44
BARBARA E. WARD
The relatively sporadic presence of the liners and others is made clear in Table I. It is also reflected in the more marginal position of the majority of their boat stations in the diagram.
The beach at Kau Sai, which is stony, shelves fairly abruptly down from low water mark. One of the attractions of the anchorage was the resulting possibility of mooring close in. The nearer lines were easily within shouting distance of the water front, and access between junk and shore was simple. Nearer or farther, however, made very little difference. Indeed, the strict dichotomy which land-dwellers tend automatically to make between land and water seemed not to exist in the same way for these Boat People. Here in their own bay they were equally at home ashore or afloat. It was true that going from, say, the shops to the junks required two different kinds of propulsion (one, walking, provided by the legs, the other, yu-loh, by the arms), but there was little practical difference between them. Every junk family owned a sampan, and every six-year-old could yu-loh with ease and skill. The water passage was thus but an extension, as it were, of the land passage. A fisherman went down to his boat in the anchorage in just the same spirit as a landsman going along to his house in the street. At this level of thinking the junk was just another dwelling place.
Fishing Methods
Yet most of these same junks were also instruments of the chase. Their role as fishing boats took them away from the anchorage almost every day and closely conditioned the types of social and cultural interaction possible for those who lived on them. The analysis of this aspect of life in Kau Sai is the subject matter for the following chapters, but a preliminary sketch of fishing methods is necessary for a description of the rhythms of daily living.
The main types of fishing practised from Kau Sai were purse-seining, long-lining, gill-netting, trapping and hand-lining. In 1950 purse-seining and long-lining were normally specialist activities, gill-netting was very rare. Some long-liners switched at times to trapping, and almost all fishermen engaged from time to