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.