a bit before dark and both families were happy for the fish, The next time I got back there near a decade later, they were building houses around it in the south side and all the good fish were pretty much gone, the water flow had been altered up stream, frog and tadpole numbers were low, Lillies gone, reeds choking some parts out, full of litter and rubbish and the blue yabbies were now brownish, all signs of a bad waterway, I don't know why they made it a protected park in the end, it is completely surrounded by urban development and all to artificial now anyway...
PS. This is only part one in a series of blogs about perspective, and how many times mine has changed over a lifetime of learning how to see things from multiple angles.
Regards.
©J. W. Newell.2024.
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