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
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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.