Marine Life Society of
South Australia Inc.
Newsletter
July 2008 No. 356
“understanding,
enjoying & caring for our oceans”
Next Meeting
The July General Meeting
will be held on Tuesday the 15th.
This will be held at the Adventure Blue
clubrooms on the Patawalonga frontage at 8.00pm.
Our speaker, Neville Skinner, will present the 2nd DVD in series – “Venom
Hunters”, which looks at the extraction of venom from deadly creatures (fish)
for medical purposes.
CONTENTS
The Noisy
Inshore Lingerer (David Muirhead)
The A.D.Edwardes
Collection Of Shipping Photographs In The State
Library Of South Australia (Steve Reynolds)
More About
The ER Sterling (Steve Reynolds)
Memberships
Thank
you to those who have renewed their memberships. This is our main source of
income to support the Society. (Any profits from calendar sales are earmarked
for the costs involved in the future production of the “Beachwash Guide”.)
Welcome
to a new member - “The Gold Factory” at Tumby Bay. See our links Page on our
website for full details of what the Committee considers to be an Ethical
Company.
by David Muirhead (Pictures by David
Muirhead)
Way back
in late January 1986 I had an interesting experience while diving off
Normanville Beach.
Unfortunately
although I had a mate in the water with me he was a long way away, mostly
further out than me, so we were each essentially solo, meaning I had
no one to compare notes with, which I would dearly have liked to do at the
time.
Instead I had to rely entirely on my own interpretation of my observations .
But try as
I might, all the while visually searching the sea bottom and
occasionally cautiously popping my head up to the surface
,and racking my brain for any other plausible explanation for the funny
sound that I kept hearing, such as dolphins nearby or
some mechanised thing on a passing boat or whatever, I remain at a
loss to find any reasonable explanation other than the one which I will
now put to you.
I remember
regretting also that I did not have a camera with me because we were
looking for lobster.
But I can
vividly recall what I heard and saw on that lovely sunny clear and calm day,
and on a number of occasions over the following years I have started to put pen
to paper to record it with the idea of putting it in a Marine Life Society
newsletter but never really completed the task, or if I did the
unpublished draft is languishing amongst these huge piles of papers that I
keep in my filing cabinet, and it will be quicker if I simply dictate this new
record rather than try to find it!
More than
halfway through the dive, having followed a limestone ledge a fair
way inshore such that I was only in about 2 or at most three
metres depth , I started hearing a strange ‘BONK’ sound.
I thought
I must have imagined it the first time I heard it.
After
pausing for maybe half a minute or less but not hearing any further
sounds apart from the obvious regulator bubbles, and maybe the occasional
sound of a pistol prawn a.k.a. snapping shrimp this being a radically different
sound altogether, rather like a sharp report from a distant small firearm, I
moved on only to hear it again, this time closer: a very brief and somewhat
abrupt almost urgent sound which while distinctive and unusual was not unpleasant to the ear.
The nearest I
can liken it to is a mildly muffled , musically flatter and
slightly lower frequency version of the beautiful banjo like ‘bonk’, also
with long pauses in between, made by some frogs belonging to the genus Lymnodynastes such as the eastern banjo frog.
While
still mystified as to the source, I continued hearing this sound repeatedly, albeit with intervals
infuriatingly long enough to make one start to wonder if it would
ever come again (as a wild guess I would say at intervals of
maybe 20 to 30 seconds, maybe even longer) but then each time I was about
to lose interest come again it would.
Hearing an
unexpected and strange sound repeating itself underwater is one thing, but
seeing is believing.
I had
been moving slowly away from the ledge as it looked like it was
petering out as I got further inshore, but then I rounded a bit of a corner and
there, surely, was the culprit!
Here the
ledge did a bit of a dog leg and in so doing regained some of its
former glory, being higher and having more extensive protective shelving , probably as it’s last hurrah because by
now I must have been less than a hundred metres from shore
in this rather shallow bay which is dominated by large areas of seagrass
and interspersed with many smaller but quite impressive areas of mostly
low limestone platform reef.
In plain view
under the best part of the ledge was this quite large and
almost eel like fish, maybe half a metre long, with drab dark
brownish dorsal colouration and paler below, rather sedately observing me
and occasionally turning from side to side to get a better look at me.
Whether or not
this Rock Ling realised the fact, we were really both in the same
boat for the only one I had ever seen before with any certainty (I had managed
to get photographs of that one’s head) had only its head showing, as
it gawked at me from one end of a
piece of broken and partially buried concrete pipe on the
bottom under Rapid Bay jetty in (wait for it !) 1977.
It seemed to
have given me or more likely it’s prospective mate the benefit of its last
and loudest ‘bonk’ seconds before I laid eyes on it, for I heard no more from
it despite observing it for many minutes, being by now almost certain that this
fish would be the source of the noise and dearly hoping that it would give a
repeat performance now that I could watch it and observe any funny sudden
mouth, gillplate or abdominal distensions or
other bodily contortions that might confidently be expected to accompany
the generation of such a noise.
I reckon I
must have started hearing this underwater sound when I was still at least 30 m
horizontally from where the fish resided, and it certainly behaved
like it had no intention of leaving its favourite ledge any time
soon so must have been there all along, and from what little I’ve read
about and what little is known about these fish it’s a safe bet that it would
have moved seasonally into this very shallow location for the express purpose
of mating and breeding .(Visit Janine Baker’s excellent ‘fish facts’ summary
page accessed easily via our Reef Watch link and you'll know all I do about
this rather special fish)
This possibility
was reinforced for me at the time anyway by the fact that, after becoming
bored waiting for it to do something interesting other than just look at me
between occasional retreats to the shady recesses of its ledge while
never failing to promptly return to the entrance for another sticky beak, I
started to investigate the more inviting parts of this ledge to either side,
rather selfishly thinking that if this ledge was good enough for such an
impressive fish it might also harbour one or two lobster-which it
didn't! (MLSSA members may be relieved to know that I finished this dive
with no lobster at all )
But I
now noticed an identical and only slightly smaller fish, which surely must
have been its sexual partner current or intended, (or perhaps another competing
adult of the same sex, but I doubt this as there were plenty of good
ledges all over this bay yet I didn’t see any other Rock Ling
throughout this wide ranging dive hunting for lobster under ledges in
excellent visibility ) under the same ledge on the other side of a
dividing bit of rocky outcrop, giving a distance between them of
somewhere between about 5 and 10 m.
I watched this
fish for a while also but it didn’t seem to do anything different to the
first one, nor did I hear any further sounds from either of them.
Nor have I
since heard anything like this sound while submerged in all the diving I have
done since, including a lot in this exact area at the same time of year.
I don’t think
I’ve even seen a Rock Ling since in this area either, indeed if at all anywhere
in South Australia since that day, and I always check carefully
wherever possible when I see a beardie or a
bearded rock cod, for example under Rapid Bay T Junction, to make sure
that it's not a ling.
So if it’s not
already a documented fact, and despite not having witnessed either of
these two fish actually making the sound, I at least am confident in my belief
that these fish, probably only of one gender (perhaps the
males but this is wild speculation indeed as I couldn’t tell the
difference between those two fish and merely presumed they were different
sexes) possess a mechanism for making quite a distinctive and loud underwater
noise as part of their normal courting or mating behaviour.
I have certainly
put the cart before the horse by allowing this article to be
printed without even bothering to await more complete
feedback from the few experts to which I have
circulated it as to whether Rock Ling or for that matter any other species of
ling have been already documented to make underwater noises.
That said, I am
acutely aware, largely from Janine’s email replies and after reading
her excellent ‘fish facts’ paper on this poorly
understood inshore fish, that it appears to be very much on the decline having
been heavily fished historically, including by spear, and having seemingly
never been very common here or anywhere in the first place, unlike its
more common deep-water cousin the Pink Ling which is still fished
commercially in southern Australia.
I was also
surprised to see that Rock Ling may
possibly have a natural lifespan of 3 decades, perhaps even longer,
and can grow to a length of at least 1.2 m : how I would love to chance upon
one that size under a shallow inshore ledge, and how sad
the reality that none of us appears likely to have such a privilege within
our diving lifetimes, if indeed we get to see the species at all.
(Probably wishful thinking on my part but maybe the relatively recent state
legislation effectively banning inshore netting could eventually allow our Rock Ling population to recover?)
If it’s probable
noise generating capability hasn’t already been documented, and that is a
big IF, it may simply be because there was never
enough opportunity in the first place for
conservation divers as opposed to spearos to interact with breeding adults in
the presumably narrow window of opportunity each year in which they do
make these noises.
If any readers have either
witnessed or heard from fellow divers of this sort of behaviour before
from the ling might I please ask that you kindly share this with me or
MLSSA or Reef Watch.
The A. D. Edwardes Collection Of Shipping Photographs In The State Library Of South
Australia
by Steve Reynolds
Since I wrote
about my article titled “The Schooner Dorothy H Sterling (and other
ships associated with her)”, which was published in our June 2008 Newsletter, I have acquired a copy of Ron Parsons’ book
titled “Sail in the South”. It features a selection of shipping photographs
from the AD Edwardes Collection in the State Library of SA. Photographs of both
the Dorothy H Sterling and the ER Sterling are featured in the
book.
“Sail in the
South” has several subtitles i.e. “The Great Days of Sail around Australia and
New Zealand” and “Shipping photographs from the Edwardes Collection”.
It seems,
however, that the full (correct?) title of the book is “Sail in the South – A
selection from the AD Edwardes Collection of Shipping Photographs in the State
Library of South Australia”.
“AD Edwardes”
refers to Arthur Diedrich Edwardes who died in 1970. Ron Parsons wrote the text
for the book but Arthur Diedrich Edwardes is credited as being the ‘author’ of
the book since it comprises a collection of his photographs.
Arthur (aka
“Bon”) was born at Port Victoria, on the Yorke Peninsula, in 1905. He began
collecting ships’ photographs in his teens. He then donated his large collection
to the State Library of SA in the 1960s.
The October 2007
issue of “Connect”, the newsletter for the State Library of SA, says that, “The
A. D. Edwardes Collection consists of 8,000 photographs of ships, mainly
sailing vessels, which visited Australian ports from around the world from 1865
to 1920.”
The newsletter
can be viewed at
http://www.plain.sa.gov.au/Newsletter/2007/Connect_PLSnewsletter_October2007.pdf.
This web page says that, “Over 2,000 digitised images from the A D Edwardes
Collection have been added to the South Australiana Database on the State
Library’s website.”
The web page found at http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?area_id=15&nav_id=1490
says that, “The collection is housed at the Information Desk
(of the State Library of SA) with the photographs to be viewed in the Sommerville Reading Room. You can access what
images of ships the collection holds through a card index located in the
Family History and Microform area.
“Ron Parsons,
the noted maritime historian has provided expanded captions to the Edwardes
Collection photographs, giving the history of the ships where known.
These captions are contained in folders at the Information Desk. It is
advisable to check these captions to ensure the ship has been correctly
identified.”
At least one of
these photographs features the six-masted wooden schooner Dorothy H Sterling.
As stated in my article titled “The Schooner Dorothy H Sterling (and
other ships associated with her)”, which was published in our June 2008
Newsletter, the Dorothy H Sterling (formerly Oregon Pine) was built in 1920 by the Peninsula Shipping Company
of Portland, Oregon, USA. She was abandoned in the Garden Island Ships'
Graveyard in the North Arm of the Port Adelaide River in 1932.
The Dorothy H
Sterling
(Source: http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/archaeology/department/publications/FUMAN/FUMAN_2007.pdf
)
The photograph
of the Dorothy H Sterling in “Sail in the South” (on page 144) shows a
‘donkey engine’ on the forecastle head. The donkey engine supplied steam to
capstan and winches. A wheelhouse and chartroom can also be seen on the poop.
(I don’t know
whether or not the wheelhouse and chartroom represent the cabin (mentioned in
my article) that was ‘placed as a ‘holiday shack’’.)
The remains of Dorothy
H Sterling at near low tide in the Port River (March 2007)
(Source: http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/archaeology/department/publications/FUMAN/FUMAN_2007.pdf
)
by Steve Reynolds
A photograph of
the six-masted barquentine ER Sterling also features in “Sail in the
South” by Ron Parsons (on page 185). There is some confusion regarding an
earlier name for the ER Sterling.
I stated in “The
Schooner Dorothy H Sterling (and other ships associated with her)” that,
“According to the web page found at
http://oceans1.customer.netspace.net.au/austrun-main.html
,
the E.R. Sterling was originally a four-masted vessel built in 1883 as
the Lord Woleseley.” “Sail in the South”,
however, says spells this name as Lord Wolseley
(a spelling that I would have favoured myself). “Sail
in the South”says that the Lord Wolseley was an iron-built ship of 2577 gross tons.
Then the web page found at
http://sailing-ships.oktett.net/482.html
says uses two other spellings - Lord Wolesley
and Lord Wolsely. So we now have four spellings
– Woleseley, Wolseley, Wolesley and Wolsely.
The web page
http://sailing-ships.oktett.net/482.html
says that the Lord Wolesley
became the Columbia, Lord Wolsely*
(1904), Everett G. Griggs (1913) and E.R. Sterling.
* (Hence some of the confusion over spellings.)
“Sail in the
South” also says that the Lord Wolseley
became, firstly, the Everett G Griggs and then the Columbia later
on.
The Lord Wolesley was launched in Belfast on 21st
July 1883. When she was “dis-masted off Cape Flattery
in 1903”, she was apparently only “Almost entirely dismasted”.
According to
“Sail in the South”, however, she “was sold as a constructive total loss to
stevedores in Vancouver. It seemed that her sailing days were over, but she was
re-rigged as a six-masted barquentine; square-rigged on the foremast with
fore-and-aft gear on the other masts. This made her slower but easier to
handle.”
When she was
re-rigged as a six-masted barquentine (as the Everett G. Griggs) in
1913, she was “the first such vessel in the world”.
I stated in my
article that the ER Sterling was sold to Captain ER Sterling in “1910
(or 1912)”. “Sail in the South” confirms that she was bought by Captain ER
Sterling in 1910.
He apparently
owned numerous sailing ships. “Sail in the South” says that, “He used (the ER
Sterling) as a cargo ship but converted the accommodation into modern
living quarters for himself. The ship also carried his
private automobile and motor launch.”
It also says
that, “In 1927, en route from Port Adelaide to Britain, she met with a series
of accidents. On 4 July she lost her main and mizen
(sic) masts in a gale off the Falkland Islands, and on 4 September she was
again dismasted. The first mate was crushed to death. After 286 days at sea she
reached the Thames as a floating shambles, and was not repaired but sold to shipbreakers for £4,000.”
The E.R.
Sterling had left Port Adelaide on 16th April 1927, to sail for
London with a cargo of wheat, under Captain (RM?) Sterling. She was north of
the Falkland Islands on 4th July when she was partially dismasted in a storm
but she continued her voyage.
It was a
hurricane on 4th September that caused her to lose her foremast and
the chief officer was killed. Crippled, she managed to struggle into the port
of St. Thomas in the West Indies on 15th October. There were no
repair facilities available there so she was towed from the West Indies to
London by tug.
According to the web page found at
http://www.oceans1.customer.netspace.net.au/austrunwrecks.html
,
the E.R. Sterling was at one time owned by the Sterling Shipping
Company* of Seattle, USA.
* (According to
“Scuttled and Abandoned Ships in Australian Waters” (2nd Edition
1998) by Ronald Parsons and Geoff Plunkett 14, found at
http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/pollution/dumping/history/pubs/sea-dumpingscuttled.pdf
,
the last known owner of the Dorothy H Sterling was the Sterling S.S.
Corporation, registered in Seattle.)
The web page found at
seems to say that the iron barquentine Everett G. Griggs was
“One of the ships owned by Thomas Dixon and Sons, Belfast”.
The web page found at
http://sailing-ships.oktett.net/482.html
explains that the Lord Wolesley
was built as a four-masted iron ship in Belfast in 1883. She was apparently a
sister ship to the Lord Downshire, built and
launched in 1882. (Visit http://sailing-ships.oktett.net/477.html
for details.)
A 1910 photo of the Everett G. Griggs is
available at
Another photo of the Everett G. Griggs taken in 1913 is available at
http://www.catalog.slsa.sa.gov.au:1084/search?/XLord+Wolseley&c=icl++&m=&SORT=AX&Da=&Db=&submit=Submit/XLord+Wolseley&c=icl++&m=&SORT=AX&Da=&Db=&SUBKEY=Lord%20Wolseley/1,2,2,B/l856~b1207663&FF=XLord+Wolseley&c=icl++&m=&SORT=AX&Da=&Db=&submit=Submit&1,1,,1,0
.