Fishing is carried on by the Mafulu people by means of weirs placed across streams, the weirs having open sluices with intercepting nets, and smaller nets being used to catch such fish as escape the big ones.  They do not fish with spears, hooks, or bows and arrows, or with fishing lines, as is done in Mekeo; and even their weir and net systems are different from the Mekeo ones.  Fishing with them is more or less communistic, as it is generally engaged in by parties of ten or twenty men (women do not fish), and sometimes nearly all the men of a village, or even of a community, join in a fishing expedition; and everyone in the village or community shares more or less in the spoil.  The fishing season is towards the end of the dry season, say in October or November, when work in the gardens is over, and the rivers are low.  I cannot give the names of the fishes caught, but was told that the chief ones are large full-bodied carp-like fish and eels.

The large weir nets are simply ordinary frameless nets about 3 to 5 yards long, and 1 yard wide, with a fairly small mesh.  The smaller ones are hand nets, made in two forms.  One of these is made of ordinary fine netting, and is bag-shaped, being strung on a round looped end of cane, of which the other end is the handle, the net being about the size of a good-sized butterfly net.  The other form is also framed on a looped cane; but the loop in this case is larger and more oval in shape, and the netting is made of the web of a large spider.  To make it they take the already looped cane to where there are a number of such webs, and twist the looped end round and round among the webs, until there is stretched across the loop a double or treble or quadruple layer of web, which, though flat when made, is elastic, and when used becomes under pressure more or less bag-shaped.

The fishers first make a weir of upright sticks placed close together among the stones in the river bed, the weir stretching across the greater part of, or sometimes only half-way across, the river.  The side of the river left open and undammed is filled up with stones to such a height that the water flowing over it is shallow, and the fish do not escape across it.  In the middle of the weir they leave an open space or sluice, behind which they fasten the big net. [87] Plate 76 shows a weir on the Aduala river, a portion of the open sluice being seen on the left.  After forming the weir, but before fixing the net, the fishers all join in a sort of prayer or invocation to the river.  For example, on the Aduala river they will say, “Aduala, give us plenty of fish, that we may eat well.”  This is the only ceremony in connection with the fishing, and there is no food or other taboo associated with it; but here again charms are often relied upon.  The big net catches most of the fish which are carried down by the rush of water through the opening in the weir; but a group of fishermen stand round it with their hand nets, with which they catch any fish that leap out of the big net, and would otherwise escape, the ordinary hand nets being usually used for larger fish, and the cobweb ones for the smaller fish.  They often have two or three of these weirs in the same stream, at some little distance from each other.