Innocent Fun For Old Gentlemen

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 100, 25 September 1950, Page 5

Innocent Fun For Old Gentlemen

Fishing off Victoria Wharf, at Devonport, Auckland, seems to provide a lot of innocent fun for the declining years of certain gentlemen who in their prime spoke rather scathingly about the amount of time their schpol-aged sens devoted to that pastime, instead of doing homework, chopping kindling, or pushing the mower round the lawn. The descendants of the gulls that used to steal our bait, and the sprats we caught, too, if our guard was for a moment relaxed, seem to have' lost none of their ancestors’ cheek. When a gull grabbed and flew off with one of our baited hooks, however, it got away with only a few lengths of string knotted together; but the father of dne member of our string-and-bent-pin angling club thirty years ago shed tears for £3 10s worth of imported nylon line when a gull played the same trick on him the other day. Case Opened

If lit were not vouched for by a man on whose word I would stake my life, I would have been reluctant to believe one thing I heard about the Devonport gulls. Before his retirement, he used to carry backwards and forwards between his home and his office an attache case full of the returns with which he occupied his evenings in order to satisfy the impudent curiosity of Government departments. Now, it carries his lines and bait down to the wharf, with some fish, in addition, for the return trip, if he has ‘any luck. It is necessary, he assures me, and I would take his word for anything, to make sure that the case is fastened while he fishes, because more than once, when he has neglected this prcaution, a big black-backed gull has sidled quietly up behind him, lifted the lid of the case with its beak, slipped its head in, and stolen his bait, or any fish he might have in ; it.