HUNDRED-TON GROWTH

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 35, 10 August 1934, Page 11

HUNDRED-TON GROWTH

MUSSELS ON THE OMANA

THREE YEARS' CROP

The Omana, chartered by the Union Steam Ship Company from.tho Sydney firm of B. S. Lamb, and shortly to take up the intercolonial running, went on to the floating dock this morning for a spring clean, and needed it.

.For about three years the Omana has been lying in the harbour, latterly at the slip wharf in Evans Bay, and it was known that there would bo a heavy growth of mussels, and the other usual and unusual shellfish growths below the waterline, but the actual tonnago of shellfish, was rather surprising. Every square inch of surface below the water lino was hidden by layer on layer of mussels, anemones, marine growths of curious outlino, and probably impossiblo names, to nn average thickness of about nine inches. Old hands estimated this morning that there were a good hundred tons of mussels on the boat when the dock rose. Beferring to the Tccent docking of the Katoa, they said that her underwater load was 80 tons. ■ ■ ' Tho cleaning is a fairly rapid job, for the mussels slice off in great masses under the push-hoes used. The usual praetieo is to gather tho mass on to a barge and to tip it into tho harbour off Kaiwarra or thereabouts. HARVEST FOE SEAGULLS. /Besides shellfish and anemones, the I Olnana brought up a great haul of small fish; tho sort that small boys try for all day, and, patterning themselves I after angling fathers, . toll lies about for quito a time afterwards. The mussel coat was their home, and they stuck to it to the last, and then fell to the floor of the dock in thousands. The seagulls had a busy time for ten minutes, and then stood about and gasped; they could not nearly clean them up, ha-ving no sOnso of providing for harder times ahoad, as had the Katoa's Chinese crew, who accepted tho offering with thanks and set to there and then to split the tiny things and dry them. Chinese aro not fish liars; they count only fish takon, small or large, and not those which get away. Marine growths on ships today aro a pest and an expense, the owner having to make his choice whether lie piles up expense jn running a dirty ship or in docking and cleaning, but they no longer threaten the wholo ship as they did.iv tho old wooden hull days, when barnacles'settled in countless thousands and gavo shelter for other pests that riddled tho outer skin. Far moro oldtime ships went to the breakers or rotted through destruction of the hull in this way than ended on rocks and shoals. Copper shoathing was the answer to the boring pest, but not a complete protection. Barnacles do not flourish particularly round the New Zealand coast, and toledo and the other borers have no effect on steel hulls. i