MALAY SKETCHES
boats make a simultaneous in-turn, the circle is completed, and at the moment when it becomes sufficiently circumscribed every net is cast, covering the whole surface of the water within the ring of boats. Directly the nets have been cast they sink, the paddlers back-water, and each net is slowly drawn to the surface and the fish taken are disengaged from the fine meshes and thrown into the boat under the bamboo grating.
Almost every net contains fish, and the numbers vary from two or three to fifty or sixty bright silvery fishes weighing from half a pound to a pound each.
The operation is then repeated, and the fleet of boats works its way slowly from end to end of the backwater, a distance of about a mile.
Sometimes every net makes a good haul, sometimes only one or two do very well, and ali the rest indifferently. It is no easy matter with such an insecure foothold to cast a long and heavy net, but, well done, the act of casting is graceful and attractive. First the slack of the cord is taken up in loops in the right hand and after it the net, until the leaden rings clear the boat and reach to about the thrower’s knee. Then with his left hand he takes
up part of the skirt of the net and hangs it over his
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