78
BARBARA E. WARD
and the development of radio weather forecasts directed specifically to the fishing fleets, brought at least a measure of security which was quite new.
I have stated that Kau Sai bay was not safe in a typhoon. Under sail the journey to the nearest relatively safe place, Sai Kung, might take anything up to two-and-a-half or even three hours. Given the unpredictability of typhoons any master who did not take his boat, with his family on board, off to Sai Kung at the first intimation of a possibly threatening storm would have been failing in his manifest duty. Many fishing days and nights in the summer were lost in this way. But with an engine there was nowhere in the whole territory which was more than an hour's journey from a typhoon refuge, and the journey itself was not dependent upon the very winds one was hastening to avoid. One of the most vivid and lasting memories of windy days in the summer of 1952 in Kau Sai, the first summer in which the village had had a properly mechanised boat at the anchorage, is of old Chung Fuk Hei chugging about here, there and everywhere to round up the stragglers and tow them into safety. He was unfailingly generous in this self-imposed task, and several times made two or even three journeys back to Kau Sai to make sure that no one was left behind. The lesson that engines spelled safety was very quickly learnt.
Safety when proceeding under power was, of course, also a matter of official concern. The prohibition of petrol engines as a safety measure has already been mentioned. With the introduction of small marine diesels the Hong Kong Government, through the Marine Department, devised a simplified form of license for coxswains and engineers in order to make it possible for inshore fishermen with only a few years' schooling to obtain essential minimum skills in navigation and engine maintenance. If this had not been done it would have been necessary for the owners of mechanised junks to employ men with the existing unnecessarily advanced qualifications. Since such men could command salaries well beyond the range of ordinary purse-seiners or small long-liners, the mechanisation of the inshore fishing fleets would never have taken place. At about the time that the first small marine engines made their appearance the