Sketch of Lower Jaw of Schnapper, showing double row of teeth.
(About half size.)
Mullet, resembling in appearance the grey mullet of the old country, but far richer and superior in flavour, are very plentiful during the summer months. These fish and schnapper are most delicious when salted and smoked, and may be said to fill the place of the English herring and haddock. Mullet average about 2 lbs. each in weight, and I have known one hundred and twenty dozen of them to be netted by two men in a day up here.
Patiki, a fish shaped exactly as the English flounder, but resembling more nearly in flavour the sole, are here in great numbers, and can be caught with a net in boat loads.
The Kahawai, weighing on the average 5 or 6 lbs., and modelled very much like the salmon, though finer in the tail, and with spotted sides. The resemblance unfortunately ends with the shape, for its flesh is dry and not over palatable. It lives principally on young mullet and Patiki.
The yellow tail, a sort of sea bream; a fish called locally the king fish, closely resembling in shape, fins, colour, and scales the fresh water tench; the dog fish, eels, and a small fish with a long snout called the pipe fish, complete the list, with the exception of the shark, and a fish called the Stingarie, doubtless a corruption of Stinging Ray. This fish—in form somewhat like the skate, with the exception that it has a long tail—attains a weight, at times, of about a quarter of a ton, and possesses a most formidable sting, armed with sharp-pointed barbs, and from six to eight inches in length, and about half an inch in width. This sting is situated at the root of the tail, and lies flat along it. When the fish makes an attack, it elevates its sting, and runs backwards with great speed at the object of its wrath. The Stingarie is of a discreet nature, however, and will never make an attack, unless driven to it. Its principal food, like the Kahawai, consists of mullet and Patiki.
Oysters and other bivalves, including Pipis (cockles) and escalops, also abound in the Kaipara. The rough corrugated shelled rock oyster, spoken of in my second chapter, are very abundant in places; and there is another kind, a smooth shelled oyster, very like the English native, which locates itself in deep water, and therefore is seldom met with.
Escalops, I think, must be plentiful, if one may judge by the number of escalop shells thrown up on the beaches near deep water. To procure these delicacies a dredge would be necessary, and dredges for shell fish are as yet unknown in the Kaipara, neither has the trawl net ever been tried, so it is impossible to say what unknown piscatorial treasures may yet lie hidden in the unexplored depths of the waters of our inland sea.