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.