Ye Yaodong listened to Uncle Lin praise him as he carried the catch ashore. Only after everything was unloaded did he smile, pull out two cigarettes for him, and ask, "How was your catch today, Uncle Lin?"
Uncle Lin took the cigarettes with a smile and tucked both behind his ear.
"Don't even mention it. I hadn't hauled in two nets before the engine started acting up, so I hurried back. Only sold about ten yuan altogether. How could I compare with you? That one devil ray brought in three or four times what I made."
At some point, the gills of devil rays had actually become valuable.
Ray gills were the two parallel rows of bony projections growing along the inner edge of each gill arch in bony fish, also known as gill rakers.
At some point, this stuff called "ray gill" had come to be regarded by many as a cure-all. He had heard that many of the devil rays caught in recent years had been shipped to Qingping City in Guangdong Province.
They weren't cheap, either. Apparently, ray gills wholesaled for three fen a gram, or fifteen yuan a jin...
But as far as he knew, ray gills were actually no different from the gills of ordinary sea fish.
Still, this devil ray really did fetch a good price. It weighed forty-three jin and sold for seven mao a jin, bringing in thirty yuan on its own. The Spanish mackerel, Sea Wolf Fish, and sea bass sold for fifteen yuan altogether. The other, smaller fish weren't light, either. Weighed by type, they brought in another twenty-odd yuan.
His first attempt at longline fishing was a great success, bringing in over sixty yuan on the first day. The catch from the fishing pots sold for nearly twenty yuan