The late Neville Martin has given us some wonderful glimpses into early Oriental Bay in the excerpts from his memoir, Playing Against the Wind. Here he goes fishing in our boat harbour (abbreviated).

I would make my way from our house in Hay Street to the boat harbour on Saturday mornings, with nylon line, hooks, sinkers, bread for slush (now called burley) and bacon rind for bait. I personified hope – which, as Dr Johnston rightly said, is perhaps the greatest happiness this world affords. It’s that wonderful sense of anticipation – no, expectation – which keeps fishermen coming back for more.

I and my friends had modest aims as fishermen. We were after the grey mullet (we called them herrings) that teemed in the sheltered waters of the boat harbour. Or trevally, which appeared infrequently, or the occasional mackerel lacking the self respect to hunt in deeper waters. It was while fishing in the boat harbour that I entered the food industry.

It happened this way. The most- caught fish were spotties, but for some reason, we disdained them. We took them off our hooks and tossed them onto the wharf to complete their shuddering demise. As I mentioned, slush, made by soaking stale bread, was thrown onto the water to attract the herrings. It was an effective strategy, but they break eventually and inevitably ran out.

The building behind our fishing spot had been left there by the Americans. I believe it housed the officers’ quarters. A pipe emerging from the bowels of this building, spewed out a continuous stream of scalding water.

I hit upon the idea of gathering up the deceased spotties and putting them under the pipe till the hot water cooked them. They were then mashed up and thrown into the water as a high-protein substitue for bread. Cannibalism being firmly established in the world of fish, I felt no moral twinge. Nor, for that matter, did the herrings.

My collection of herrings went home to be offered to our cat, Frankie, who once ate 20 of them at a sitting. Admittedly they were small and Frankie wasn’t. But 20 herrings surely should have short-listed him for the Guinness Book of Records.

— Bay View newsletter 74, November 2019