Trengganu Malays, male and female, look forward. When the rivers are in full flood, the sun obscured, the N. E. monsoon blowing half a gale, the surf thundering on the beach and full of yellow yeasty foam, then you will see all the Malay ladies trooping out in their best silk coats and sarongs, and all the old blades and young bloods are in attendance.
They are all out for the day to enjoy themselves and to catch mullet and the more it rains and blows the better they like it, the ladies, perhaps, because their vivid silken raiment looks best when it is wet, or may be it fits their figures better so, and the men, perhaps, because they will catch more mullet!
These ladies have designed and made their own costumes. Raw Chinese silk has been teased, wound and spun; fast dies of vivid colours, orange, pink, vermilion, green; every colour and every shade have been prepared from roots, bark and leaves, and the garments have been woven in intricate designs, tartans, checks, watered silks and shot silks; a creative art which has been lost on the West, and will soon be lost on the East Coast, in these days of cheap imitation silks and aniline dyes. But let us get back to the mullet and the rain.
And the more it rains the fresher keep the flowers in the ladies' hair. These ladies wear no hats and there are no collars, draggled skirts or squelchy boots in this picnic party.
Let us again to the mullet. Now this catching of mullet is an affair of casting-nets and he who catches the most mullet is some ace. It is not a simple poaching trick of slinging a net over a sleepy fish in a pool, but quite a different business, I assure you.
The nets are made of the finest and strongest cotton, water-proofed in white of egg which renders them to the touch, for a season, as though they were made of the finest gut or sinews. The small net or jala anding when thrown covers perhaps 100 square feet of surface and it is weighted with little chains of pure tin. The light cord attached to the thrower's wrist is usually 30 feet long and the net is often thrown so as to drop fully expanded at the full extent of the cord, and that throw is in the teeth of a North-east gale.
Each fisherman has perhaps two or three such nets and, in reserve, a much larger and stronger casting net for the Pělong which is the giant of all our mullet.
Keeping far back on the sandy beach, the men follow the shore line until mullet (Anding) are seen, and, to the novice, it is a difficult matter to see them. But there they are, and when you know what to look for, in the smother and foam, you will notice little black heads, in hundreds, between the breakers. Now these Anding are the shyest fish that swim. A wave of the hand and they have disappeared to pop up again at a distance further seaward, where no man can hope to reach them.
