FLY BY NIGHT HANGASHORE
  by Ernie Walsh

Being the youngest in our family, and as John and Denis were gone away and Ron was sick and spent most of his time indoors, I hung around a lot with our next door neighbour, Gerald Barry who always had something on the go. Down in the beach or landwash we'd pick small conchs off the strouters and rocks into a tin can and fill the can with salt water, start a small fire in the beach and boil the conchs, hook them out of the shells with a piece of wire and have a great feed of saltwater snails or escargots. Other times we'd go around the beach turning over rocks looking for small catfish, eels, crabs and many times put the rock back in a hurry when we'd uncover the biggest green sandworms, sea lice or other things that would scare us. On other days we would row out to the Long Rock and Tommy Yoe's Point for a feed of mussels. These we'd bring home for a meal. Other times we would get beach gravel when needed for paths around the doorway and house to keep the grass down and also to allow the water to run away.

One summer Gerald and I made our own small splitting table and set it up on the flat rocks between the end of our flake and Barry's stage. We went around the beach and picked up all the pollock and small fish or tom cods we could find and headed, gutted and split about a quintal. We had one minor problem - no salt. This we solved quickly. We decided to get three or four buckets of sand about the same size as coarse fish salt and figured this should serve just as well. We put our fish bulk out of the weather on the flat rock under Mr. Jim Barry's stage and sanded them away - heads and tails in opposite directions.

The next few days we checked on our fine fish bulk and invited others to admire it. There were also a lot of blue bottle flies spitting on our fish. We forgot our fish bulk for a few days until this evening Mr. Jim was going into the stage and heard this humming noise, went and checked and discovered our fish. He sang out to Gerald, and Gerald got me to come and look. Well, our fish pile was buzzing and actually moving and vibrating. The fly spits had hatched and turned into white maggots and the whole pile looked as if it was about to walk down off the rock. Mr. Jim told us to wash that ugly pile and smell out of there. It was late in the evening and the tide was high, so we pushed the works down off the rock and into the water with flake longers and got a bucket and washed away the remaining sand and maggots. The smell was in our noses for weeks.