about three pounds, the largest about
seventeen pounds, and the average weight of the lot was about eight
pounds. Then we knocked off for breakfast. That finished, we lit our
pipes and settled down to work again. Alas! a swarm of ugly brown and
yellow 'leather-jackets' had arrived on the scene, and before our lines
could touch bottom the brutes would either take the bait, or bite off
the hook snoozings with their keen, rat-like teeth. In a quarter of an
hour we had caught but four schnapper and lost a dozen or more hooks;
my own line was bitten through at about five fathoms from the surface--a
piece of meat skin had wound itself round it and had been discovered by
one of these predatory villains. No wonder that the Samoans and natives
of the Tokelau Islands term the leather-jacket _isumu moana_--the
sea-rat. However, as leather-jackets make excellent schnapper bait, two
of us were told off to fish for them with bream-lines and wire-snoozed
small hooks, and we soon had the satisfaction of catching a dozen of the
thieves. These were quickly skinned and cut up; then we lifted anchor
and pulled southward for about half a mile, knowing we should catch but
few schnapper where leather-jackets were.

Our new ground proved a lucky one, for we not only caught some seventy
schnapper--some of them truly noble fish--but two magnificent black
and white rock cod, a fish whose flavour is excelled by no other in
Australian waters. No leather-jackets appeared to disturb our pleasure,
and not even the usual murderous shark showed his ugly face, and played
the usual game of seizing every schnapper as it was hauled up, and
biting it in halves. Only the previous week half a dozen had followed us
about from ground to ground, breaking our lines, and taking five out
of every ten fish we hooked. Two at last we succeeded in harpooning and
killing, and casting their bodies to their friends, who made short work
of them and left us alone for the rest of the day.

Schnapper in the winter months, on the Australian coast, retire to the
deep water, and can be caught in from thirty to fifty fathoms. They
travel in droves like sheep, and prefer to frequent rocky or broken
ground. Sometimes, however, they will enter the bar harbours in great
numbers and ascend the tidal rivers. Twenty-five years ago they were
often taken in nets in the Parramatta River, near Sydney, and were
very plentiful in Sydney Harbour itself. Nowadays one is rarely
caught anywhere