Octopus Hide-and-Seek

Six of us- Monaynee, Makol, Hadji, Stephen, Mosquito and I- met on the beach just as color began to enter the day. What was just moments earlier a scene in grayscale beach now included a slight pink-orange, and a few minutes later the shallow waters offshore give the first hint of their screaming blue identity. The tide was still pulling away, but the pace was slowing and low slack wasn’t far off. Today, the boys were showing me how to hunt for octopus, Zanzibar-style . We took a long walk through ankle deep water, eventually reaching deeper water, and finally reaching the Gambaguru. Today there was plenty of wind to carry us out to the reef.

In theory, octopus hunting is straightforward. Bring decent footwear for pacing around on the exposed coral reef. Keep an eye out for all the damn sea urchins, because stepping on one doesn't tickle. Carry a couple pieces of bent coathanger and a spear. As an old Maine friend would say, make sure to bring Percy along (Percy Verance) for company during the search. Be ready for a battle if you find an octopus.

Octopus make their lairs in the nooks of the coral reef. They are cunning masters of camouflage disguise, shape-shifters, and I’ll make the case that they’re the strongest living thing, pound-for-pound, in the world.

Stephen told me that octopus tuck into tiny caves and holes that have a certain look, and that the first major challenge is in finding one. Cleverly placed loose rocks, empty shells (middens- the leftover remains of urchin or mollusk meals), or a tip of one arm is about all you can hope to see. Surprising even himself, Stephen happened to spot an octopus within minutes.

The second major challenge is getting the octopus out of its cave. After watching Stephen’s battle, and having some experience with an occasional octopus brought up on the longline in Alaska, there is no way I can describe just how superhuman the strength of an octopus is. We are outmatched 100:1 or more. Even with the unfair advantage weapons- wire and spears and knives- the suction-cupped beasts are formidable.

After five minutes of work, squatting in six inches of water, Stephen had only managed to get a grip on a single foot of the octopus. This was after poking and jabbing it in its body scores of times. After ten minutes, he managed to remove a second leg. After a short eternity, he asked to me to hold a third leg that he’d pulled loose of the coral. Stephen is a strong guy. From just one leg I could feel myself getting pulled toward the octopus hole. Luckily it wasn’t even a fist-sized hole. The fight continued. After a half an hour, hundreds of stabs to the body and legs, unsuccessful attempts to break into the from above coral and from the even smaller rear entrance, all but one of the legs were free of the lair. Still, it took another few minutes to pry the thing free. Refusing to quit passively, the octopus came out guns blazing, dousing black ink on Stephen from his neck to his ankles. It just missed getting him in the eyes.

I looked at the octopus in awe. This was a big one for this reef I was told, but still it was only about a kilogram and two feet long from top of mantle to tip of it’s legs. This one would have overpowered and outlasted me, so imagining what a really big octopus could do stretches into the land of myth and monsters.

Today, this was the only octopus that Stephen located before the tide rose and covered the reef with water and waves. Mosquito had forgotten his shoes (or had wanted a little more rest and had conveniently left his shoes ashore), and was tending to the boat. The other three men had managed to win wrestling matches with five octopus between them. Mosquito tells me that on the best days it’s possible to collect 20 octopus. Better eat your Wheaties, but no need to go to the gym if you have an octopus as a personal trainer.

Fried octopus is delicious and very popular both in Stonetown and on the east side of the island, selling for around 5,000 shillings per kilogram on the market in Stonetown, and more if it’s fresh. You often see men biking down the roads leaving to the Stonetown Market with a sand-covered octopus draped over the handlebars. Incidentally, octopus is also the best bait around, because it’s tough even after death and stay on the hook. They’re great hunters in their own right, the octopus, grow quickly, and are devilishly intelligent. I’m a fan of the animal in all forms.

Stephen's catch this particular morning will be traded for enough food staples to serve up the bulk of 30 or so meals, and a small piece of the octopus will also be bait to entice swimming protein aboard the Gambaguru in coming days. A noble cause for one stubborn sucker.

Moondance

Eight of us met on the Jambiani beach in the afternoon and worked on shifting a heavy, half-buried seine net form above the high tide mark into the boat. This dhow of the day was bigger than the Gambaguru, heavier, and most appropriately named Doza’, as in “bulldoza’”, because it was capable of handling so many people and lots of gear. Filling up the ranks for Captain Mahamoodi were Pandu, Hadji, Ahmed, Ali (a different Ali than we’ve met before), Ari, Mosquito, and one pale-skinned accessory. After the gear, we all climbed aboard and poled out to sea, as there wasn’t enough wind to push the beast along.

The fishing council discussed options for the day's set as we alternated poling duties. The spot finally settled upon was about four feet deep, with a bottom of dark coral and seaweed. A big rock anchor and a large buoy, attached to one end of a long net, was tossed overboard. The boat carved out a broad U with the net, with the opening facing up-current and southward. The net hung about three feet deep in the water and stretched several hundred meters. Immediately, across the opening, a thick line with palm frond “brooms” tied in every three meters or so was laid in the water. These brooms serve to sweep fish down into the belly of the net, closing the mouth of the U-shaped set. To my mind, when seen from underwater, each frond bundle looked like an octopus in attack mode. Whatever it looks like through fish eyes, it was effective at turning the catch around and back within the cup of the net.

By now the water had dropped to around three feet. Between us, there were five masks and snorkels. All but one man jumped out of the boat and took up a position along the perimeter of the net or on the line between the octopus dummies. We gradually sealed the mouth of the net and continued so that the ring described by the dark blue net slowly telescoped smaller. Those of us with masks kept tabs on the underwater activities and gave updates on where the concentration of fish was. (I tried to help with pointed fingers, waving hands, and grunts of “Poa!”). When the net had been drawn to a ring around 30 meters in diameter, Ahmed and Ari carried over a separate piece of net- this one much shorter- and a black rectangle of fine mesh. The black rectangle is the final trap into which the fish are herded, with the aid of the short stretch of net. As the mass of fish converged on the black mesh box, its mouth is closed, and the bundle of fish is carried over to, and dumped into, the Doza’. Snorkelers do a sweep for straggling fish, and the herding process can be repeated if need be. Kelp and seaweed are sorted from the finned quarry. The coordination required for this sort of fishing is impressive. The fish will feed eight Jambiani families as well as their friends and neighbors.

The process was incredible to watch from underwater. Even when knowing well that fish caught were going to good use, I couldn't help but sympathize for individual fish as they watched their boundless reef paradise hatch walls, and for the walls to rapidly encroach on their freedom. There was a brief period of panic as they tried to escape their new foreign environment, but the black mesh box seemed to attract them like a magnet as a place of safety. A false refuge. Life for a fish is hard, with or without humans.

We made a total of three sets, and each set took around two hours from start to finish. There were lots of laughs all around- this was a feat of teamwork and cooperation, without oil and machinery to share any of the load. The second set was laid out in the rain just after dusk, and the third set was done by moonlight. I’d guess that each set yielded about 20 kilograms of fish. Sometimes Mosquito tells me that a single set will fill the boat to the gunwales (which I’d guess is several thousand kilograms of fish), and that the fishermen are then forced to swim home (smiling no doubt), and then there are feasts, spontaneous beach parties, and lots of fish for the market. The tale of a boatload of fish is the equivalent of the rare giant bluefin sunning himself just in front of the boat in the Gulf of Maine, the big piraracu biting on the Solimones in Brazil, the winning numbers on the lottery, guessing the day right for Alaska's Nenana Ice Classic. A rare event, almost a miracle, but the exciting thing is that it might happen any old day.

Attempting to prove my usefulness, during the second set I noticed a spot where the bottom of the net was hung-up above the sea floor. I rushed over to close the leak as a few small fish zipped out and away. Just as I blocked the gap, a large pufferfish was huffing his way to the exit. We had a showdown: my arm-flailing bravado versus his patient beady gaze. I thought about trying to push him back in with my hand as he seemed frozen in the water column. Just then he triggered his quirky defense tactic and inflated into a spiny football in front of my face. He and I both popped to the surface in surprise. I let the prickly danger blimp float away free.

Heading in by the light of a waxing moon, surrounded by happy shouts in Swahili, and now with wind to carry us effortlessly, I couldn’t help but smile like the rest of the gang. The passing rain had already cleared for the stars to poke out, and unknown southern constellations dancing out in the blackness. Once on the beach, Mahamoodi generously sorted the fish into eight even piles, after taking a few choice fish as owner of the boat, as is the custom. The group had automatically given me a share of fish, and this action meant a lot to me. Mosquito was quick to quietly dissuade me from returning my share back to the group, as he was eager to acquire an extra portion, under the vague promise of a grand barbecue for the mzungo. I never did see the the barbecue, but it was a fine trip and I'm sure the fish all went to good use in and around Mosquito's home.

Passing to Level 5

When the wind is too weak to push a dhow by sail, using a long pole to poke along the bottom is the alternative. Poling is also the method Mosquito opts for when passing over the shoal water that makes up the barrier reef. Mosquito, Stephen, Ali, and I were going fishing “Inside” today (by inside, Mosquito means "outside"). Passing through the breakers can pose a big challenge for a sleek dugout canoe, and although I couldn’t understand the Kiswahili, I could sense by the tone of the conversation that the location where we passed through the reef was important. The day was quite nice and I myself was looking forward to a little splash of warm water in the face.

This timing of the pass through the shoal waters reminded me of the only video game I’ve ever played: Donkey Kong. To be specific, Donkey Kong Level 4, where the world is an urgent reddish hue, and you have to learn the timing and location of the deadly bouncing spring in order to time your passage and once again touch the princess (before the barrel-rolling gorilla snatches her from your arms and jails her on the top platform in Level 5). It seemed really hard back in the day. Needless to say, we watched the wave action and poled on through, to the vast fishing grounds outside of the reef. Real-life Level 5 is big. (Real-life video gamers are probably making fun of me right now.)

I’ve heard mention in town that the offshore waters of Zanzibar are especially prized fishing waters, coveted by many other nations, especially China. (These were Zanzabarians saying this, so of course they’re proud of their waters.) Apparently there is some alliance between Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, and South Africa to protect their collective waters from foreign fleets and from Somali pirates. This is just intercepted talk, hearsay, and I haven’t been able to find out any details of this or any of the agreed-upon rules. Regardless, I doubted that pirates or fisheries enforcement would be interested in the Gambaguru. Today we’d taken a bigger sail for the boat, initially made out of sailcloth but well patched with assorted other materials. “GAMBAGURU” was painted on the sail, although it was upside down and backwards. Still, a badass boat name.

After spending the other day receiving harsh criticism on my fishing abilities from Mosquito, today was my day to celebrate a lucky revenge. Depending on a whole range of things, not the least being blind luck, two fishermen right next to eat other can and often do have very different catch rates. Of course the experienced fisherman is guaranteed to ignore and discredit all the physical variables that could justify this and will claim that the difference comes down to skill, even if he fronts with modesty. This is a global phenomenon of fishing psychology. For whatever reason (skill), totally unexplainable (skill), almost certainly because I was using a bigger sinker than the others (nope, skill), I ended up catching fish almost continuously (skill), while Mosquito and his brother struggled to catch fish, and Ali couldn’t catch a thing, gave up, and took a nap in the bow. I kept quiet but was secretly smug.

One benefit of this sort of fishing is that it was be very selective, and you can release unharmed any unwanted fish. However, here in Jambiani every fish is edible, and there are no rewards for beauty, so little was released, but none is wasted. Like the fishing inside, we eventually gathered a spread of fluorescents and pastels in the bottom of the boat. Octopus and sandworms presented in the right way (skill) yielded some tasty fish. Even with decent fishing adding up to several dozen fish, I’d guess that for every ten minutes of backbreaking digging that Ali had spent gathering sandworms at low tide with nothing but a stick and bare hands, we only returned about one-tenth of one small fish. Maybe we should all shift to eating the marine spinach.

Living Rainbows

The outer coast of Zanzibar, as mentioned before, is buffered by a coral reef running more or less parallel to the shore, a couple miles out. This reef knocks out any swell coming in from India, so inside it’s smooth sailing. The Gambaguru sits anchored in two or three feet of water when not out fishing. In fact, at low tide, much of this inside corridor isn’t much deeper than a meter or two anywhere. The water is absolutely clear, deceptively clear, making the jet-black sea urchins two meters down look like they’re within an easy arms reach. Most of the inside seafloor is bare white sand, mostly void of bigger forms of life, but where odd-shaped patches of coral and seaweed lay on top of the blank slate, life is suddenly abundant and flamboyant.

It was towards the darker patches just inside of the reef that Mosquito, his younger brother “Captain” Stephen, and I headed today. Traveling to the fishing grounds, albeit a short journey, was especially quiet and pleasant in the Jambiani-style dhow/outrigger. We turned into the wind over a dark patch that Mosquito selected, out went the anchor, down came the sail, and we were ready to fish. The secret recipe for success today: careful presentation of a #14 Royal Wulff pattern, two pound tippet, laid out by a weight-forward QRST5 sinking line using a graphite 5/6 weight rod. Just kidding. A couple plain old hooks tied onto hefty monofilament and baited with small chunks of octopus, with a small piece of lead clamped on a foot above, worked just fine. With a flick of his wrist, Mosquito tossed his line 10 meters away from the boat and let the bait sink to the bottom. Nibbling commenced. He set the hook, and in most cases a bright little reef fish came up on one of his two hooks. Sometimes he caught a pair with one haul. Many times the octopus had crawled away from its station, and Mosquito needed to rebait. Sometimes Davy Jones decided to keep the hooks. So it goes. You’d think Davy Jones would be sick of collecting fishing gear by now.

Here the three of us sat, slowly collecting a kaleidoscope of fish in the bottom of the boat. Mosquito tells me that some days catches can be as high as 2,000 fish, with a good crowd of good fishermen aboard, and when the bite is on. Today we caught about 40. Sometimes barracuda, tuna, and turtles, even the occasional shark, wander into the tranquil swimming pool on the land side of the barrier reef, but this day we only encountered fish like chang choray, mcheche, gowgow, cunday, chengua. Big scales, bright colors, and mouths equipped with predatory fangs or coral-crushing chompers.

We eventually called it quits, raised the patchwork quilt of a sail- a faded banner of advertisement for Zanzibar grain, Arabic meal, Camel-brand flour- and slid back toward the palm trees, which welcomed us with ecstatic waving. The darker patches on the bottom faded into white sand, and then closer to shore more dark patches appeared but instead these had straight edges and the patches formed definite rectangles. I hadn’t noticed the geometry on the way out. Mosquito tells me that here they cultivate a certain seaweed species (a marine look-alike to Old Man’s Beard) to dry and sell to the Japanese. “They eating like a-spinach,” he told me, and I could tell he was more of a fish-and-rice kind of guy. This side of Zanzibar must be damn close to paradise: the sun continues to smile, the trees are friendly, and there are thousands of rainbows swimming just offshore.

Jambiani Jambo

Jambiani is a small village on Zanzibar’s southeast coast. From here, you can look out upon a sea that stretches east all the way to India, although you'd have to dodge the Somali pirates to get there. The coral reef a couple miles offshore makes a nice breakwater and sort of protects Jambiani’s beach, making a giant tranquil buffer that is fishable even when outside waters are stormy. House walls are made of coral and cement and then whitewashed; roofs are of woven coconut fronds. In Jambiani the paths are dirt, goats are common, stars are bright, smiles are big, soccer is huge, the unending beach is pure white, and the ocean is, amazingly enough, the exact color of the margin of a Microsoft Word application. Check it out if you don’t believe me. How convenient, leave it to Microsoft to save me from floundering around in my shallow mental database for a novel way of saying “really, REALLY bright blue”...

I've made some lopsided alliances with locals in Dar Es Salaam and in Stonetown that turned out to be more interested in playing the role of Robin Hood than offering any services for the money I’d foolishly advanced them to help with petro or fishing line expenses. So it was with reluctantance and caution that I've come to team up with Issa, a.k.a. “Mosquito”, here in Jambiani.

Incidentally, I’ve had more than a few internal laughs about the trend in the “profitability curve” of my fishing “work” over the last year. From making good wages deckhanding on somebody else's boat in Alaska, I shifted towards working harder for less in my own skiff. I worked in Newfoundland for a half-share, traded my labor for food and lodging in Chile, worked as a welcome but unpaid volunteer in the Amazon, and was reduced to full-on begging to volunteer in Asia. The Azores were slightly out of this progression, as I was a welcome volunteer and in any return trips to Sao Jorge (in coming years, for tuna!) I might even earn a wage, but here in Africa it seems expected that I should pay for the experience to work alongside local fishermen, covering any boat expenses and ensuring a little secondary income for the fishermen. This is understandable I suppose, and is relative to the local economy. My interest hasn’t been in making money, but more in making it clear that I’m not interested in a charter or in sport fishing- that I’m trying to see exactly how fishing goes on a typical day in the particular area, to not impede in any way by letting outside money foul the bilges. Hats off to the fishermen-entrepreneurs of Zanzibar! Returning to paying work will be a strange feeling after this!

Back to Mosquito and Jambiani. For a small fee, Mosquito agreed to be my fishing liason, to keep tabs on the local fishing fleet and to get me aboard any trips I was interested in. I was then supposed to tell them some complicated fib about how I’d already paid the tourism board officer (a position that probably doesn’t exist) such-and-such an amount for so many hours and so had arranged to go out with Mosquito as my guide. I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the story and none of the other fishermen seemed to care a bit. Mosquito helped explain to them that I was a mzungo interested in fishing, and that was fine to them. Wind provided most of the moving power, I was another hand to push when the boat ran into shoal water, and I wasn’t taking any fish home for myself.

Mosquito is 28 years old, and strong and fit like every other person in Jambiani. He has especially dark skin and especially white teeth. Despite red alerts from his tendency to repeatedly verbalize what a nice guy he is (if I’ve learned anything in the past few months, it’s that there’s an inverse relationship to how many times a person says, "I'm a really good guy" aloud and how nice a guy he is in truth), I’m convinced he really is decent, an outlier to this pattern. He started fishing with his dad, and alone from the beach, at age 10, and has always lived in Jambiani. Now his dad is dead, and his mom takes care of his two young kids he’s had with a former wife. He has a brother, “Captain” Ali, 22, and a sister, age 10, in town also, and a little brother in Stonetown, age 20. Mosquito works as a fisherman, a carpenter, and whenever possible as an officially unofficial tour guide, hustling mzungo to earn food for his web of family and himself.

Mosquito owns the Gambagumu (something like “Swift”), a dhow-outrigger canoe combination craft typical of the kind on this side of the island. Within sight, there are around 70 dhow in the water around Jambiani, with hulls somewhere between 7 and 12 meters. Although these boats aren’t quite the heart-stopping beauties of Stonetown, what they lack in elegance they compensate with utility. And on this side, dhows are fishing boats! With a steady breeze from somewhere on the compass, usually an onshore breeze (this time of year from the southeast), wind lends the moving power at the right price.

The Gambagumu is a little under 10 meters long tip to tail. The boat is basically a deep, heavy dugout canoe, with an outrigger on either side made of planed wood. A squat mast juts vertically, looking ineffectively short in relation to the length of the vessel at hand. With dhows of this style, there is a single sail, and it is huge relative to the length of the boat. The lead edge of the sail, its longest side,is lashed to a long wooden pole (sailors probably have a fancy term for this type of sail, which I don’t know about and neither of us cares about). Roughly the center of this pole, often around its balance point, is pulled to the top of the mast. Thus, this pole, and with it the front edge of the sail, run from a fixed point in the bow sharply upward, past the top of the mast and into the air above. This is different than a “classic” (western-style) sailboat, because there is no boom, there are no spars, and the sail runs high beyond the top of the mast (excusing the squat mast). Aside from being a little slow to “come-about”, this design is brilliant. There are no pulleys, no cables, no levers, no winches, no widgets, bells, or whistles. The sails of the Gambagumu, like nearly all of the dhows in Jambiani, are made of modern burlap sacks (woven plastic grain bags) cut open and stitched together. Nothing but wood, line, empty grain bags, a few handfuls of metals spikes, and a few hand tools can make a perfect boat, to be anchored (a big hunk of coral serves the anchor) just off a perfect beach. Jambo!

Stay tuned for the Mosquito chronicles, when we take the Gambaguru in search of unsuspecting tropical fish with a variety of fishing modes, assuming Mosquito doesn't evaporate like some of my other Tanzanian fishing friends...

The Five-Gallon Shuffle

For those westerners who are suspicious that Zanzibar is a real place (just a couple weeks ago I was one), you can take my word for it. Zanzibar is indeed real and alive- and a semi-autonomous island off the coast of Tanzania. Stonetown is Zanzibar’s biggest port- it’s only city- the island’s connection to the mainland and the capital of Dar Es Salaam. The population is a blend of native Africans, Arabs, and Indians; language, religion, architecture, and food all benefit from this. The richness of colors and culture here would elude the best of writers and photographers, so please excuse my amateur attempts. In my limited exposure to various parts of the world, this is without a doubt the most picturesque and visually stimulating of any social environments I’ve ever seen.

Arriving in Stonetown was refreshing, after a tiring push through Dar’s busy public spaces, where everybodseemed to be working hard to get my meager business, by hook or crook. The dock and street crowd still all give me the feet-wallet-eyes once-over before welcoming this free-range mzungo, but somehow once eyes meet the welcoming seems more genuine. Here in Stonetown, more than in the mainland capital, Muslim faith dominates life, business, and developments, and the respect granted to others, even a foreigner with different beliefs, is felt immediately. Most of the city answers the call to prayer, beautiful melodies broadcast over loudspeakers five times per day, and a siren at around 6:30pm signals dusk at the equator and curfew for small children. Handshakes are long and complex here, and are often repeated over and over throughout the course of a conversation. Also of note, shop and home doors in downtown Stonetown are ornately carved and decorated with impressive metal spikes and latches, Arabic in origin and beautifully imposing.

I set up camp just above the Malindi Fish Market, around the city’s highest concentration of stray cats (thanks to the fish guts I suppose). Here in town the two fish hubs are the Malindi and the Darajani, and the spectacle of fish auctioning would dazzle even the fish haters of the world. Let’s start in the market and work backwards to the fisherman.

Fish are sold at the busy market in stands, where an interested buyer can walk up and order a cut of whichever fish he or she desires, as is more or less conventional in many countries. For a better price though, she can walk to the tip of the market building, to the human ring which is a continuous fish auction, with middle men laying individual bigger fish or small piles of small fish, squid or octopus on the well-worn stone floor in the center of the crowd. Auctioneers keep tabs on the highest bidder, and several actions are underway at the same time. For the amount of visual commotion, the scene is mostly quiet, and most of the communication is without words. The smells of ginger, cloves, frying bread, and Arabic dates waft through once in a great while, a miracle considering that these smells are overpowering the pungent fishy odor (or is my mind anticipating an upcoming snack and tricking the nose?). Piles of fish fluctuate in size, deals are cut, and men and women walk in and out with fish in plastic buckets and reed baskets or wrapped in newspaper. On the streets middle men also sell fish, taking care to arrange the catch in neat piles, 500 Tanzanian shillings for these sardines or 1,000 shillings for that string of choles (these days, around 1,300 shillings equals $1 US).

Fish are transported throughout Stonetown and to the market by an impressive fleet of rusty bicycles, each with a reed basket bulging out behind the seat. Transport begins around 7am and seems to continue all day long, through narrow streets which continue to get me hopelessly lost. Before 7, all the bikes are parked in a mass in front of the Malindi pier, and the “five-gallon shuffle” is in full swing. Bucket after bucket of fish are lugged from fishing boats, through waist-deep water, up the cement pier, through the crowd. The crowd consists of folks already vending fish (middle men to the middle men?), locals looking to buy straight form the fishermen, and others waiting to transport. Work is hard to come by here right now it seems, and I get the sense that there is quiet but significant competition for fish transport privileges. I can’t imagine there is any profit in this line of work, but in a place where hotel workers (a very good job) make 120,000 shilling per month (around $90 US/month), and where many families can only afford to rent a decaying single-room cement cube on the edge of town, every shilling requires sweat and every shilling counts. A substantial meal on the street costs around 2,000 shillings, but most all of the workers around the Malindi market eat a watered down soup, which likely costs a tenth of this.

The mvuivi (fishermen) that base out of Stonetown mostly fish out of heavily built open boats around 10 meters long. An outboard motor, something between 20 and 40 horsepower, is mounted off-center on the stern, and between eight and twenty men hop aboard. Coming in, the appearance of the most crowded boat and her crew isn’t much different than images of overcapacity refugee boats coming towards Florida from Haiti, and I can bet that fishermen enjoy the personal space that a return to dry land affords them. Much of the fishing is done in the night, with fishermen heading out around dusk and returning in time for the morning market. It seems that many of the boats are owned by a fishing cooperative, in which the boat is also owned collectively and profits from fish sales are split. For a few boats, there is a day shift of fisherman and a night shift. The boat itself gets little rest. Fishing with handlines is the main strategy for larger fish, and so the more men aboard, the more hooks in the water. The small daga and tongay are lured in at night by dangling kerosene lantern over the gunwale and scooping the minnows up with nets, just like shishaw in the Azores. Some of the schooling medium-sized fish are also enticed with artificial light and are caught with bigger seine nets. The larger pelagics (tuna, kingfish) are found well offshore and fishermen go out for several days and freeze their catch.

I must confess that I’ve become spellbound by a Zazabarian beauty, a distraction from the straight-and-narrow fishing industry. The heavy oversized skiffs, as practical a fishing boat they are, just aren’t holding my interest. Dhows- the graceful, distinctive sailing vessels of these parts and much of the rest of the Indian Ocean, are my new love. Here, they’re mainly use for water transport- bringing charcoal and wood from the mainland to Zanzibar, moving goods between smaller islands, shuttling fish back to the mainland, and not primarily for catching fish. The generous sails seem to fill with even a gentle breeze, and carry the boat through the baby blue. These dhows are so stunningly beautiful gliding through the water that I lose much ability to speak when one is in sight. To my delight, they’re common here; I’ve drifted away from many conversations with dock rats. matter of fact, here comes a dhow now...

Placing Zanzibar on the Map

Stonetown, Zanzibar, TANZANIA
Targeted fish: kibua (mackerel-like), yodadi (bigeye, yellowfin tuna), daga, tongay (little minnows to dry in the sun), boomla (small fish with a huge gaping mouth), upapa, kibuwa, pono, subadi (assorted reef fish), tas (butterfish), saradine, pweze (octopus), gesee (squid), garingare, mkule (two gar-like fish), sim-sim, choles (perch-like), ta (skate), fatundo (red snapper), changu (small snapper), mzia (barracuda), nguru (kingfish)
Fishing methods: handline, seine net, lantern and dipnet, bent coathanger and spear (octopus)
Footwear: barefoot
Favorite local sayings: Mambo! (How are you?) Karibu! (Welcome!) Mzungo! (white guy!) Hakuna matata. (All is good.)
Local food: fried octopus, fried fish, chapate bread, coconut milk-based stews, potatoes
Drink of choice: tea, water, sugar cane juice, Fanta
Local entertainment: big fans of the English Premier League (soccer), playing football (soccer)
Local music: Zanzibar's unique blend of Indy-Afro-Arab music, more to come about this
Select Local Fishing Boats: Shebedu, Angello, Hikma, Allva Kadir, Swaj ("Jaws" backwards)

Shishaw Brothers

On one of my last afternoons on Sao Jorge, with the junkyard crew busy with their various tasks, I wandered down the road. The scene was fairly normal, and since Paul was busy using his only welder I was left to either invent a wrenching project or be a superfluous assistant. I chose option C: to head down the road, with no particular plan. Road adventures in Sao Jorge seem to have a few consistent characteristics: beautiful scenery. Really, REALLY crazy drivers treating their Toyotas like Monte Carlos and the twisting road like a race course, comfortable assuming that there’s nothing around the blind corner just ahead and so taking it hard to the inside. Cows young and old in their stark binary robes, pondering something, maybe. Loud, mean dogs in the front yards of whitewashed stone houses, the homes of quiet, friendly Azorean folks.

This particular sunny day, a grin and a waive were more than enough to prompt several people to call me into their yards to enjoy say hello. I did my best to pretend like I was on a mission, some goal-oriented quest, but I should know better trying to fool those drinking the truth serum. I returned to home base (the junkyard), but only after several pieces of homemade candy, sampling various local fruits, and, of course, a Sagres or two.

Back among the piled up cars, Paul was looking for me. “Americano ducarayo!” (My fond nickname, not worth translating.) “Vai por peixe aghora!”

I liked the sound of those words. Time to go fishing. It was not Paul himself who was going out, but Paul had let all his buddies know that the American wanted to go fishing. A friend of his had called from Velas, boat leaving as soon as I could get down there.

I promised a beer in exchange for a ride down the hill from the junkyard regular I’ve nicknamed the Jolly Friar. As dusk rolled in reluctantly, I scrambled to the dock, which in Velas nothing more than a big cement pad that runs up to the water’s edge, serviced by a picking crane but directly exposed to any swell from the west. Here, most of the boats are pulled out of the water between use, because there’s no decent harbor for the small commercial fleet. Three small boats were nosing away from the crappy harbor, but one boat, upon seeing the truck pull up, swung back towards the dock.

Salvador and August are the rare type of brothers that get along very well with each other. The brothers have one of the three boats that make up the nighttime shishaw fishery of Velas. Unlike the other two boats, which are heavy-ribbed wooden double-enders powered by small center-mounted diesels, the brothers’ boat is a compact five and a third meters, fiberglass, built by Paul, and pushed around by a 115 horsepower four-stroke outboard. Gear on board consisted of one large dipnet, a galvanized meat grinder bolted to the seat, a fish finder, an insulated tote mounted in the middle of the boat, and a deep cycle car battery wired to a panel light mounted to the starboard rail, facing out into the water. Nice, simple fishing gear!

With August at the wheel, Salvador dropped the pick in exactly 156 feet of water and then took up residence along the starboard rail. We were only a half-mile from the harbor. The brothers were jovial and at ease, happy to explain their work to me, and both seemed like sharp tacks. There was still traces of light to be had at 9:10pm. A small but confused swell form the northwest kept the bobber of a boat on its toes. Gulls of some sort make a wild racket just after dark, singing out “Gurl! Gurl! Gurl!” towards the horizon.

August showed me the technicolor blob hugging the bottom of the fishfinder screen. “Shishaw,” he said. “Shishaw e cavala.” [note: opinions on how to spell “shishaw” varied greatly around Velas, so I chose this one, until further corrected.]

The two fish targeted by this niche fishery look very similar to the untrained eye. They show up together, and are both have smallish fusiform bodies with slightly oversized pectoral fins. Shishaw, I was told, appear more blue in the water. These fish are sold in town. Cavala are very similar to tinker mackerel in appearance, a skinny relative of tuna, but on the island have no real market value. Since the two species are caught together and separating them in the dark is a hard task, cavala are also kept, and are certainly not wasted. My impression is that the cavala are given away to neighbors, traded for small favors, sometimes sold to longliners to be used for bait, and thrown into the fishermen’s own frying pans.

As light faded above the water line and the panel light broadcast an artificial sun into the water’s depths, the colored blob of fish on the fishfinder rose towards the surface. The fish all seemed to be in agreement, because the blob moved quickly. In short order quick light sabers flashed through the water just below the surface, silver-blue streaks in the blue-black water. August and I took turns making a fresh sardine puree with the grinder, and Salvador tossed bits of this chum in front of the light’s beam. Off the starboard, the festival of lights intensified steadily, some fish flashing slightly more blue than their neighbors. Salvador would keep a steady sampling of food bits in the water, and would follow a bigger pulse of chum with a well-practiced dipping motion with the big dipnet. Over the rail and into the tote came a kilogram of 10-inch fish. Later in the evening, each dip yielded two or three times this.

The fish tote, packed to the gills, fits 200 kilograms of fish. The brothers call it quits for a night when they have around this much. They’re not limited to this amount by any regulation, but have just decided that this is the amount of fresh shishaw that Velas can use. Weather permiting, they’re out fishing six days a week. The time it takes to fill the tote varies, and sometimes they end up fishing all night and into the light of the next day. A nice catch is around 140 kilograms shishaw, of the 200 total.

This night the shishaw-cavala ratio was only about 1:1, but the fishing was fast and furious. In what seemed like no time, the tote was full and Salvador had another 30 kilograms spilled onto the deck. Time to head ’er in. A bucket full of sardines and some battery power had been converted into a third of a ton of fish.

Tied up to the cement dock, the next task was to sort shishaw from cavala. Without much for light, this was about like sorting pennies from nickels, blindfolded. It turns out, although I can’t call it a fortunate characteristic, that sheshaw have a sharp spine on their dorsal. Stick your hand into a pile of fish, and the ones that prick are sheshaw. But that test gets old fast.

Night and day, a crowd of folks keeps an eye on the boat landing pad, and the crowd converges on any new arrival. Here on Sao Jorge, to my delight, I didn’t have to justify my desire to go out on fishing boats. I could see a wistful gaze in the older men, the businessmen, and even the maritime police that converged on newly arrived fishing boats, an attraction almost as intense as the light for the sheshaw. It seems to me that here in Velas, where the only supermarket has a pervasive smell of fish throughout, those standing dockside are silently wishing they were on the other side of the oilskins.

The Junkyard Gang

Around Sao Jorge, wind from any direction is something for fishermen to take into account. The Azores are really nothing more than a few tiny bumps of green poking out of the middle in the big Atlantic pond. Although April is considerably nicer than May, and the bulk of the fishing craze coincides with warmer temperatures and calmer breezes. This is June through September- tuna time- where frenzied fishermen chase frenzied albacore. Football-sized torpedos with fins are caught by chumming the waters, then dropping a big barbless hook into the boil, attached to a cane pole just like a big version of the one your great-great grandfather used for trout back in the good ol’ days.

This is only exciting hearsay, as far as I’m concerned- a teaser for you and me- although I can’t wait to take Paul up on his invitation to come back another year to crew during the peak of the tuna run, on a new boat he has in the works. Before tuna, Paul and his crew put the Familia to work lobstering. But before that, it’s trap-making time.

The glorious life of a fisherman doesn’t start or end on the water, or even with dealing with the boat. The time-consuming gear work is quickly forgotten or optimistically overlooked when calculating how fast a deckhand makes his or her money, and similarly gear expenses are often the troughs where a skipper dumps all his so-called profits. Is this what the business world calls capital investment strategy? Fishermen probably call it survival.

While the wind blew steadily from one direction or another, this junkyard gang was my crowd, and Paul was a hands-off welding mentor, for the most part letting me figure it out on my own. Through trial and error, mostly error, I got a basic handle on how to spot weld with the shop’s tempermental machine, and only flashed my eyes a couple of times in the first day or so. The task was churn out around seventy new lobster traps, made by bending and welding nine individual pieces of half-inch rebar into a lobster trap frame. Chico, Mario, and Joseph would then take funnels, made of plastic buckets with the bottoms cut out, they’d cut plastic fencing material for the trap walls, and would lash together a complete trap. Each trap, start to finish, took around three hours of work. The somewhat more evolved Maine lobster trap has entrance funnels, two “rooms” within with a narrowing walkway connecting the two, escape slots, and hinged lids. Paul’s spartan design, in comparison is basically an open cage with a tapering hole in the top. Stick some bait in and drop the trap to the bottom. Maine’s high-tech pots don’t outsmart the lobster anyway- observation has shown that a significant majority of the lobster that enter a trap eat and exit before the trap is hauled- so Paul’s pots are probably just the ticket. Lobster trap are more like lobsters kitchens- the trick is to pull the pot when it's dinnertime.

Paul is a remarkable example of a well-rounded fisherman. He’s adept with wrenching, (fiber)glasswork, and wielding a welding torch, on top of all the navigation skills that come in handy when away from terra firma. His shop, a few kilometers up the hill from Velas, is home to all sort of projects, is the stomping ground for all sorts of scallywags and riffraff. Paul seems to be the regional consultant on all matters of maritime mishap. Nearly every dat I've been hanging around his shop, he’s dropped his own projects to give a hand to a friend who’s stopped by. The shop is the nucleus of an auto junkyard, which is a steady source for all sorts of odd nuts, bolts, and scrap metal, and masculine procrastination. What a place!

The junkyard regulars are an eclectic group. Master Eduardo, Paul’s dad, spends at last half of each day piling partially crushed cars on top of each over with a bucketloader, playing a giant game of car wreck Tetris. His game plan leaves me confused. Maybe he’s really playing Jenga because some of his teetering piles seem to go straight up. Master Antonio, a German by descent, is a talented alcoholic who has yet to let his reputed welding prowess poke through his passion for the booze and butts. He’s a pleasant guy to be around, despite being no model for productivity. Ricardo is a massive guy, tall and strong and with a fitting deep laugh, so loud that hurts the ears if you’re with him in any confined space. He’s working hard on restoring a 40-foot hulk of steel, a boat something like a Coast Guard cutter, an endless welding project and constant fight against rust. There’s an old-looking young guy I’ve nicknamed the Jolly Friar, on account of his goofy grin and donut of remaining hair, who seems to have plenty of mechanical skills but is more content being Master Eduardo’s assistant in the mysterious car shuttle. A half dozen other cats stop by on a regular basis, mostly men in their 40’s with an itch to escape their wives and work for a while and join in the junkyard fraternity.

For reasons I can’t fathom, conversations between the men are intense, loud, and full of wild hand gestures. Ordinary events, like weather or a neighbor’s new car are described as if the man had just been an eyewitness to a train robbery, or like he’d walked out his door and discovered a lion screwing a tiger in his front lawn. This Azorean flair for creating intensity out of the mundane still hasn’t ceased to amaze me, although usually the only phrase I can pull out of the tumble is “fila de puta!”…

Sound bites

Here's a low-budget experimentation in a different mode. Unfortunately I haven't landed as many decent sound clips as I would have liked, because boat engine rumblings tend to dominate the sound. I'll eventually get around to assembling the good clips into an audio piece or two. Whoever edited this piece here has some really low quality standards...

Fishynomics

Velas, Sao Jorge, Portuguese Açores
Targeted fish: lula (squid), cherne (grouper), congro (conger eel), goraz, peixão, safio, rinquim (blue shark, marketed as mako for some reason), boca negra, abrotea, cantaro bagre, peixe espada branco (white spadefish), king mackerel, atum (tuna- albacore, yellowfin, bluefin), langosta (lobster)
Fishing methods: Açorean-style hook and line- longlining, jigging, trolling, bamboo rod, stout line, and big barbless hook used to catch frenzied tuna; lobster trap
Footwear: rubber boots, mostly from Dunlop
Favorite local sayings: “Wea-pa!” (“What’s up?”)
Local food: Fish is big. Dairy products from the islands are big. Lots of breads, potatoes, and Portuguese sausage.
Drink of choice: red wine. Sagres and Super Bock beer.
Local entertainment: working on boats, tinkering on engines, evading Portuguese beaurocracy
Local music: Folk music with great duets and trios of stringed instruments. More to come on Açorean music.
Select Local Fishing Boats: Maria Gorete, Debora Christina, Filipe, Familia Terras, Simao Pedro, Iris, Sidonio, Baia de Velas, Pinguin, Aguia, Maria Barbara, Oriana
___________________________________________________________________________________

The system of buying and selling fish here on Sao Jorge is worth mentioning. The price of fish is something which fishermen only have partial control over. Market demand is a finicky thing, and depends on a host of logical and illogical indirect factors. When fishing, it seems best to not be concerned with factors outside of your control (aquaculture conditions on salmon farms in Chile, or the value of the yen vs. the dollar) and to focus on things you can control (delivering fresh fish and keeping your engine running well).

Here on Sao Jorge, fisherman meticulously ice their catch and sort them by species and size. On any given day, assuming there’s an offload of sufficient size, a silent auction is held. Fish are all brought in from the dock, and trays of fish are weighed and ranked. Interested parties- buyers and the fishermen- show up at an agreed upon time, pick up a remote control device, and watch a monitor, where a certain tray goes up for sale, with an advertised price per kilogram. The price drops until someone presses the “buy” button, or if fishermen become unhappy with the low price, they can choose to keep the catch for themselves.

Quite an ordered and high-tech system for such a small-scale fishery! Here there isn’t even a harbor for fishing boats (no good protection from the weather), and boats need to be hauled out of the water between trips. I suppose, though, that even though many communities in Alaska have established harbors, bigger fleets, and larger harvests, fishing in Portugal and specifically here in the Açores had been going on for many centuries before any commercial fisheries in Alaska were conceived. These Açoreans have figured out a good system of selling fish. No secret or buddy deals here.

With Paul, I had the chance to sit in on one of these auctions. Mustached men in white rubber boots shuffled fish around. These same buyers and fishermen in this tiny community of 2,000 must have gone through the same process hundred, if no thousands, of times. The mind games and poker strategies used could be intense. But if there was any rivalry, I couldn’t sense it. The men joked and laughed, and several in the crowd seemed to just be around to take in the scene. The arrival or departure of a boat, any interesting, rare, or big fish, and any foreign stowaway seems to attract a curious crowd.

This particular day in Velas, conger eel sold for around 4€/kilo (one Euro these days is something around $1.33 US), peixão sold for 5€/kilo, spadefish sold for a meager 1€/kilo, large squid went for 3.50€/kilo, and the prized cherne garnered just under 9€/kilo on average. All for on-island consumption. I only mention these details to compare them to recent Alaskan (ex-vessel) fish prices: roughly 7€/kilo for halibut, 1.50€/kilo for sockeye salmon, and 0.50€/kilo for pink salmon. I myself would even take a humpy over a spadefish to eat, but the market decides what it values, and transport expenses factor in. Go figure.

Familia Affair

“Go hide in the cabin for a little bit, while we cut her loose.” Mario told me this as we were finishing loading the last of the boxes of baited longline from Paul’s truck onto the boat.

I tucked down into the boat’s sleeping quarters. From here I could feel when the boat was freed of her land leashes, and in only a few minutes we were out of the harbor. The American stowaway was free to come on deck.

There was really nothing shady going on aboard the 11-meter Familia Silveros, but as skipper Paul had explained to me, Portugal is a land full of paperwork and rules, and the Açores weren’t exempt. As seems to be common sense in most of the working world, avoiding paperwork and superfluous authorities when possible is the best option. I was grateful that Paul was willing to take me out, and fine with my role as the unofficial fifth-wheel of the boat.

Paul’s crew consisted of Mario, Chico, and Joseph, three men in their forties with plenty of sea time, as well as a little extra padding, under their belts. Paul is younger, trimmer, and taller than his crew, and I could immediately see that he was one of those die-hard fishermen whose mind rarely wanders from marine thoughts. Model boats in his house, displays of maritime knots on the wall, fishing gear of all types in every corner of his garage, several boats in various stages of life to his name on Sao Jorge, shop space to work on engines, even talk of a bigger, brand new boat in the works in mainland Portugal. The Familia Silveros could sleep three forward and at least a couple more in the cabin, and although she was now rigged for longlining, the boat, like her owner, was an eager fishing machine, and could quickly adapt for jigging, tuna fishing, or hauling lobster traps.

We left Velas at dusk, and after a ten-hour steam at a steady seven knots, passing between the picturesque islands of Pico and Faial, we reached the fishing grounds. Around 5am it was time to set the gear. This was a different longline setup than I’d ever seen, and at first seemed quite complicated. A fifty-kilogram chunk of hardened lava served as the main anchor at each end of the “ground” line, but instead of this line stretching along the sea floor (as with halibut or blackcod), this line hung about 50 meters above the bottom. Fixed to this mile or so of mainline were 140 sparlines, spaced evenly, and with a snap-swivel at the tag end. As the mainline paid out, the snap of each sparline was clipped to a 25-meter piece of stout monofilament, and along this mono, every meter or so, was attached yet another branch of monofilament, and at the end of this short piece was attached a small J-hook. At the tip of the main branch of monofilament a fist-sized rock was tied, and served as the bottom anchor for it’s respective branch. This the snap end of the monofilament, in theory, hangs at 25 meters above the bottom, and the small rock sits directly on the bottom. This fishing tree would be much more easily explained with a drawing. I’d love to see the image drawn by somebody after reading this dizzying description! The end result of this style of fishing, when set correctly, is that for a mile-long transect, the bottom 25-meters of the water column have a good number of hooks waiting in ambush, sharp barbs dressed as small chunks of salted mackerel. Somewhere around 3,500 treacherous bites per set.

All of the baiting- a considerable amount of work- had been done ahead of time by Mario, Chico, and Joseph. The 25-meter stretch of mono is essentially fixed gear in longliner jargon, and this crew was using gamelas-ingenious “flower pot” bins- to keep hooks and line in order. Order is a good thing to have when hooks are flying overboard and being pulled quickly toward the bottom by heavy rocks. Around the fringe of each shallow wooden flower pot is a rubber tab with slits cut in it. Baited hooks are placed in these slits, and then the line between hooks is coiled inside of the bin. Each bin holds four fishing “branches”, and so 100 hooks around its fringe. The three men had baited around 80 of these boxes.

As soon as the last hook was out, Paul pointed the bow towards the other end of the set. Apparently there were either hungry fish at the bottom or not, and the mackerel did not stay on the hook for long, so there was no point in letting the gear soak. Hauling was smooth and the fish coming up from 250 fathoms (one fathom equals six feet, so this is around 1500 feet) were mostly all new to my eyes. According to Paul, the day’s catch was poor. Peixão, a silvery wide-eyed perch-like fish, boca negra and cantaro bagre, two species of small orange rockfish, and peixe espada branco (white spadefish) were most common. The spadefish reflected twice the light as chrome on a new Harley, had dagger-sharp fangs, and skinny stretched bodies appropriate for their name, with tiny and seemingly useless tails at the tip of the sword. Small blue sharks and conger eels also rose on the line, and a single large cherne- the crown jewel of Açorean groundfish- a grouper prized for it’s delicate white meat. I can verify that the reverence for a plate of this fish is deserved.

Unphased with what may not have been a great haul, Paul turned his attention to jigging for the day, trying to target cherne. Each of the men mounted a jig contraption- basically a spool of wire with a crank handle and a means of adjusting the drag on the spool- along the boat’s rail. To the end of the wire they attached a section of mono with ten or so line-hook branches, and with a weight at the bottom end. Down to the bottom went the small tree of hooks, each jig basically a single vertical strand of the morning longline setup. The difference was that these strands were actively monitored from the top by Paul and his rotund crew. By dark, the jigging efforts had landed another 100 kilograms of fish, but no cherne.

We ate fish, potatoes, and wine in the dark, and dropped anchor in 280 fathoms of water, far from Pico, the nearest landmass. The next day the process was repeated, with less success. That night we ate beans and sausage and dropped the pick in 480 fathoms (2,880 feet). To me, this was more than notable- including scope, Paul had a good mile of line out between the 35-foot boat and its anchor! Here we sat in the deep blue, rocking and rolling through the night. Mario couldn’t have slept much- he insisted that I take the cabin floor instead of the bench seat, and with several big leans to starboard in the night he rolled off. (This happened exactly four times. I remember because when a guy like Mario rolls onto you, you don’t forget.)

Heading to the fishing grounds and moving between different fishing grounds, Paul would always troll a couple lines for tuna. It’s hard to imagine a fish being speedy enough to hammer a lure zipping along at seven knots, but tuna have no problem. Even when targeting groundfish, Paul’s eyes were always scanning the surface, looking for fishy waters- a flock of gulls, jumping baitfish, a different look to the water than experienced eyes like his can read. The tuna seemed to be somewhere else these days, but as we steamed back towards Sao Jorge, past the perfect volcanic cone on Pico, the trolling continued.

The crew and Paul seem especially welcoming to a guy they just met a few days before. There was a distinct absence of the tough-guy fishing attitude. Mario speaks English well although rarely chooses to use it, and at some point in his past lived and fished in southern California for 17 years (A man in town told me he left after getting shot in the leg. Mario never mentioned this small detail. Part of the mystery.) He insisted on lending me an extra pair of socks, so that I wouldn’t have to put on wet ones in the morning. Chico’s voice is as animated as any cartoon character, with all sorts of non-verbal tones adding to his side of any conversation. Even in a country where it seems like every conversation is filled with volume and energy- normal conversations here seem to have the suspense of a fight or an emergency to a foreign ear- Chico stands out. (He also promises to kill me if I make any advances on his daughter, which I have no intention of doing, but which the rest of the crew keeps encouraging.) Joseph is all smiles under his thick mustache, and seems to take great pleasure in asking his “Amigo Americano!” a long question in rapid Portuguese and then cutting into any possible response with a rolling laugh. Paul made it clear throughout that he was happy to have me along, and insisted on giving having me over for dinner before and after the trip. Good guys, these Açoreans, and hard workers. Although I still had to go below when heading into port, I felt like part of the Familia.

Tri-fecta

Chong Kneas, Tonle Sap, CAMBODIA
Targeted fish: Tricman, trionday, tridiep, trira, tritoe, compote, chiroba, trifra, trichidao (some English names, which might correspond with above fish: spotted featherback, catfish, snake catfish, soldier croaker, sheatfish, giant snakehead, carp)
Fishing methods: seine, gillnet, canoe trawl, castnet, Khmer dipnet, fish weir, fish trap
Footwear: bare feet for life
Favorite local sayings: “Sus-dai!” (hello) “Coconut!” (mocking the American)
Local food: Rice, and fish soup. Sometimes grilled or fried fish. Cigarettes.
Drink of choice: ice, Tonle Sap lake water, tea
Local entertainment: really bad Khmer talk radio. Khmer news on the television, viewed for about an hour after dark, run off a generator.
Local music: traditional music of the ganong, back-and-forth male-female duos with Indian influence, Thai-style women singing slow songs of heartbreak.
Select Local Fishing Boats: No names. The boats are built to last, heavy and deep, painted sparingly.
Local Fruit: very little affordable for the floating houses, but nearby: bananas, dragonfruit, mango, tamarind, oranges, pineapple, apple, papaya, pear, coconut, grapes, jackfruit

Sifting Minnows

If the floating house had had a door, we would have been out of it before 4 am, and as I watched the sun set over the west side of Tonle Sap, still sweating and still hunched over a pile of mixed finger-length minnows, my back was reminded what commercial fishing is like. Mr. Gran was towing our four-boat procession to a new area of the lake, not willing to let anything like darkness make him call it a day. The catches seemed to have been good for most of the day, I’d guess averaged around 400 pounds of fish per haul, and each haul taking around two hours to complete, we were about to start our seventh set of the day. The crew hauling the net got a short break as Mr. Gran moved between areas, and the fish-sorting crew usually got a few minutes to inhale a couple of butts as the net was closing up, before a new pile of silver minnows were scooped onto deck. Everyone seemed happy, but to be honest I was ready to stand up straight, and my fingertips were sore and bloody the many surprise pricks from shrimp shells and catfish barbs.

Over the past five days, I’d come to really respect this fishing gang. Despite being unable to speak with them beyond a few basic words and phrases, they all proved to have good hearts and to only poke fun at me in a good-natured kind of way. As we hauled back the net or tied the same hitches- the repetitious work of fishing, the men would keep me smiling with animated outburst of English words and phrases they knew:

“Coconut!”
“Sweethaat!”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you live here?”
“Where you from?”
And of course my old favorite, “Wow!”

This is a group of ridiculously hard workers who get up at sunrise and worked until the light runs out, and longer when out on the boat. With the exception of Mr. Gran and his wife, they sleep on the bare wooden floor or on one of the boat decks, only sometimes under torn mosquito netting (on still nights the bugs are bad). They seem content to eat rice and fish for every meal, talking about an upcoming meal like it’s a exotic dish. In the 20- by 70-foot floating house, 15 men and boys, 3 women, one baby, and one strong-willed tomcat with a stubby tail all make peace. I’m still not sure how or if everybody in the group is related, but this doesn’t seem to matter. During the couple of days not spent fishing, everybody worked on mending old net or hanging a new one, repairing a boat, or keeping the mob fed.

Each of the three women are as much involved with the fishing operation as any of the men. Like I’ve seen in other parts of southeast Asia (and beyond), women are often the ones running the show. In this home, they oversee net repairs, sort re-sort fish before they go to market, and handle the sale of fish to market. The exact same thing could be said for women in the 4,000 Island region to Laos- despite not often being aboard when the fish are caught, the women are absolutely crucial to the small family fishing operations.

All day the sets had yielded a mixed bag of small fish, mostly of the size sold in the US for ice fishing bait. The majority of the catch was what looked like a shiner, and the second-most common catch was what looked like a freshwater catfish/shark sold in pet shops, with comical whiskers twice as long as its body length and a tiny tail like a thresher. A funny duckbilled catfish was also common, and these were sorted separately. Each set carried with it a few pufferfish, this kind spineless but with a large fake eye painted on each of its sides. Of all things, the crew was very afraid of the bite of this tiny-mouthed airbag- perhaps they are poisonous or perhaps this is superstition, but I found this fear hilarious, considering all of the other dangers the crew barely acknowledged. I was much more intimidated by the water snakes, while the crew thought nothing of grabbing the snakes and throwing them back into the lake, often right over my head (funny funny).


From the reward of a typical set, consisting of perhaps 5,000 tiny fish, each minnow was picked over and sorted into bins. The crew for this was usually one especially smiley fisherman named Soon, his two sons who had especially dark skin, my buddy Heap, and myself. These fish were sorted both by size and by type, and then bagged and put on ice. When thirsty, the fishermen would sometimes break a chunk off the ice block in the insulated fish tote, dip it in the lake to get off some of the fish slime, and put it in a bowl, where it would quickly melt. Most of the men would drink straight from the murky lukewarm lake, if they drank anything at all. I couldn’t shake the idea that for part of each year this lake is the receptacle for everything the upper Mekong has to offer. Lots of greywater coming from as far up as the Himalaya, through southern China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, ending in Tonle Sap. And the guts of these gentlemen are strong enough to deal with it all.

Perhaps Tonle Sap fishermen are superhuman, because in addition to having iron guts, their lungs seemed to have no problem filtering through a couple of packs of cigarettes each day. Every evening one of the women would dole out portions of cigarettes- 2 packs to every man or boy- and these burned like wildfire at every short break in the day, and pretty much continuously in transit or on the home float. Even the two darker-skinned boys, who I’d been told were 17 and 18 but looked to be 12 or 13 and certainly hadn’t hit puberty yet, were puffing- and also pulling on the net- as hard as any of the men.

After wrapping a round of fish sorting, finishing hauling the final set in the dark, and sorting these as our floating caravan steamed towards our floating home, I sat upright to stretch the back. Four dark silhouettes stood out on the back deck, a shade darker than the sky. In the center of each of these dark outlines was a small orange glow. Pick, pull, or puff- not too different than the Newfoundlanders, yis b’ye.

Upon getting back to the house around 9 or 10pm, I had visions of the monster pot of rice and cauldron of soup opening their lids to our sunbaked faces as soon as we stepped off the boat. Wrong I was. One pile of assorted fish still needed to be re-sorted before bringing fish to market the next morning at 4am, and the least valuable of these fish needed to be minced into fishmeal for the hundreds of pet catfish, whose cage was lashed to the east side of the house, and who needed fattening before they could go to market. Turning minnow scraps into fat catfish with a backyard aquaculture operation. Other families in Chong Kneas have crocodile farms strapped to the side of their houses, where they transform low-value minnows into exotic reptile leather. Tonle Sap minnows, if sifted and sorted properly, might just fuel the world. The midnight dinner of rice and fish was delicious.

Tug-of-Life

Tonle Sap is a huge lake in the heart of Cambodia, a broad but shallow lake that shrinks and swells almost beyond belief with the seasons, and the main source of fish for all of Cambodia. The lake has a complicated role with the Mekong River- during the dry season, water flows out of Tonle Sap into the Mekong, and out to sea; during the monsoon season, the current in the Tonle Sap River reverses directions and Mekong water flows into the lake. The lake serves as a flood control for the lower Mekong, as well as a nursery for many of the fish that eventually enter the river. In return, the Mekong provides the lake with new water each year, and included in this liquid package is all the good and bad debris carried down from upriver.

Just because it’s a nursery doesn’t mean that Tonle Sap is off-limits to heavy fishing pressure. For communities like the “floating village” of Chong Kneas, fishing is the only game in town. Fishing and Chong Kneas are as related as the chicken and egg: they come tegether, and it’s certain that if you removed either one of the pair, the other would disappear.

Chong Kneas is not far from Seap Reap, which in turn is near the spectacular mecca of ancient temples known as Angkor Wat, and so the Midas’ touch of western tourists is not unknown along the northeastern shores of Tonle Sap. Tour companies actually offer short boat trips out to the floating village, allowing tourists to marvel at how “terribly poor people make a living, without ever walking on land,” as one European lady explained to me, before returning to the comforts of Seam Reap. I was convinced her description was lacking.

After a moto (motorcycle taxi) ride, and despite the better efforts of a smooth-talking Khmer boat owner (who was hoping he could get me to pay for another ride out the next day), I managed to work out a deal to stay with a family living in a floating house, in the constantly shifting, floating assembly of houses, floating stores, floating school, and floating churches known collectively as Chong Kneas. If you don’t like your neighbors, just pull up anchor and move to a new part of town for free.

Just on the short trip out to where town was currently located (the entire community shifts according to water level and fish harvests), I’d seen some creative variations on familiar fishing styles. I’d watched a motorized canoe pull one end of a tightly woven net up the middle of a stream, while two men scrambled to manhandle the other end of the net- attached to a big vertical stick- up the muddy river bank. At times one of the fishermen would jump in the water to clear a snag from the net, and the tow would continue. Canoe trawling? There were many fish traps cut into the riverbank, men tossing castnets from the shallows, and men dipnetting from canoes with huge triangular hand nets. Once reaching the lake, I could see complex fish weirs, made of wooden stakes driven into the muddy bottom, designed to corral traveling fish into a holding pen. Gillnets were set and marked with bamboo or bottle buoys. Far offshore, the occasional cluster of boats broke up the smooth horizon line, with no shore visible across the immense lake.

My new host, Mr. Gran, is the boss-man for a four-boat seining operation. Only a few minutes after showing up on his watery doorstep, I was the mute add-on to the 15-man crew, headed for (slightly) deeper waters. All of these four boats were stout and wide, open wooden craft between 25 and 30 feet. Two of the boats had power- diesel auto engines- and two of the boats were without any motors. Mr. Gran runs the larger of the two powered boats, which serves as tugboat in transit, provides power when making a set, and carries all of the fish in it’s hold or on deck. The other powered boat is what would be called the skiff in the parlance of seiners. The larger of the unpowered boats holds the entire net. The smaller of the unpowered boats is stationed between the skiff’s tow line and the start of the fishing net, and the fisherman in this boat is responsible for keeping a large pole, attached to the edge of the net, vertical and hard on bottom.

I should note that for the few of you reading this who are familiar with seining, my description will sound simplified and boring. For anyone not familiar with seining, this will sound confusing and boring. Might as well skip the bore, no matter who you are! (In case you’re still reading, a few people have asked me to explain…) Seining is rodeo fishing. You locate a concentration of fish, either through divine intervention, experience, or dumb luck, and then circle a net around the school of fish. A seine net is designed to be of small enough mesh such that fish can’t pass through (this would be a worthless net) or even pass through partially and get stuck (this would be a gillnet). Many seine nets, designed to catch salmon, herring, or anchovy among others, are designed with the ability to cinch up the bottom of the net before the entire net is hauled aboard. Aptly named, these are purse seines, and allow for fishermen to close off the downward escape option for fish caught within the net.

A seine can be set in a variety of different shapes, proven through years of trial and error to be effective at one time or another. A “hook” is more or less a stationary set, often with one end of the net hard against shore, and with the other end of the net looping back (a-la-hook) to discourage wandering fish from simply swimming outside of this offshore end of the net. A “tow” is a set where the seine net is used in a similar fashion to (floating) trawl net, moving a smiling net through the water before closing up. A “roundhaul” is where the net is immediately set in a circle around what is hoped to be a lively patch of water. “Closing up” any set- a hook, tow, or roundhaul- involves bringing both ends of the net together, at which time the net should be more or less circular. At this time the net is hauled back with the aid of power blocks, and the skiff goes to work with a towline attached to the main boat, keeping the net in an orderly circular shape and the boat and net in good position relative to the other.

Enough of the dry generics! I mention it only because the seining deal on Tonle Sap is unique. The net is extremely long- at last twice the length of an Alaska salmon seine net- probably stretching over half a mile if laid out straight. It isn’t a purse net but instead takes advantage of the fact that the lake is rarely deeper than two or three meters, and so the net stretches the whole water column and the bottom of the lake blocks any downward escape. Three smaller boats take the place of one big one, the sweat and backache of 12 men hauling the gear replaces heavy rigging, oil, and a deck crew of three. Without fancy boats or gear, this low-tech fishing cooperative is capable of making seven or eight sets a day, which any old hand in the seining world will admit isn’t a cakewalk.

With a hand signal from Mr. Gran, off peels the skiff, which until now is the last of the four boats in tow. Attached to the skiff is a stout tow line, which is attached to the leading end of the net with a large wooden pole. As the pole pays out, one fisherman in the smallest unpowered boat goes out with it, pole in hand, assigned with the talk of keeping this end of the net vertical and ensuring the net stretches all the way to the bottom. The bulk of the crew is piled into the net-carrying boat, and they make sure the net pays out smoothly, while their boat is towed along by the one and only Mr. Gran. In 10 minutes Gran loops all the way around and passes inside of the skiff. A boy from the net-carrying boat jumps overboard and swims with a tag line to tie in to the corkline, around 50 meters up from the beginning of the net. At this point Mr. Gran’s big boat takes over the pole-tending duty from the smallest boat, and all free hands join in hauling the net, hand-over-hand, shaking fish caught in the net back into the watery ring as they go.

Heave away, boys! Endless hauling, pulling back hundreds of meters of heavy netting, fish and debris through thick water. It’s an eternal game of tug-of-war for these Tonle Sap fishermen. Considering the bloody, war-pocked recent history of Cambodia- many people alive today remember losing family, parents, or friends to Pol Pot’s genocide and civil war- a better description of the fishing struggle here might be the tug-of-life.

After over an hour of sweaty hauling, the crew has hauled all but the final 50 meters of net. The skiff powers the net and boat in a sweeping arch, forcing all fish hard against the net, and quickly the crew skips a small portion of the net where most of the fish are concentrated, the end pole (held by Mr. Gran’s boat) is now simultaneously pivoted to be horizontal and flush with the surface of the water, and the crew speedily hauls in the last bit of the net. When finished the big boat and the net-carrying boat are rail to rail, but the fish are caught in a pocket of net, now tucked underneath the net-carrying boat. This 50-meter section of net is transferred to the big boat (“backstacked” for all ye seiners), and then the net, starting with the fish-rich pocket, is slowly hauled onto the net-carrier. All the while a portion of the net lies in the water between the two boats, and the fish ball is sort of rolled along, getting thicker and denser all the while, the catfish getting caught in the mesh by their stubborn barbs and needing to be constantly shaken out of the net. At last the “money bag” of fish is ready to be scooped out with a brailer (a heavy hand net designed for this). The previous two hours of toil is now measurable in thin silver slices and tired backs.

What fin-filled bounty does 30 man-hours of sweat, sifting a five-acre patch of Tonle Sap, look like when laid out on deck? About like 300 pounds of assorted minnows, a couple dozen fish larger than finger-length, a few hundred small prawn, a couple of water snakes, a few sticks, a hundred odd pound of rocks and snail shells to return to Davy Jones. Sort the catch out and let’s do it again! With a couple bowls of rice, a little fish soup, and a couple of dozen cigarettes, these Tonle Sap seiners seem happy to continue their version of the tug-of-life forever.

Four-thousand Islands, Four Minnows

At the far southern tip of Laos, just north of the border with Cambodia, hundreds of islands crop out of the smooth Mekong. These are stubborn islands that refuse to be swept downstream and instead force the water to flow around, splicing the current and creating impressive waterfalls, broad eddies, beautiful channels, and bloating the river’s width to an obese 14 kilometers during the wet season. During the dry season (October through April), many more small islands stick above the surface, making the region’s name, Si Phan Don (Land of 4,000 Islands), seem more in the ballpark. Many of the bigger islands are inhabited, and a couple- Don Det and Don Khon- are popular with tourists for three major attractions: rare Irawady dolphins, picturesque waterfalls, and an island Rasta vibe that pervades and often intoxicates visitors.



A few kilometers to the north lies Don Khong- bigger, much less touristy, and relaxed but in a much less chemically-induced way. Here most capable men and many women, except for the few making a living from tourism, are fishermen and rice farmers. One local tells me he guesses there are 3,000 regular fishermen on the island, and the total population can't be much more than 10,000 folks. Almost all Don Khong houses are on stilts (makes for a nice shady open-air first floor, which also serve as a shelter for animals, machine shop, wood shop, and flood insurance all in one), and dogs are sparse- there are no food scraps to be had, enough but no excess.

Branthuay is a man somewhere around 50, strong, quick to smile, a tan five-foot six, and can speak Lao, English, and French. This description would get me nowhere with the police blotter, as I could be describing one of many Lao men. Branthuay lives with his wife and kids on the east side of the island, seems to have the normal job mix for an islander. He fishes, and during the rainy season he tends the rice fields. He also heeds occasional attention to his five water buffalo, which are fairly autonomous and spend most of their days in the shadow of a Buddhist Wat (temple), or grazing on the town green, at this time of year very dry and brown. Branthuay has fished the waters within a kilometer or two of his island for the past 28 years, each year seeing the river flood and ebb in yearly cycles, watching fish pulse up or downriver according to the water, and seeing the fish get smaller over the decades.



In college I procrastinated by playing around in boats of different shape and size. One of these was a featherweight craft which was boldly named “The Eagle”. I remember the name seemed ridiculous, because the kayak, made for flatwater racing, was so unsteady without headway that it seemed to have a will of it’s own, very unlike an eagle (steady, soaring), more hell-bent on acting like a duck. It was all but impossible to balance the thing without a dramatic flip, and just sitting in the boat meant a never-ending, nervous twitch of hip muscles.



Branthuay’s bare-bones canoe was every bit as unstable as The Eagle. Going out fishing with him felt like trying a high-wire act. It must take Lao-level calmness to go out in this boat at high water and keep it upright.



During the day, especially early in the morning, the castnet is Branthuay’s tool of choice. He targets water depths between two and five meters, and then does the unthinkable- he stands up in the bow of his canoe. As he did this, I felt like lying flat on the bottom of the canoe to try to add some ballast, but to save face I settled on just easing back in the stern, hands clamped to the gunwales, feigning a relaxed recline. Gripping a handful of the net in his left hand, another handful draped over his right elbow, and the rest cradled on his right forearm, Branthuay rotates his whole torso starboard to port, his left hand leading a graceful fling. In his right hand, he holds a loop of strong line which is connected to the center of the net. With this discus throw, the net flies out of his hands, and the steel chain which lines the perimeter of the net plunks down on the surface in a perfect 10-meter circle. And the boat somehow stays upright.



After letting the net sink to the bottom, Branthuay slowly pulls back on the main rope, in pulses. Fish which were in the water within the one-meter ring should, in theory, now be caught in the folds of the net. Nothing but weeds this time. Move and repeat the casting dance. Again, only mucous-like algae and a few weeds.



The same day, after dark, we went out again, and this time Branthuay carried along a gillnet. A gillnet with mesh smaller than an inch- far too small to catch lobster or halibut bait. But bigger is often not better in fishing, and smelt taste every bit as good as a heavy salmon. We paddled out away from the island. The darkness was pierced by twinkling from all around- the flicker of house lights from the island and from the far side of the river, from the 40,000 stars above, from fireflies on the tiny islands, and from fishermen's flashlights as they checked their business and then saved their batteries. The hills above town on Don Khong were ablaze in long narrow lines. Oddly enough, it struck me as perfectly normal that in this mysterious tropical land the island might have a volcano, which would of course be active and trickling molten lava down it’s slopes. I then rubbed my eyes and realized that instead locals were burning their rice fields, cycling back nutrients for the coming crop.



The was an explosion going on right then, though not volcanic. As full darkness set in, an impossible number of tiny bugs rocketed out of the unseen in into my face, in my eyes, down my throat, in my ears, up my nose. Not a biting bug, but ones that are only more annoying because they don’t bite, and yet still have a magnetic attraction to a human face. Like the boat balancing act, Branthuay seemed unaware of the difficulties, and that his unnecessary sternman was walking a tightrope of temporary insanity.



To set the driftnet alone in decent current, Branthuay starts by dropping a rock overboard. The rock is leashed to a stout line, which he then connects to one end of his gillnet. Downstream we drift, setting as we go, plastic water bottles serving as corks. When fully out, Branthuay paddles up to the rock, frees the upstream end of the net from it’s anchor, and then tows this high end perpendicular to the current. From then on, it’s a matter of towing on one end of the net or the other, trying to keep a slight downstream smile to the net, and monkeying the net around any of the small river islands. (Thank you fireflies, mini lighthouses of the Mekong.) Although tough to sense in the blackness, we were drifting quickly, and Branthuay was busy. He hauled and reset his net three times this night.



The sum total for the day and night efforts was a whopping four potbellied fish, each about five inches long. Valued at 700 kip each (about 10 cents), this was not a red-banner fishing day for the Eagle II. Expectations are not particularly high in these parts- 100 finger-length fish or one or two bigger fish, adding up to a kilogram or two, are considered a normal day. Branthuay caught 130 small fish the day before, but tonight there fish were somewhere else. According to my Lao fishing friend, most of the common species- fish like Pa Pea, Pa Kung, Pa Tong, and Banang- are worth around 40-50,000 kip per kilo (around $5). Luckily, the fuel bill is measured in spoonfuls of sticky rice (or for others with external motors, in small quantities of gas). April marks the biggest pulse of upriver fish, as the start of the wet season commences, and is when the locals search for what (I think) translates to “economic fish”- nice densities of heavier fish. Until then, fishermen around Si Phan Don seem satisfied enough to go for not-so-economic fish.