Living Fisheries

Blood, Mud, and Saltwater: a guest piece!

2011-02-15T11:51:00.005-09:00

I was blown away by this piece of writing from Linden Jones, who at 12 years old is already dealing with a serious fishing addiction. He has the writing talent to bring us all right into the deadly pluffmud with him! I hope you all enjoy this as much as I do. Thanks to Linden for allowing me to post his epic story!

Blood, Mud, and Saltwater
by Linden Jones

The jolt was unbelievable. I tripped over a sunken log (like the oaf I am) and fell to my knees. My head went underwater; when I came up again I spat out mud, crushed pieces of seashell, and a lot of water. I stood back up in the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, knee deep in water and ankle deep in the deadly pluffmud. The sinister mud didn’t hurt you but it acted like dried cement when you stepped in it. I leaned back with my rod to pull the fish towards me.

To my surprise, it actually supported me. With another vicious tug, I saw a reddish-brown hump rise out of the water, glistening in the twelve noon sun. And I knew I had hooked a red drum.

And so it began…My knuckles turned white as fresh snow over the handle grip on my rod. I was jittering all over with the pure shock of this animal’s strength. And then it hit me.

I don’t want to lose this fish. I don’t want to go back to the house and have my cousins tease me about losing this fish. And then it was like I went deaf. I didn’t hear Dad yell. I didn’t hear Uncle Frank yell, “Fight ‘im, boy!” I reeled the line. And the fish knew that I had challenged him. With a pull that made me feel like a chew toy, and made my arms feel like rubber bands, the fish struck back.

I was yanked forward, but resisted long enough to pull back with the line. The rod and I had fused into one living, breathing warrior. My line, instead of the 12-pound test braid nylon, was now the lifeline that held everything together. I knew that if the lifeline snapped, I would drown in an ocean of insults. The fish knew this, too.

He made a run for an oyster bed, to cut the bond that tethered him to me and his lemon juicy, chili peppery, warm and steamy fate. I quickly cut him off with a technique that I only use for the strongest bass and the heaviest catfish. He was heading away (massive mistake) against the incoming tide and heading down. I pulled back with the tide and up diagonally, overwhelming him and pulling him one step closer to victory. I may be a rookie in salt water, but I am the fresh water master.

Fifteen minutes later, I was covered in blood, mud, and salt water. My arms and legs were sore, and my face burnt like an idiot who had tried to put out a fire with gasoline. And I was holding a red drum.

The Best Love Note Ever

2011-02-14T12:15:00.000-09:00

I spent a couple weeks in Wainwright, Alaska this past November. I was taking part in a survey that asks how people share their foods, especially subsistence foods, with other in the community. Sharing is a major part of traditional Inupiaq life. Relative to modern 'white' norms, sharing of food is still very high. The act of gathering and harvesting local foods, and the preparation and consumption of these foods, is a major part of life in many parts of rural Alaska. The people in Wainwright, men and women, young and old, are amazingly warm. Kiara Bodfish, probably about 8 years old, wrote me a special note:

Living Fisheries rises from cyberspace hibernation!

2011-02-11T09:59:00.001-09:00

Hi All,

The fishing adventures haven't declined, despite the lack of blog documentation! I keep planning to post new stories and to rekindle old tales, but time slips away from me...

The F/V Icky Thump, my 22' jet-black Tolman skiff, continues to allow me to search for halibut:

as well as salmon and crab (for the dinner table):

Being a flat-bottomed craft, she handles a heavy load well but is prone to making all hands on deck leave an inch shorter than when they stepped on deck, due to spinal compression. Heck, I was never good at basketball anyway. Since returning from overseas, we've had two good fishing seasons on the Icky Thump, injury-free and almost profitable! Much of the success of the past couple seasons is due to excellent deckhands, who double as friends and family:
Eben. Who says Vermonters don't take to the water?

My dad. In the 1970's, he lobstered out of a 14' skiff along the Maine coast. That makes 22' seem spacious!

Katie. A Kasilof (Alaska) native who has seined and setnet for salmon for many summers, and now works with subsistence fishing communities in northwest Alaska:

Two good friends in Homer made the transition from skiff fishing to a "real" boat. Skiff owners always take slight offense to this designation of 'real', but I think we all know what is meant. A foc'scle, steering station, and fish holds are 'real' treats that few skiffs afford! In recent years, Kyle and Emily have transitioned from the Galway Girl (a 22' V-hull Tolman), to Bong Hits For Jesus (a 26' fiberglass setnet skiff), and now to the Northland (a 32' Rawson gillnetter). Just when the bottom line of a fishing operation start to go from red to black, fishermen go and buy a new boat or a new engine! Who says passion follows logic?

You can follow the adventures of the F/V Northland up close and personal at their own direct-marketing venue:
http://emilyandkylescatch.wordpress.com/

I've made a few trips to a great community of 200 or so folks in the village of Nanwalek, located about 35 miles from Homer. Here's an idea of the layout around Homer/Nanwalek:

Subsistence fishing is a major part of life in Nanwalek- sockeye salmon, coho salmon, halibut, bidarki, and octopus. I'm fascinated by the use and valuation of octopus by the community. In industrialized ports like Homer and Kodiak, octopus is caught as bycatch (mostly by pot cod fishermen) and is used mainly for longlining bait. In Nanwalek and other remote communities in the Gulf of Alaska, octopus is hunted during low tides and is a highly prized delicacy used in special meals!

I visited the whaling community of Wainwright (Alaska) this November, located on the Arctic Ocean to the west of Barrow. This is a Alaska Native community where most of the meat consumed is harvested locally. Whale, seal, caribou, and bear are hunted, as well as lots of fish (mainly smelt, whitefish, cisco, char). Unfortunately, the timing of my trip didn't align with good smelt fishing or whaling season, but it was incredible to hear stories of recent harvests, and the region is beautiful.

I also migrated back to Maine for a while around the holidays and explored fisheries in the northeast, although most of this was shoreside 'research'- very different than jumping right into the gurry on deck. I did get the chance to turn over a few lobster pots one icy January morning with a new friend, Curt, in Portland Maine. Curt also recently made the shift from skiff fishing to a larger vessel with the entertaining name "Li'l More Tail". I think the name makes Curt cringe, but it can be bad luck to change a boat name. If it were me, I might take my chances with Lady Luck.

Hopefully I'll make the time to type up a rant or a tall tale more often this coming year, and maybe I'll get around to expanding on some of the above experiences. There's a lot to share about small-scale fishing!

Octopus Hide-and-Seek

2009-05-25T00:48:00.002-08:00

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

2009-05-24T00:43:00.002-08:00

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

2009-05-21T01:06:00.002-08:00

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

2009-05-19T00:49:00.001-08:00

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

2009-05-14T02:03:00.004-08:00

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

2009-05-06T07:41:00.004-08:00

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

2009-05-05T07:55:00.005-08:00

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

2009-04-24T07:05:00.002-08:00

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

2009-04-16T07:02:00.001-08:00

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

2009-04-09T09:13:00.003-08:00

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

2009-04-09T08:40:00.005-08:00

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

2009-04-05T08:31:00.000-08:00

“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

2009-03-21T08:59:00.001-08:00

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

2009-03-16T01:38:00.002-08:00

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

2009-03-07T01:35:00.002-09:00

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

2009-03-04T04:08:00.002-09:00

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.

Mekong gauntlet

2009-02-25T19:40:00.001-09:00

A first glance at any market in these parts, and you can start to grasp just how big big a role fish play in the Asian diet. Pork, chicken, ducks, eggs, (frogs, egg fetus, intestine) are important supporting actors, but here fish is the star. From what I've seen, mainly little fish, dried fish, displayed in aesthetic swirls or neat bundles. Fresh fish, fish sauce, fish eggs, fermented fish, fish flakes, tiny fish to sprinkle on as a topping to any meal.

Clearly the Gulf of Thailand is the source of some of fish consumed, fish caught with hook, net, or dynamite. For some reason, perhaps because I'm fresh from seeing the mighty Amazon, world's most productive river, I was keen to explore the Mekong River fisheries, reputed to be the second-most productive river in the world, fish-wise. The Mekong starts on the Tibetan plateau, sprinting away from the mountains, winding through the southern China's Yunnan province, before assuming a steady pace south. The lower stretches of the river feed hungry mouths in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Fish life in the lower Mekong is greatly enhanced from a giant lake in the heart of Cambodia- Tonle Sap. I'm told that the Tonle Sap is the source of three-quarters of all the fish caught in Cambodia, and much of the Laos take as well. Many fish migrate out of the Tonle Sap and up to Mekong, later to return back to their mother lake. I'm hoping to explore a stretch of the Mekong (time and visas allowing), before looking for fisheries in Tonle Sap itself. (Maybe I'm trying to justify why, after arriving in Bangkok, I headed directly away from the water and into hilly northern Thailand.)

At the border of Thailand and Laos, only a few miles south of China's border and near a region once renown for it's opium production (an area known as the Golden Triangle), I caught my first glimpse of the Mekong. I wasn't expecting much- a big brown river- so the river's striking beauty was a welcome splash in the face. Here the water forms the border between the two countries, dark striated rock and fine white sands line the banks, and it seems like a contest as to which side of the river can foster a bigger smile. On the Laos side, the greeting switches from sa-wat-dee kap! to sa-bai-dee!, and Beerlao seems to own or sponsor everything, like Coca-Cola in South America. There's a contagious energy at the convergence of multiple countries that is hard to ignore, a turbulent swirl of cultures and languages that is partially mixed but not willing to dissolve into something consistent. Unlike the diversity of a big city housed within a single country, where there seems to be a constant push to continue the blending process, these international convergence zones seem more stable with their chunky blend, and so them seem a little more vibrant and turbulent.

In Huay Xai, Laos, I watched men and their sons set up intricate networks of stakes in the river shoals, forming a "V" in which fish heading upstream would be funneled through a slot and into a fish trap. A fish weir of sorts, Mekong-style. I also poured over the design of a few complex reed and stick cornucopias set in the shallows. Fish enter the trap and trip a dangling strand of monofilament, which then releases the trap door at the entrance. I'm amazed that these traps could actually work with river currents, shifting sand bars, and cunning fish. Other fishing styles used here are cornucopia-shaped traps, with a tapered opening a-la lobster or p-cod pots, and the old Alaskan favorite- dipnets.

Heading downstream, I soon realized that nearly every eddy of the river was being fished, at least at some point in the year. Stemming out of the reeds or wedged into the rocks, arching wooden poles- as long as 10 meters- dangled over the water. From these hung gillnets or lines (baited hooks?). Hundreds of patient fishing poles waiting for the upstream flow of fish. In more calm stretches of the river, lines of plastic water bottles marked the top of gillnets. In between tending these setnets, fishermen in long, slender canoes would stand and etch perfect rings in front of their canoes with cast nets. Although fishing techniques and tools are basic, the fishing pressure on this stretch of the river is impressive. Hard to imagine any fish making it past this assorted gauntlet of trickery.

Luang Prabang is a small city in Laos, bordering the Mekong, French colonial influence still evident, full of warm and friendly Laos folk and- to my eyes- overrun by tourists. Here locals have learned that many westerners will bite at the familiar tuna sandwich before nibbling unknown curry dishes or Lao fish soup. Across the river, based on a wide sandbar, local fishermen were not sandwich artists, and were probably wondering why this falang was hanging out on the wrong side of the river, asking in confusing gestures to help with net mending work. Here in patient action was a new variation of fishing to my eyes- a Mekong driftnet fishery.

For the bulk of the day, fishermen stood on the edge of the sandbar, cleaning weeds and algae from their gillnets. Gear work and preparing to make a set consumed most of the day- a pattern true to most any fishery anywhere I'd guess. It seems that vegetable matter is thick in the Mekong, and nets are great at catching it all. Each fisherman had a net 250 meters long and about a meter deep. Wine bottle corks served to float the cork line. Most of the fishermen had actually sistered together two gillnets of different mesh size. Bee and his son, with whom I tagged along for most of the day, used one net with 5-inch mesh, paired with one of bigger dimensions. Bee's canoe, like the others, was all in all very similar to that of those used along the Amazon. Parallel evolution for similar demands. Unlike Amazon boats, though, these Mekong canoes have flared bow and stern, and the bow has an elegant fork that, to me, has the likeness of a dragon. A mix of the pragmatic or artistic, this flared, forked bow transforms a basic canoe into a real looker. The canoes are powered by the same long-shafted lawnmower engines used in the Amazon, although the motor is often mounted midship.

After clearing junk from the net for an hour or two, Bee and other fishermen ferry most of the way across the river, each on their own schedule. From there, they begin to lay out their net, setting quickly and angling back towards the sandbar and just slightly downriver. The Mekong pumps along at around 10 kilometers an hour in this stretch, so immediately the net begins to drift downstream. The fisherman follows the net downstream for a kilometer or so, before quickly hauling his net and returning to the sandbar to repeat the cycle. Today, vegetables are thick and fish are thin, and I don't see any of the half dozen boats of the sandbar fleet bring aboard a single fish. Plenty of weeds though. In the late afternoon, Bee resigns to net repairs, giving his son a lesson in net mending (educational only before other boys start up a soccer/wrestling contest). Other boats continue to set and keep getting skunked.

I'm impressed that these guys stick to sifting river water with what I imagine is an inevitable draw towards the easy money of tourism, the edge of the city lying just out of hearing range of the sandbar. In Laos, the average salary is roughly a dollar per day. Maybe these men are turned off by the uglier aspects of the callous foreigners always passing through, expecting services, intruding with obnoxiously hefty cameras. Maybe they mix the two forms of work. Maybe their wives work in town, selling handmade scarves or blending fruit shakes. Or maybe they just like fishing. I wish I spoke Lao and could ask, but even then the answer probably would come across as a big smile.

The opposite jungle

2009-02-20T19:29:00.001-09:00

Another whirlwind transition, in which I admit to have strayed from the fisheries quest a bit. However, I've met few people with more of a myopic fixation on fish than me, so the tangential wanders may be less boring to some than the main subject...

The best way to leave the Manaus was by ferry boat, down the Amazon, to the coastal city of Belem. The passage has a romantic billing, but this feeling leaves the passenger as soon as he steps on board. It turns out that getting to Belem is only the secondary goal of the ferry boats, the first goal being to achieve a new world record in the number of hammocks that can be slung aboard, while still allowing for people to fit within the hammocks, and for these people to still be able to breathe. I'm exaggerating. The hammock scene was fun while it lasted, and was indeed intimate. The trip downriver went smoothly enough, and the crowd aboard was spirited and friendly. For a good chunk of it, I was fighting an internal war with worms which seemed to be having a party in my intestines, so I wasn't a very keen observer of much outside of the quickly-degrading toilet facilities.

Along the river were a few remote homes, which seemed to have the ferry schedule dialed. As the ferry passed these houses, canoes would dart out, into the path of the oncoming ferry! The ferry had the aspect of a bulldog and plenty of inertia, so at first this seemed like a ridiculous move on the part of the young children paddling the canoes. Sometimes, as the ferry bore down, plastic bags filled with miscellaneous objects would be tossed towards the canoe from the big boat. I learned was a unique form of charity for families far from easy luxuries. Extra fruit, food, or clothes were bagged by ferry crew or passengers and tossed to the canoes, and the kids would give a quick wave and would then scramble to collect the gifts before they sank. Other times, the kids would magically position their boats to just miss being steamed over, and then the boy paddling in the bow would exchange his paddle for a rebar hook, which was tethered to the bow of the canoe, and would quickly snag one of the giant tires that served as fenders, lashed alongside either side of the ferry. The young paddlers would hitch if they had something- often fish- to sell on board the big boat. The risk taken in hooking the ferry seemed to far outweigh any profit. The canoe would immediately accelerate from a standstill to 15 kilometers an hour, the canoe was swamped with the big boat's wake, and it always looked at though the canoe were about to be swept underneath the belly of the bulldog. I have no idea how these kids learned this trick, but they are damn good paddlers to pull it off.

Belem has a huge fresh fish market in the part of the city known as Ver-o-Peso. Here were fish new to my eyes, with a range of big catfish species replacing the colorful mixture from upriver. Saltwater species resembling sea trout, mullet, and sardine, along with shrimp of all sizes, were being hawked by middlemen who sat on wooden crates on the slimy riverfront sidewalk. A small fleet of fishermen aboard gillnetters ranging between 12 and 15 meters, taking a few days rest from recent two-week trips in the high seas, watched the morning fishmongering spectacle with pretended disinterest. By around 8am, restaurant owners had pecked over the fish and carted away their choice fins, hired muscles were carrying the bigger loads away, flip-flops through the slime; the middlemen were drinking beers before nine.

So it's farewell to Brazil, where locals would give me a simple, earnest thumbs up which said it all. A place where the rainstorms were predictable and intense, just like the catcalls on the streets. Here passion and sexuality were worn on the outside, and clothes fit tight. Where the clothes and fish are both colorful, and the fish and plants often have more teeth than the fishermen or farmers. Here the jacaré is the grizzly (where everybody has an epic story about a friend who just barely made it), the woods are loud but the cities are louder, and the general attitude might be summed up best by an old lady I met in Belem, still going strong nicotine in here late 80's- "I don't know why I love the life, but I do!"

Traveling from the jungles of Brazil to the jungles of southeast Asia made for an unavoidable excuse to see western Europe for the first time in my life. First stop, Madrid, Spain, and with it a shock of culture and age. An old building in Alaska is one from the 1950's. An old building in Maine dates back to the 1800's. Here in Spain I found myself walking around in a medieval city- still throbbing with life today- founded in the 7th century! In my gawk my way through the ancient narrow streets of Toledo, I passed up chances to see fine museums, instead opting to save my euros for the "Instruments of Medieval Torture" museum, and to buy a hunting knife. I might have fit in well back in the day. I left Spain happy to learn that it's acceptable- even classy- to drink a big cup full of thick chocolate syrup instead of coffee, and impressed a layered culture formed with significant and often bloody input from Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim faiths.

London. The place seems so familiar that I almost forgot that I'd never been anywhere near it before. In a two-day pass through, I found some parts to live right up to the Monty Python lore. [In a crusty British accent] announced repeatedly on London's subway (tube) intercom: "This is the Picadilly line traveling to Cockfosters. Next stop, Picadilly Circus. Reminder, no busking." Or the tight-lipped mother to her loose-lipped son, who called the transportation box in front of him an elevator: "We're British, Henry, we call it a lift." I do say! While I could see how these tendencies, mixed with the lovely British weather, would entice pilgrims to move west, I was blown away by London's ethnic diversity, bringing all sorts of energy and excitement, and can definitely see the allure of the city behind the grey front.

Another quick stop in the sand dunes outside of Abu Dhabi (airport complete with prayer room), and then right into the mad bustle of Bangkok. I managed somehow to weave around the especially thick swarm of smooth-talking tuk-tuk (motorcycle taxi) drivers at the airport, and onto the public buses. Sa-wat-dee kap! Kap-kun kap! First impressions of Thailand's capital are of smoggy skies, intense traffic, big smiles, polite wai (bows of respect), lots of cross-dressing Thai men, and incredible spices in the food.

Now off to explore the fisheries of the Mekong!

Tudo Bem

2009-02-01T14:34:00.004-09:00

Parana do Paratari, AMAZONIA, BRASIL
Targeted fish: tambaci, tucanare, piraracu, sahardeon, janjea, piraiba, pirarara, arowana, triera, caruazu, bobo, jiju, surubi, cascuda, pechibuey, piow, sardina, jaraci, piranha, many others….39 different species were quickly rattled off by da Silva girls (excuse the phonetic spelling)
Fishing methods: setnet, harpoon, bow and arrow, hand-tossed net, hook, paralyzing powder made from tree bark
Footwear: nada, bare feet
Favorite local sayings: “Tudo bem” (All’s good or no worries, used lots like “Pura Vida” is used in Costa Rica)
Local food: A combination of peche, arroz, and feijon (fish, rice, and beans), spagetti, and lots of corn farina. Fish soup or fried fish. Guayaba and cacao fruit. On rare days, gallina (chicken) or carne preservada (canned beef product).
Drink of choice: Nescafe coffee, Escudo beer
Local entertainment: swimming, teasing piranhas, Saturday night Catholic mass, community bingo games
Local music: mostly absent upriver (no power), but in certain homes, the incredible percussive beats of SAMBA!
Select Local Fishing Boats: Of all the canoes in the region, only one was named: Deus e Amor- God and Love. (This was a typical name painted on larger boats downriver in Belem. Although not as tough sounding as the Time Bandit, it calls upon two omnipotent forces for protection, and so it’s probably a superior choice.
Local Fruit: over 60 different fruits mentioned as being commonly eaten, plus six different types of bananas

On my final evening upriver, Antonio set his nets in a small lake, which we reached only by getting out of the canoe and pulling it (barefoot) through a shallow stream that stemmed off of the big Solimones. The offshoot was less stream and more a tangle of spiky vines and reeds, but at least it was brief. Once we mucked our way into the opening of the lake, huge flocks of brilliant white stork-like birds crossed above like they had waited for us to show off. Dipping up and down just above the water, flocks of noisy black birds passed, their group so thick it looked more like a dark and fuzzy low-lying cloud. Antonio set the nets quickly, instructing sternman Joe as to where he wanted to set with a word or wave of his hand. He told me that the lake held some especially big jacare, and I had every reason to believe this, judging by the especially dense amount of life- even for Amazon standards- above the water.

On the trip back to his house, I could see why Antonio had been quick with his net-setting. A fine tropical rainstorm was daring us to outrun it. Antonio throttled his engine to it’s highest, but of course the storm won. It was as if the canoe were passing under a waterfall continuously for 20 minutes- what must have been inches of rain. And then the storm passed and the sun came back out for a blazing sunset.

At 5am we were back on the lake. Still dark, the birds were quietly roosting, but the occasional giant bat swung through the flashlight’s orb. As we approached the first net, an intimidating thrashing of reeds distracted us both, and Antonio paddled straight towards the ruckus and into the reeds. Two red eyes glowed from further in. Antonio threw his two-pronged harpoon and the world went crazy. Antonio had stuck a jacare of the “Mucho grande” variety, and the receiver wasn’t happy about the matter. The harpoon tip was attached to about 20 meters of stout cord, and this was attached to the harpoon’s shaft by a few piece of weak cotton string. With the explosion, the shaft had come loose, as designed, and now Antonio had nothing but a long leash on his new pet. I had no idea what could be done next, it being still dark and the jacare of unknown size being held somewhere within 20 meters but having only suffered an annoying skin piercing. Loud thrashing continued. Antonio told me to paddle in full reverse- attempting to tow the croc out of the reed cover. The chaos incarnate would have none of this and I couldn’t pull the boat an inch.

Antonio had done this dance before, though, and was unimpressed by the stubborn animal. He pulled steadily on the cord, carrying the boat towards the red eyes, whacked the croc on the head with his paddle (after which, exactly twice, the beast took at good chomp at the bottom of the canoe), and backed the boat away, al the while keeping tension on the cord. After repeating this over and over, and waiting calmly at a 20 meter distance between surges, Antonio finally traded his paddle for a machete, and, with the absence of fanfare more characteristic of his father, placed a few quick strikes on the neck of the tired jacare. With this, the vertebrae was quickly severed and splashing stopped immediately. As dramatic a scene as it may have seemed to me (and as much as I’m describing it like a medieval battle), this was just another morning of bringing home Amazonian bacon for Antonio. He had carefully but efficiently killed a three-meter jacare- lots of steaks for an asado (barbeque), a nice change of fare from the usual fish. There was little entertainment value in this for Antonio, and it certainly wasn’t done for bragging rights.

By the time the aquatic grizzly of the Amazon was aboard it was light enough to see, and the birds were declaring the arrival of dawn. The nets, perhaps due to the violent flush of rain the evening before, held a nice batch of arowana, long slim fish which boast massive scales and an impressive forked goatee. This was one of the very few days since I’d been with Antonio that he’d caught a sizeable amount of fish to sell to market. There may have been a little extra sparkle in his grin as we left the lake.

From Josa’s house, I waived down the passing transport boat, and in three hours I was in a different Brasil, a different world. Music blared from boomboxes and street vendors hawked pirated copies of the latest Hollywood movies: the streets of Manacapuru. Here and in Manaus, only a few hours further from the da Silva’s floating home, with a little sweat and toil it seemed like a person could make a decent living at all sorts of different jobs. Why does Antonio and his clan continue to eek it out fishing upriver, when they could earn more and eat better in a city so nearby? Antonio had actually known big city life- he’d worked for four years in Manaus transporting vegetables to and from the market- and had chosen to come back to the river life. What keeps him here when he seems so constantly broke? Probably the same thing that keeps Mainers from moving to Boston, that stops every last Alaskan from moving to Anchorage, the same things that keeps outpost Newfoundlanders clinging to the rock. Sometimes work is just what you do to afford living where you want, how you want.

Croc Spearing and Pig Smuggling

2009-01-25T06:34:00.003-09:00

It was a steaming Saturday afternoon, and although a decent rainstorm had already passed, the temperature or humidity hadn’t been carried away with it. Saturday being a day of religious rest for Joao, an Adventist, it was a day free of fishing work for Antonio and his clan. The crowd was restless, excited for the party in Comunidad Sao Francisco that night.

The morning had started early and was eventful. Up around 4am, Antonio and I had headed upstream to where he’s set his maladeras (setnets). On the way upstream, he mentioned that the huge pulse of rain that had pelted down the night before should have enticed many tambaci out of the weeds and into his monofilament grasp. First, though, it being completely dark, we would look for jacaré in the reeds, and for big fish hanging drowsily along the edges of the channel. Flashlight in mouth and spear in hand, Antonio looked and listened for clues off the canoe’s bow. What he heard and saw was beyond me. While I heard a cacophony of awaking birds joining the band of norturnal insects, Antonio was pulling the occasional splashings of jacaré from this audio tangle. I saw only black water and eyes shining red in the reeds; Antonio could pick out a dark fin from the inky water and could judge sizes of the jacare staring out at the approaching canoe. In a flash, his harpoon was flying, the water became alive, and Antonio would usually haul in a stubborn fish or furious reptile. He declined to throw at a few sets of eyes (“Mucho grande!”), did mostly spearing-and-releasing (I’m not sure how the crocs react to this in the long run), and kept one meter-long jacaré, along with half a dozen nice fish.

At dawn the crocs disappear with the mosquitos and the fish become more shy of the approaching mass of a canoe, so Antonio shifted his attention to the nets. As he predicted, many large sunfish-shaped tambaci were tangled in his webs. It was a good morning- fresh fish to eat and extra to sell. He’d even speared a small piraracu, which sported stunning red hashes down its sides which blazed in the morning sun.

After the early morning harvest, I’d expected a tranquil afternoon. Antonio’s clan had other plans. It turned out that the plan was to cross the big river- the Solimones- and there was vague talk of a nice beach and a mystical place of unlimited fruits. I was, of course, to be included in the crew, and to be the trip’s benefactor. This meant that I would foot the bill for the three liters of fuel and the liter of some cheap liquor, a combination which they deemed was crucial for the trip. I somewhat reluctantly obliged, not sure of what direction this trip was actually going.

A larger canoe was begged to carry our motley crew. Assembled for the crossing was a unique blend of characters. Our captain, Bebé, was wearing nothing but a minimal bright blue European-style bathing suit, an almost matching bright blue headband, and ladies sunglasses. He had a wild blend of tattoos across his body: a large letter “C” on high upper right thigh, horseshoe tattoos on his left foot, a distorted pirate girl on his right calf, a sword on his right forearm, and another that was either a goblin or an abstract rendition of a universe on his lower stomach. This body art and wardobe was not entirely normal for this part of the Amazon, so bebe must have spent some time outside. Antonio was himself, and sat with his ladyfriend Josa, the kind but crude matriarch who seems to lack a volume control on her voice. Most of the rest of the crew was related to Josa. In the bow, very drunk, was a son of Josa’s. He had eyes which stared in very different directions, and although this is not particularly uncommon in itself, his gaze, in combination with his impressive level of intoxication, made him a sight to behold. Another of Josa’s sons, who had half of a pointer finger missing from a “crocodilio” (more likely a machete injury), actually had a remarkable likeness to the animal apparently responsible for the damage, with bleached ends to his hair and haunting jacare eyes. Also aboard were Christina, Josa’s granddaughter and quite a charming little princess, along with Bebé’s wife and a rotund guy who was apparently a talented singer.

There was confusion as we left, as wild-eyes and singer-man disappearing into the riverside brush. They popped out of the bushes a while later, tossing a squealing burlap sack into the bottom of the boat. It turns out that a piglet had been “borrowed” from one of the neighbors to help further supplement the trip. It was worth $20 reales on the other side, on the piglet black market. The squealing sack had to be smothered until the overloading canoe limped out of hearing range.

The boat, although quite large for a canoe, was old and leaky. Constant bailing was needed to keep her afloat, and we quickly broke one bailer and lost another. Luckily in these parts they are made of the cask of a local fruit and are common and free. After two hours of nursing the five-horsepower engine, we hit the opposite bank. The Solimones is a big, big river.

The promised lands didn’t hold exactly what was promised- no beach. There were a few houses, and a few fruit trees in their yards. One of the tiny stores in the “community”, it turned out, belonged to yet another son of Josa’s. I got the feeling that, to this son and his wife, our visit was about as welcome as a plague of leeches. As the hours ticked by, the boat’s crew begged intolerably, with broad smiles, for food and drink at a steep discount. To be fair, however, I should say that Antonio and his clan are poor enough that any vice- a single can of beer or cigarette- is enjoyed slowly and thoroughly like the finest of wines or fanciest of cigars, and is often shared. But when the rare opportunity presents itself, his clan really enjoys their vices.

After a few hours of this, the canoe was mostly submerged, and the hosts were plenty ready to close up shop. The piglet had been pawned and pockets were bulging with guayaba fruit. This exotic far bank had been a hoax to get me to foot a fuel bill, I thought, as we bailed the canoe and started back. But the return trip was fully redeeming, as a samba spontaneously erupted, and lasted a full two hours. Beer cans, a pot cover and spoon, plastic bottles, and sandals became instruments, and singer-man showed his stuff. The chorus was spirited and in tune. Wild-eyes, beyond drunk, became a talented rhythmic bailer. The long backtrack in the sinking canoe passed in no time.

Once back to Josa’s floating home, where was much nervous preparation for the party. Dancing outfits were carefully selected. I was now very curious to see what a party of this sort might entail, and could hear the distorted echoes of amplified music cming from the community center. After several delays and more begged beers, we canoed across the small Parana and walked toward Comunidad Sao Francisco. The music became louder but it never became clear where it was coming from. Into the community we stumbled…and entered the Catholic Church. We walked in and sat down to mass! In the front of the tiny church a couple of overcharged amps blasted words and hymns so loud that actual words were indistinguishable. This was the party, for which Antonio’s clan had anticipated and pregamed!

To be fair, after the service there was a community gathering, which included both bingo and a food auction. Anybody from a small town would agree that you could justifiably call that a party. I bought a few bingo cards for the clan. The auctioneer were so intolerably slow that, after having only sold a dozen or so items in almost two hours, we gave away our bingo cards and paddled back to Josa’s place for a midnight feast of fish soup. The sound of the world’s slowest auction rattled on. Tomorrow the clan would turn back to their fishing nets, and would have to dream about next weekend’s party.

Floating home and beyond

2009-01-16T06:27:00.003-09:00

From the outside, floating houses in these parts are very basic, although some are painted with enthusiastic colors or have small frills (for example, trim). Some of the homes are meticulously clean, with scrubed floors and painted chairs. Josa’s place is not, but I find the inside fascinating.

The vertebrae of a large snake, and a dried jacaré tail are propped in one corner. Empty cans of Anglo brand beef product line the tops of the window sills, and plastic bottles, tops cut off, are strategically wired between rafters to catch water from the leaky roof. There is a propane-fueled stove, but as the propane tank is empty, food is cooked on the porch over a wood fire, lit with a piece of foam mat used as kindling. An old school book is used as a makeshift source of rolling papers for cigarettes. A procession of ants marches to and from the thermos, which must hold some coffee residue. Empty Nesafe tins abound at random, while Gury soda bottles and 51 liquor bottles are organized along one wall. Hammocks hang in each of the two rooms, four in each at the moment. As with all houses in these parts, all the wood used- framing, floor, walls- is beautiful and exotic (to my eyes), hard and oil-impregnated. Guayaba fruit, Nescafe, rice, beans, spagetti, sugar, salt, oil, and farina make up the entirely of the cupboard. There is no actual cupboard. Ingenious lamps have been created with just sardine cans, string, and vegetable oil; I’ve found four or five variations of these lamps. Of course, several machetes lie about the house. Each room has two doors and several windows, and each room has a four-foot by four-foot hole in the floor, providing interior access to the river. These holes are used for all sorts of functions: preparing food, cleaning fish, obtaining cooking water, bathing, washing clothes, as a trash receptacle, for going to the bathroom. There is current in this part of the river, but not much. The house is not unlike a scaled-up design of an ice fishing shack, for those northerners who may know what this is.

Along the outside of the house, clothes hang to dry. Clothes here are well-worn but are always spotlessly clean. A small canoe, tied up next to Antonio’s larger craft, looks like a shark has taken bite out of it’s gunwale. Beyond, lilypads six feet in diameter (and boasting thorns over an inch long on their undersides) are a buffer between the reeds on the bank and open river. Macaws fly high overhead. Piranhas swirl after the food scraps which drift from under the house. Kingfishers zip by, low and purposeful, only to stop in a tree at the opposite bank as if they forgot their purpose. Roosters callously interrupt the wild songbirds. Morning clouds, an indescribable blend of purples and grays and yellows, eventually flatten and dissipate into blue sky, and then in the afternoon a dark horizon forms under the complex thunderheads. The resulting rain frees large mats of vegetation, which drift and bump downstream, perhaps eventually all the way to the Pacific. With luck, after the rainstorm the fish will move, and a few of the fish will be caught by carefully set gillnets. This is the living fishery.

Setnetters of the Amazon

2009-01-12T12:56:00.000-09:00

Joao Cardoso da Silva is particularly strong and agile for a man of 77 years. Or 72. Depending on when I asked him, he reported his age differently. No matter, because what he does daily is a feat for any age. He has broad shoulders, a thin white moustache lining his upper lip, a slight underbite, and an omnipresent smile. Joao married Maria Santana Soares, and together they have nine children, 37 grandchildren, and many others who consider them avós (grandparents). One of their sons, Antonio Marco, 29, is of slight build but every sinewy ounce that he does have is of pure muscle. Antonio has three children to an earlier marriage but now lives with an older woman, Josa, who has five children of her own and now cares for two of her grandchildren. Joao and Antonio are my fishing partners. More correctly, Joao and Antonio are fishing partners, and I am the gringo whose name is impossible to pronounce who alternately helps then gets in the way, and seems to say "Wow!" every other paddle stroke.

In truth, neither Joao nor Antonio ever let on that I was in any way a burden. Although my thinly-veiled spanish rarely bridged to full communication with their particular breed of Portuguese tongue, Antonio quickly took initiative and decided to call me "Joe" (due to my many odd statements like "Yo no sé", or "Yo no lo entendí"…), and then gave me warning of potentially exciting upcoming events by exclaiming "Wow!", in a hilarious animated voice.

This particular day I was lying in my hammock in the da Silva household, doing a very poor job at patiently waiting for Antonio to wake up from a nap, so that we could head up into the upper lakes to fish for a few days. Up to this point we had been fishing every day, but had based ourselves out of the house. The usual schedule was to set the nets after the midday heat, around 3pm, to pick the nets just after dark, around 8pm, and then to pick the nets and bring them in for the day around daybreak. When rainstorms interrupted a date with the fishing grounds, it was shifted or skipped. This seemed a fairly relaxed schedule from my ignorant, excited perspective; I wanted to be out fishing the entire day, or for days at a time, watching the family catch heaps of fish for market. I was excited to get away from Maria Santana`s generous but overly-frequent coffee breaks. (Her only other experience with foreigners was a Japanese man years back who, upon visiting the family, became terrified of getting sick from the local food or water. According to lore, he ate only crackers and drank only sugary coffee. Maria then concluded that all Japanese-her word for foreigners- must have an insatiable thirst for sweet coffee.) Any local could probably have explained the clear logic and wisdom in fishing these hours and in this way. (Picking fish after their peak movement, before Jacaré are most active, then in the morning, after another period of fish activity but before the rainstorms moved the tetris board and locked the nets between huge blocks of vegetation.) I was just anxious to go to the lakes and fish, and didn´t- never will- have Joao´s cool patience.

What of all this setting and picking nonsense, and for those of you who know the trade, how do they do it in the Amazon? Well, a setnet is a gillnet (in which fish try to pass through, get tangled, and drown) with both ends fixed to something unmoving. Joao and Antonio were using monofilament gillnet with "holes" in the web about four inches on the diagonal; the entire net fishes about six feet deep. The current being slight in the area they fish, they used nothing but the weight of the monofilament or nylon to sink the bottom of the net. The top of the net is buoyed by pieces of styrofoam about the size of a deck of cards, simply wedged onto the line. Either end of the net is fixed either to a stick pushed into the muddy bottom, or tied to a handful of reeds. This is it- very simple, low-cost, and, with luck and skill, very effective. Depending on where they are, Joao and Antonio either set the net to span an opening of a serpentine, or they weave it along the floating mat at the edge of the open water, hoping to catch fish going to or coming from the sheltered waters. All this father and son did together without more than a few gestures and a word or two, spoken just louder than a whisper. It is spectacular to watch.

To the lakes! The afternoon and evening activities quickly explained for Antonio`s groggy behavior in the morning. Without fanfare father and son loaded two canoes- one with power and Joao`s smaller 4-meter boat in tow. Three tarps, one mosquito screen, one kettle, three plates, three spoons, coffee, maize farina (the ubiquitous food source of Brasil- cooked, ground corn, which is used heavily as a dressing on any and every meal), salt. Long pants and shirt for the bugs. Boots for the woods. All the nets, ice to keep fish, a couple of spears, and two large nails, bent in the shape of hooks, sharpened, and attached to stout cord- Jacaré hooks, I was told. We were off!

The trip up to the lakes was memorable, and is the tight, twisty, overhung waterway that you might imagine when thinking of the Amazon. Small fish jumping made the water´s surface look like it does during a light rain. Vines dangled to the water, and many of the trees boasted bonafide thorns, inches long. Once onto the lake, storks and black-headed vultures were the yin and yang of the sky, the chorus of insects and birds same from all directions, and the da Silvas went to work.

After setting, we set up camp in the dark. This involved making a lean-to from the biggest tarp, stringing the mosquito screen underneath, and laying the other two tarps as a groundsheet. All the while Antonio was teasing me about getting carried off by monkeys. I told him I was more afraid of the snakes, especially having only sandals. He had a great laugh over this, saying that there were snakes all over, and yes, they were mostly poisonous,. Almost as if he set it there as a prop, he suddenly hopped back grabbed a stick, and beat the ground right under his feet, killing a four-foot snake. Still in sandals and with a dying flashlight, I didn´t find this as funny as he did.

Still alive after tiptoeing around in a half-hearted attempt to help set up camp, I was glad to dive under the mosquito mesh for the night. Across the lake a tribe of monkeys roared like a jet engine, and the deep echoless forest gave birth to every sound, screech, and cry imaginable. These were the animal punctuations of the insect symphony, complete with the drone of all too many mosquito bagpipes. The noise was as intense as the heat.

In the middle of the night (probably only 9pm), I woke up to Joao unceremoniously getting geared up to go out. I followed suit, confused as to why they`d chose to work the nets with clouds of mosquitoes around them, and without natural light, but unwilling to miss out on the action. The bugs were fierce upon exit. Instead of the big slow mosquitoes of the north, these bugs are quick and pragmatic- they know their cause, and their metabolism is in full swing. They land and plunge for blood. On the water, the moon gave light to work and the bugs were considerably thinner. The lakes, being clearer than the Paraná, hold more of the smaller targeted species (visual feeders), and fewer catfish. The nets held a range of fish- tambací and others in the general morph of a sunfish, triera, which resembles a lake trout with steroid-infused teeth, and many strange little armor-plated fish that look like they`d never be limber enough to swim.

The first two triera were sacrificed for Jacaré bait, after Joao uncovered the lair of a large one. He did this by making an impressively foreign series of gutteral tones and finished with a sharp clap, just as we entered a new lake. He then waited, and from not far away, a very similar set of noises responded, and then a very large animal charged into the water. This was stunning and scary, sitting in a small canoe, freeboard of three inches, in an unknown dark. I have no idea what the sound effects in a Jacaré, but it seems to vault the dominant animal(s) in the vicinity into immediately reply and action. The reaction was as abrupt as a huge bull moose storming to a call in rut, and Joao knows how to call his Jacaré.

Once located, and with fresh bait, we paddled towards the crocodile zone, threaded the fish onto the modified nail-hooks, looped the cord over an overhanging and flexible branch, and then tied it securely to a large limb. The idea is to hang the fish so that just their tails dangle into the water, so that Jacaré see the fish, swallow it whole, and then are held near the tree because in their haste they also engorged a strangely shaped nail. Witnessing a strike with this kind of fishing would be sensational.

This trip to the lakes, the Jacaré avaded us, seeming to prefer live prey. And the moon, according to Antonio, allowed the fish to see and avoid the nets more than usual, so the catch was slim. We ate caldeira de peche, fish soup, every meal, with plenty of maize farina to add to it, and it was delicious. The snakes and monkeys left me alone, the bugs made mash out of me from the ankles down. I watched Joao work, shift, and pick his nets in an area he`s fished for 74 years (or perhaps 69), in an area which his father fished before that, and in an area that he doubtless showed to Antonio.

We left after three days with a meager 25 kilos of fish, comprised of a nice blend of species but of types only saleable for around $1 Real/kilogram (Brazilian currency, right now $1US is worth about $2R). A scant income for half a week´s work of two men. Neither seemed frustrated or disappointed. It seems that fishing here can be very pulsy (like everywhere), and that this trip, the fish had been sparse. While working the nets, Antonio had told me about the potential to catch a whole school of tucanaré (peacock bass) when they`re thick, or the holy grail of the Amazon- catching several huge piraracu. Growing as large as 120 kilograms, and worth a whopping $12R per kilogram, a single fish could value over $1200R- an astounding amount of money for a fisherman living this sort of low-overhead life. A single fish could yield enough to buy an engine, or almost an entire new canoe! The sushi-grade giant bluefin of the Amazon. As we worked net after net for fish destined for the family soup bowl, I had to wonder how often piraracu are a fisherman`s dream in these parts, and how often they become a reality. For the da Silvas, father and son, profit doesn`t seem to be a big priority. At least there`s always something to eat.

Up the Rio Solimones with a Paddle

2009-01-09T12:52:00.000-09:00

Only a few kilometers from the docks of Manaus, the Rio Negro and Rio Solimones converge and blend their colors. Below here, the mighty river is known, especially to foreigners, as the Amazon River. The Rio Negro is clear, dark, and much less buggy; the Solimones is "the color of coffee and milk mixed together," one local told me, and full of insect and fish life. Upstream on the Solimones, five hours by the sleek express boats and 12 hours by larger boats, lie the two communities of Botofogo and Sao Francisco- two of several remote communities located on the Parana tributary. A few families live between Botofogo and Sao Francisco, either in floating houses or in homes built on stilts, set back from the river. Locals told me that river levels here change annually by as much as five meters, so houses are built to accommodate this.

The da Silva family lives in a floating three-room house, six meters by ten meters, with a wrap-around porch of sorts, made of salvaged boards. The foundation of the house is simply enormous tropical logs spiked together, buoyant enough to keep the house six inches above the water. A series of boards provides an access ramp to land. Between five and seventeen people call this home, depending on the day. For the past two weeks, my hammock swung from the da Silva´s rafters, as yet another addition to the large household.

Coming upriver in an overcrowded skiff, (capacity, incredibly enough, read 42 persons, painted by hand on the covered roof; I counted 45 people, along with a couple tons of staples- hard bread, dry milk, rice, beans, oil, coffee, fuel, and colorful heavily-sequined clothes.) I watched a few canoes pass along the river´s edge. As we entered the tributary of Parana, the number of small, low-lying canoes increased to impressive numbers. Men, women, and children passed and were passed, unalarmed by the wake our burdened vessel, which seemed certain to swamp the sleek canoes.

People here have muscles. Toned muscles, Oscar de la Hoya-like muscles, I first thought. Then I realized that instead, these are muscles honed from paddling, muscles like champion marathon canoe racers. Chopping muscles, from clearing brush and wild grass with machetes, clearing the way for corn and other crops. And fishing muscles, from picking through net after net, set for food and for profit. Many families in the Amazon, the da Silvas included, rely on fishing both for their primary protein supply, and as a way to make money in order to buy other food, tools, or pleasures in the big bad city- Manacapuru. This is the end of the known world for many of the young kids living along the Paraná.

Throw all Amazon stereotypes you may harbor aside- today`s Amazon, at least the part I´ve seen, is a blend of old and new, fast and reliable, and this is not an indigenous community. This is a rural life that is decided water-based and is refreshingly simple in many ways, but not ignorant of outside life and extravagant lifestyles. A very few of the houses around the centers of the communities have electricity, but none have running water, phones; words like Facebook and YouTube mean nothing. Old women wear trendy pink teeshirts boasting statements like, "Power girl with power attitude!", or "Extreme World Surf Team" (written in English) while they wash their family`s clothes in the river. The young girls in the family were fascinated by my ability to write so quickly, and I was equally astounded at their abilities to cook so expertly.

The bugs in these parts defy stereotype as well. The Rio Negro and its tributaries are known to be teeming with life, including mosquitoes, but during the day they are entirely absent. Like clockwork, at 6:30 pm they appear, and around 6 am they vanish, afraid of the sun like the vampires that they are. Watch your neck a night though, because during the witching hours they´re thick.

Some canoes are powered by clever five-horsepower lawnmower engines outfitted with a six-foot shaft, at the end of which spins an economical propeller five inches in diameter. The motor "mounts" onto the canoe with a single pin on the bottom of the engine block, which is fitted into a hole in the stern of the wooden canoe. Speed comes at the cost of expensive gasoline, and even though the engines are remarkably efficient, paddling costs nothing. More than half of the fishing canoes are human powered, and every six year-old paddles prodigiously.

The variety of fishing methods is as diverse as the fish species targeted, which is as diverse as the range of eccentric shapes, sizes, and colors of these fish…which is huge. Hooks are handy at certain times of the year, and bow and arrow are used from trees when the forest is flooded. Indigenous groups sometimes use a potent tree bark which, when pulverized and tossed upon a confined body of water, stuns the fish for a while. The fish float to the surface and the fishermen pick those they want and let the other recover. Here on the Paraná, and at this time of year, gillnets and spears are the preferred tools. The trick is finding the fish in the side channels and lakes nearby. Like a colossal tetris game, huge chunks of floating plant mats shift and open. This is the tropical version of shifting ice floes in the Arctic. Around and under the mats and in lakes seeming to boil with life, fish seek refuge from the current, and from giant river catfish, river dolphin, birds of prey, and most of all from the primordial Jacaré- the caiman (think crocodile!), armored fish-eating robot of the Amazon. Here swims the lifeblood of the Parana.

Adios Chile, Bem-vinido Brazil!

2009-01-05T17:48:00.004-09:00

This being at times somewhat of a solitary trek, I´ve shared company with a few good books along the way so far. Reading good writing is English is a refreshing break from speaking, often in vain, juvenile sentences in a foreign language. A good book is captivating (did I just say that? ), but in the past few weeks it seems like the books have mixed in uncanny ways with the daily happenings. Cod, by Mark Kurlansky, was an great post-Newfoundland transition, and I´ve seen bacalao (cod)- both fresh and salted- showing up in markets all over. The cultural influence of the singular fish is impressive here in South America, and according to the book, the world over (you should read the book). Later, while hiking in Patagonia I read John Krakauer´s Eiger Dreams, and (in my demented mind) I myself was transported into one of the author´s “learning experiences”. While reading about a true mountaineering endeavor- waiting out a hellacious storm on Denali- I listened to the screeching Patagonian winds. Just then an especially monstrous gust of wind picked up my entire tent and hurled it 20 meters through the air, ridgepole and all. Luckily, although the howl of wind was probably comparable to that on Denali, the temperature was a balmy 30 above zero rather than 30 below. I´ll also admit that my “tent” was actually a sheet of plastic, but the gust was truly sensational- it picked up three logs, each six inches in diameter and eight feet long, along with the plastic- a good 80 pounds, and tossed it clear over my head and against nearby trees.

I´m coming around to my excuse for this ramble...Keroauc´s On the Road was the next book I picked up, and just finished. Corresponding with this, the past week has been a crazy, wild whirlwind of sights, and new experiences in new places for me. It has little to do with fishing but I think the Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty in all of us- fascinated by how other people live their lives and go about their business- might be interested. You would be if I could only describe it as it as my eyes saw it. And I think the only way I can share the past week is in a rapid-fire, mixed-up, rollercoaster sort of way.

Puerto Aysen is a fishing port in northern Patagonia with especially friendly people, ringed by steep green hills. Hills like you´d see in the Aluetians of Alaska or in Norway, that blow you away at how something so steep could still be covered in trees. There are lots of tires on the sides of the dirt roads on the edge of town and the giant semi-ferule chickens in many of the yards had an attitude than made my heart race as I passed by. There is no true harbor in Puerto Aysen, so boats have to snake up one or another small river and either stick their bows into the muddy bank or tie up to a makeshift dock. The most crowded of these river tie-ups is called the rather ominous “Agua Muerte”. Before getting to Agua Muerte I saw a few dive boats and a lot of broken , abandoned, sulking wooden hulls. Hulls still in working order had names like Tigussa, Piratta II, Yasna, Don Alfonso, Antares, Pascualito, Mar Austral, and Reymar II. Lots of 40 foot boats working as tenders to fishermen working outside the long, narrow fjords that cut into this piece of Patagonia, and lots skiffs, around 26 feet long and rigged with 40-horsepower outboards and remarkably simple longline setups. A few hundred hooks, monofilament line, some rebar or rock anchors, and styrofoam buoys the size of a basketball.

I talked for several hours with Mauricio, who described how he caught merluza (hake). He was getting ready to go to church with his wife, having come in to town to sell fish and buy supplies, before heading back to his fishing cabin/house, 12 hours by boat. He filled gaps in our conversation by washing his hands dozens of times and muttering “Norteamericano” . I think he was trying to come to grips with why anyone would spend two days around Agua Muerte, coming from such a distant place. A place that to him exists only as an idea or photo. I tried to tell him that Patagonia was nothing but a name on a map to me, until just a week ago. I walked towards the church with the couple. Mauricio´s hands were still dirty with engine oil and hard work.

I decided to check out Valparaiso, which lies directly west of Santiago, on the coast. Valparaiso is supposedly a major fishing port, but I think that this means big, industrial trawling mostly, maybe for anchoveta, and I couldn´t find any small boats near the city. Along the water, Valparaiso is strikingly beautiful. The chaos of the markets was wild to watch. Fruits and vegetables and shellfish turn into rinds and husks and shells on the streets by evening, only to be completely cleaned in the night, and to appear all over early the next morning. In the hills rising above town, there are certainly some beautiful, old, high-end mansions, but the bulk of the hills seem to be barrios of poor, poor people. Several times when walking up the winding streets I was stopped by a local, who told me that I couldn´t go any further up, that it was too dangerous. I heeded their advice, for the most part, but wondered if this was actually true. The spectacular graffiti in the upper streets of Valparaiso rivals any of the fancy buildings in beauty.

Valparaiso gives birth to one of the largest New Year´s fireworks celebrations in South America, perhaps in the world. Being in town, I couldn´t help but check it out. I was joined by tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others of course. Mohawks (the Israelis brothers would have liked this scene), dreadlocks, and tattoos were abundant. I even saw gothic-dressed Chileans. This was certainly different than anything I´d seen in Chiloe or Patagonia, which is perhaps more old-fashioned or less hip. I bumped into a French volcanologist named Sebastien, a fantastic guy who´s spent two years in El Paso, Texas and two years in Detroit, and spoke English perfectly. We decided to check out more graffiti and then check head t a lookout to watch the fireworks, which began at midnight.

And fireworks there were! For a stretch of something like 14 kilometers, stretching the coastline down to Viña del Mar, fireworks exploded for a continuous half hour. By far the most spectacular fireworks I´ve ever witnessed. All the while Sebastien and I were two among a sea of thousands of Chileans, all of us squished together as tightly as any overcrowded fraternity basement. People were on roofs, on porches, on top of fences and in trees. The sea included 80 year-olds and parents with babies, although we all swelled together and had huge energy, it was surprisingly completely peaceful . “A-ya-ya! Yi-yi-yi! Vi-va Chile!” chanted the crowd together, and cheap champagne was sprayed in the air. The streets were alive and wild and people peed wherever and whenever. Dance parties erupted all over the city. The next morning the street smelled spicy with the aroma of cooked urine.

Chilenos have beautiful cinnamon-colored skin and big, warm smiles. “Waivon” (something equivalent to dude) is used on the street in every sentence. A land where pelligallo, the strange elephantfish, and almeja fill the docks. A country with good shellfish plates, empañadas, mote con huesillos (a popular drink- peaches, peach juice, oatmeal), and completos con palta (hot dogs with avocado). A land where bus companies with names like Tur-Bus and Cruz del Sur run amazingly on time. Warm mariscos for sale in the streets and salmon-skin jewelry. Where Nescafe is coffee and milk is never a part of the tafecito, and where yerba mate is either nonexistent (in cities) or an integral part of life (in the country). A place where traucho, a midget man of mythological lore with strong sexual powers, lives on on Chiloe and beyond, and where Patagonian men wear beret-like hats and moustaches like they were born with them. A land of “sí, pó!” and “Puta la wea!” Quickly, my time in Chile came to an end. The Chile that I saw is a fantastic place.

Just as quickly, an instant introduction to Brazil began. Bueno become bem, just like that. I found myself in Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America. Completely overwhelming and fantastic. The first Brazilian I met was an especially friendly security guard by the name of Alessandro, who spent a good half hour advising me on cheap hotels, and then insisted that I take his umbrella as a gift (it was pouring and I accepted). After a quick bus ride, I commenced a four-hour slog through wet streets, mostly back and forth on the same damn streets, looking for mysterious, evasive cheap lodging. The umbrella constantly got wedged between objects. One hotel had a room for much more than I was willing to pay. The smooth, seductive language that I´ve heard in Brazilian songs isn´t nearly as suave on the streets, and it isn´t as instantly interchangeable with Spanish as I´d thought. My inquiry for hostpitaje ended with me walking a long sweaty way to a hospital.

I finally ended up at “Amar Hotel”, the only hotel within walking distance that wasn´t bent towards high-fliers. Here, you could rent a room for one hour, three hours, or 12 hours. A per-hour love shack. No sheets included, a huge mirror on the ceiling above the bed. A see-though shower stall, and five TV stations, two of which seemed to be bad porn (fuzzy reception left me happily uncertain). I set down my packs and headed out to find a bite to eat.

After a couple tasty and new calzone-like creations from a little street corner store, and free of the weight of the packs, I finally took the time to look around. Next to the store was the base of an immense tropical tree, soaring skyward. The sky had finished gushing rain and was now a complex spectrum of pinks and purples and grays. The food was much better than a completo, even a completo con palta. Back in the hotel, I found the sheets, there all along, neatly ironed and folded and very clean. The fan made the new hot humidity easily tolerable. Even though I had to stare at myself in the mirror before shutting off the lights, the spot was just fine. Maybe a little weird, but fine.

Downtown Sao Paulo. Wow. Many people warned of danger in the streets around the city center. I didn´t see anything too alarming. Lots of other hotels advertised hourly rates, but then again maybe all hotels should. Maybe it just makes sense. The center of the city is for pedestrians only, very pleasant. Many of the streets are white and black stone laid in endless stemming patterns that seem to have no beginning and no end. Loud, angry, spontaneous sermons going on in the plaza just outside a stunning Sao Paulo Cathedral , while at the same time a dozen bums sleep on cardboard along the plaza edges, and a woman casually walks by, smoking a cigarette and vomiting at the base of every tree in the plaza. Sao Paulo has a skyline that is at once beauty and decay, with tall buildings looking like they were never quite finished to the top, and have since started to fall apart. Under these are beautiful old, well-kept buildings. Here in the streets you can get little cups of coffee for the equivalent of 50 cents, or fresh-blended juice for just over a buck. Saltados, some combination of meat and bread which can take many shapes, can usually be found for under a buck. Brazilian music erupts out of a few restaurant patios. Six musicians- four with just their voices and percussion instruments- sound like 15, and playing songs that rise and fall but have no end. There is every sort of look here- tall dark-skinned women wearing alarmingly short cutoff jeans, modestly dressed Palestinian men, many woman wearing shirts designed specifically to show off large portions of their back. Even a couple natural blondes.

Despite my initial shock, it seems that sex is unabashedly a part of the core of Sao Paulo life. It is flaunted and eluded to in everything. One very modest Japanese-Brazilian, a craftsman who etches personalized messages on rice-grain jewelry, spoke to me for half an hour about politics, about his work, and about the economic situation in Brazil and Japan, then casually shifted subjects and asked me, “You looking for a woman? Want to have a look? Just 20 Real for a nice one.” Here the cleanest-minded Paulista (Sao Paulo resident) was shifting into pimp mode. Displays of affection were rampant in Chile, but here sex is just around the corner. I steered clear, perhaps my loss.

As a side note (or perhaps all of this other nonsense is a side note note and this is the on-topic bit), here is a list of fish offered in a major supermarket in the city. I couldn´t find a fish market, although there likely is one. English translations to come if I ever learn them:
Atlantic salmon, merluza (hake), marapa, sardine, cavalinha, anchova, pescadinha, taina
Also, Alaska merluza, for about $2 US/pound. All the way down here!

Enter the urban jungle. Manaus is unlike any place I´ve ever seen. Two and a half hours north of Sao Paulo by plane, to where it is decidedly hotter and more humid than the big city. Street vendors sell skewers of marinated meat of all sorts for about 50 cents, which you then reheat over a fire they keep kindled just for this purpose. This is eaten with some sort of dry pulverized matter resembling rough cornmeal and tasting about as bland. I don´t blend in here nearly as well as I did in Sao Paulo, and some stares are pretty intense. The streets are certainly not for the faint of ankle- holes and rebar abound. Don´t let me mislead you- Manaus is not the jungle. It what Anchorage is to the Alaskan bush- an urban staging area for the jungle. But it´s a wild city. Perhaps the most aggressive people in town are those trying to talk an outsider into a “jungle tour”. A short, sinewy guy with an attitude fit for a giant latched himself onto me, declaring himself a buddy of mine and a friend of everybody. His nickname, Portuguese for “Cockroach”, might give some clue how others feel about this particular amigo. Another man, a strong, heavily-tattooed man, an Amazon native staying in town for a few days to sell medicinal leaves, herbs, roots, and pulverized bark, gave me a great tour of his production facility (a cheap hotel room). He, unlike Cockroach, is the real deal. In Manaus just this afternoon, I watched a mother nursing a baby in the back of a church, in service. I saw a teenage boy, working in a shop that sells women´s underwear, clear his snotty nose onto the store floor; a balloon-artist clown drinking hard liquor before starting his afternoon work. Natives just outside of Manaus, I´m told, traditionally fish with bow and arrow, spear, and with a paralyzing powder rendered from the bark of a certain tree. Now many use nets and steel hooks. This is the frontier.

Today I explored the market, complete with a big area devoted to fresh fish. Fish of many shapes were present, including several species with the general shape of piranha, but very large. Catfish, peacock bass, and a shad-like fish. Also, lots of saltfish- not cod, but salt-brined and preserved in the same way. Which brings me back to Kurlasky´s book, Cod. And Portuguese influence down here in Brazil. Books intertwine with life.

Today I arranged transport to spend a while out in the Amazonian “bush” with a fishermen, and the book in hand is a bunch of short stories (many jungle-based) by Joseph Conrad. How can these two twist together? We´ll have to wait and see. I promise, regardless, that it´ll be more fisheries-related...

Christmas in la Patagonia

2008-12-30T07:21:00.002-09:00

I
A generous ride brought me north to the bustling town of Coyhaicae, famed destination for fly fishermen and a restocking center for local campesinos, in northern Patagonia, Chile, on Christmas eve. Here I admired how perfectly street lights stood perpendicular to the pavement, in sharp contrast to craggy wind-weary trees bowing towards the weathered rock. Taking a break from the coastal-based fisheries project, I headed for the hills, and had thought that spending Christmas alone in the Cerro Castillo mountains would be memorable, in a solitary sort of way. But the hike had gone more quickly than I thought, I been completely skunked fishing in Lago General Carerra, and a chance ride al dedo (hitching) had taken me all the way back to town. I was now pleased to get to see the social side of the holiday in these parts, and glad to get some respite from the relentless Patagonian wind.

Finding a place to stay for the night turned out to be a challenge. Every hostel, every house advertising hospitaje in its windows turned me away at the door, telling me they were full for the night. Even at the peak of daylight hours here in the southern hemisphere, darkness eventually descends at this southern latitude, and it looked like I might be forced to walk a long way in the dark before hitting the hay. I passed another hostel and was given same response- all rooms full. This one, however, offered to allow me to camp on their lawn. Camping, for me, seems to loose its appeal once submersed into the world of cars, boomboxes, and barking dogs, but this night I gratefully accepted the offer and headed out the door to find a nesting site for the night.

On the cracked steps of the hostel sat two Israelis and several liters of Cristal beer. Both sported fine mohawks, were probably around 20 years old, and one was playing a nylon-stringed guitar like he was a backup for Ted Nugent.

“Hey man, what’s….whoa, do you have a moustache?! Wow, there’s nothing cooler than a moustache!”

“Except Mohawks of course,” I replied, entertaining their egos.

“And mullets. Especially she-mullets.” These guys were clearly hip to what’s hip. “Hey man, where you from, and what’s your favorite band? Cause we know them all, let us play you a song. Any song,” touted the taller brother, sans guitar.

I hesitated, adjusting to the words spoken in English and to the rare haircuts, certainly foreign to Patagonia. I delayed by telling them where I’d been traveling, and where I call home. I’d heard little but latino love ballads (Te quiero, te quiero…) and morphed Christmas tunes (Navidad, Navidad, hoy es Navidad to the tune of Jingle Bells…) for a while. “Hmm, well, you know any Tom Waits, Floyd, Modest Mouse?” I was being simultaneously truthful and difficult, as my choice bands have a knack for writing eccentric, complex songs.

The Israelis were unphased. “Not Alaskan bands, man, bands that everybody knows. Tenacious D. That’s what you want. And here you go, from us to you,” said the brash singer. With that they launched into several songs, complete with all the original songs’ pauses, inflections, and attitude, and with the bonus of middle-eastern accents. The guitar player was a joy to listen to; the singer was not. Together they had plenty of heart. After a while I bid farewell to the Israeli brothers, who were still singing irreverently and with volume to spare, and headed into town to check out a midnight mass. With the Hebrew rockers lording over the camping grounds, I was in no rush to roost for the night.

The Coyhaicae Catholic church sits on the northern edge of the town’s central square, looking south. Mass here was a lively affair, with people of all ages in attendance, despite the late hour. Babies inside and dogs celebrating in the streets contended for air time with the priest and speakers throughout the service. The actors in the manger scene weren’t noteworthy but the ornate costumes were, and the live stand-in for baby Jesus was a truly beautiful baby. I’m no Catholic but thought the service and songs beat the pants off the Tenacious D cover band.

Back at the manger, things had settled down. I pulled out my tent- actually just a three- meter by two-meter sheet of one-millimeter clear plastic bought a week earlier at a hardware store- scavenged a few rocks and a ridgepole, quickly erected my shelter in the dark, and tucked into my sacko de dormir for the night. The stars were burning bright, and I could see the southern cross constellation to, surprisingly enough, the south. A few hazy thoughts about the grass within my tent not quick smelling right crossed my mind before I dozed off.

Christmas morning shone bright and clear (not ordinary Christmas weather for a Mainer, where tradition mandates a holiday mix of wet snow and freezing rain). Not a single wispy cloud interrupted the baby-blue sky. As I woke, olfactory-cognitive coordination improved, and the reaction was less than pleasant. There was something amuck in my stall. A look to my left, and then to my right, cleared up the confusion. On one side lay a hunk of fleshy bone, partially decomposed, although fortunately not nearly as maggot-ridden as the head of the dead cow I’d encountered on a hike a few days back. On my other side, lay a nice pile of the remains of what was likely the rest of the meat, after being fully processed by a large dog. Santa had visited my humble abode, and he’d come bearing presents!

I said a quick prayer of thanks for the heavenly forces which had guided me around the landmines the night before when setting up camp, keeping me clean and relatively fragrant. I then headed out to enjoy the beautiful day.

II
To celebrate the union of my good fortune, the holiday, and the fantastic weather, I decided to treat myself to a big breakfast, before exploring a trail network in Coyhaicae’s nature reserve. True to relaxed latino culture and signifying the importance of the holiday, not a single supermarket, store, or restaurant was open. After ambling around town until noon, I finally found a small panaderia in the process of opening its latches. In I marched, and proceeded to assemble a venerable feast for one. I bought one of each kind of pastry the store made, a can of frutillas en jugo (strawberries in their own juice), and a bottle of Colo de Mono, which was advertised as a traditional holiday drink, which I imagined was the Chilean parallel to eggnog.

On a sunny patch of grass on the back side of a gas station, I feasted. Each pastry was soaked in strawberry juice. The half-dozen pastries were gone in short order, at which time I had serious stomach pains. It took me a couple of hours to recover from this food coma, which gave the sun plenty of time to burn and dehydrate this pathetic white chap.

Stomach recovered and spirits still high, phase two of the Christmas plan was to explore a protected forest of the outskirts of town. Partly due to poor planning but mostly due to an odd tendency to create illogical personal challenges, I showed up at the reserve with no food and my only my eggnog substitute to drink. At this point I took further inspection of the drink’s label and contents, and learned that this certain drink, Tail of the Monkey, is actually more like a bad Kailua, a somewhat sickening coffee liquor. And alcoholic. Not my cup of tea for this endeavor. But the challenge had been set, and there was no arguing with the judge.

The first five or so kilometers of the trail were quite nice. The following several were, to my recollection, quite sinuous. Small hills, in the blazing heat and with the monkey on my back, became valiant struggles. I passed several streams which would likely have yielded potable water, but for some reason, this felt like cheating. By the time I ambled out of the partial shade of the reserve and down the dusty and sun-baked road to town, the monkey’s playful, comedic demeanor had given way to pain and thirst. Time is a good remedy though, and by the time I was in the town proper, the monkey has jumped ship. The day, although unique, had been beautiful in it’s own way. Water never tasted so sweet.

This is a longwinded way of wishing all a happy holidays. May all of you be so lucky as to successfully dodge foul meats and dog poo where you lie, keep all of life’s little monkeys off your backs!

Chiloe's wild west

2008-12-20T06:44:00.004-09:00

In northwestern Isla Chiloe sits the small city of Ancud, population around 25,000, one of the larger cities on the island. West of Ancud, and extending south for the entire west coast of the island, is wild, undeveloped coastline. Most of this is officially protected as park land. Road access is rare and few fishermen work on this western coastline, especially as compared to the busy eastern shores. This is understandable, as the western coast lies directly exposed to the Pacific, while Chiloe’s eastern shores open into the Gulf of Ancud.

Directly west of Ancud is one place where a road does manage to snake all the way to the wilder coast. Half way to the coast the road turns to a rough dirt road and houses effective end, save the occasional capensino dwelling. Here is the Pinguineria- a protected nesting area for two species of penguins (Magellanic and Humboldt)- and an area frequented by tourists from all over the world. A few restaurants catering to tourists spring out of the beach about where the grass begins, although today they appear closed. The black and white penguins seem to be web-footed gold to these restaurants and the Ancud agents who sell (overpriced) package tours to tourists.

Just down the beach from these restaurants, benefiting from the wind and swell protection that the penguin-speckled islands just offshore offer, a group of artesanal fishermen live right on the beach in the warmer months. Their camps are the just like many salmon setnet fish camps in Alaska- simple, functional, snug, and homey. These are members of a local fishing cooperative, known here as a syndicate, which together manage and harvest the local loco, a mollusk of high value, with an appearance that sometimes leads to it being mistaken as abalone. When not diving for loco, these fishermen are die-hard skiff fishermen.

I walk up to four fishermen on the beach and strike up a conversation with the closest man. Mario, in his mid-30’s with an easy smile, has an uncanny knack for known half a dozen synonyms for any particular word. The fishermen on the beach are four of 60 men and women in the local loco syndicate, which controls, monitors, and enforces loco harvesting in the waters directly offshore of this particular beach. I’m told that there are roughly 15 of the loco syndicates in the region. Loco longer than 10 centimeters along the long axis are harvested between March and July (mostly in June and July), at which time they’re the plumpest. Recently, loco have been garnering about 7,000 pesos/kilogram (roughly five bucks a pound) for fishermen, and earnings are split evenly between all members of the syndicate. Price-sharing and local management are both somewhat rare in the fisheries these days, and the concepts here are progressive. Many eyes are keeping tabs on how this management regime pans out, and the Chilean loco fishery is well known to fisheries management insiders worldwide, both for this artisanal control and its history of being overharvested.

This being outside of loco season, attention here is now on other species. Mario divides a gillnet with three others on the beach. They parcel the long net into shorter lengths, roughly 100 feet in length, to make each piece more manageable for one or two people to handle, using only human power. The gillnet mesh is larger than any I’ve seen before- probably 10 inch diagonal- and I’m told that it’s for manta ray (never has thought to eat these before myself). Also targeted here are cholga, chorita (mussels), almeja, lapa, macha (three types of clams), trimulco,, picuyo (two morphs of whelk), picoroco (a suiting name for barnacles), luga (kelp), bacalao (cod), pejigallo (elephantfish), jaiva (Dungy crab), merluza (hake), and corvin (undetermined finfish). This guys, like many fishermen who have their vocation entwined with their passion, basically will fish for whatever is abundant and of market value.

The fishing fleet here consists of a dozen or so 25-foot boat powered by 40-horsepower outboards. The skiffs are all fiberglass- certainly an anomaly on Isla Chiloe- and are probably a testament to the rough seas on this side of the island and to the financial success of the fishermen. Four men routinely go out in each skiff. Profits are split six ways- two shares go to the boat, and one share each to the fishermen. I suppose this equates to a crewshare of 17%. I’m not sure why I was made privy to these particular details. I’m now passing them on because I think that it shows how democratic and up-front the decision making seems to be in this local fishery. Disagreements are hashed out face-to-face in the cabin in the evenings. Too often in bigger fisheries accounting and payments are conducted with hazy and/or creative arithmetic.

In the cabin, we enjoy tea, mate, and a delicious salty crumble of fishy that once, I think, resembled a smelt. We eat boiled dungy crab by bashing the shells between two rocks. I’d guess I ate about a few heaping teaspoons of sand mixed in with the delicious crab, didn’t mind a bit. Ten of us are packed in to the one-room cabin, and ages ranged from 15 to 50, sitting on crates, stumps, and partially repaired chairs. This crew is sharp and tuned in not only to local marine affairs, but foreign affairs as well. Both affect them directly. I was informed that George Bush had recently had a pair of shoes thrown at him during a press conference (news to me), and we all had a good laugh over this. [Bush is uniformly disliked down here, although Chileans seem to have amazing patience with Americans, seeming to understand and forgive our national decision to give him a second term as president, although his stint seems to have had negative impacts on Chile.]

A poster of cetaceans on the wall kicked off another lively subject. Many species of whales are frequent visitors to the productive waters just off Chiloe’s west coast. These fishermen had all had very close encounters with various whales, and Eduardo, the oldest man in the room by a decade, retold with animated detail of the time that a sperm whale came up from below and grazed his boat. He told us that it knew exactly where the boat was, and only wanted to scratch it’s back- no harm intended. I told Eduardo a few sperm whales in Alaska and British Colombia had learned to pick fish off the longline as gear was being hauled, and that this sometimes infuriates fishermen, for stealing their fish. His response surprised me, as had the collective perspective of this group of fishermen since I first walked up to them on the beach. “Tienen hambre, exacto como nosotros,” he said with a shrug and a smile. They are hungry, just like us (humans).

I head out to take a walk on the beach in the dark, and bump into an ancient man, taller and skinnier than the rest of the group, with a long beard seeming to drip off his chin. His son, no spring chicken himself, appears behind him, and introduces his dad as “Rusputan”. Rasputan has a cracked but functional headlight on his forehead. I ask where they are going, and am told that they’re going out for loco…and a few confusing sentences which I interpret as, “the holidays are coming and we want a little extra money to have a real feast.” They say this with grins, I smile and laugh, taking this as a joke, as I’ve just been impressed for the full day with the structured internal management and embedded social welfare of this tight-knit group of fishermen, who seem to protect and share their collective resource so well. The two laugh as well, and were probably just pulling this gringo's leg. Probably.

Quellon, a serious fishing port

2008-12-18T10:56:00.005-09:00

The chaotic fish dock in Quellon immediately brought to mind Melville’s description of the Nantucket waterfront in Moby Dick. Although currently a vague and distant image for me, I remember the author’s description of the place as being simultaneously chaotic, exciting, and intimidating. Quellon is certainly this. Several men wandering around who would fit the casting role for Queequeg. An Alaskan parallel, somewhat stretched, would pair Dalcahue with Homer and Quellon with Kodiak- slightly less hospitable, a touch more fish-crazed. Longer hair, more tattoos, a bit more trash on the sides of the streets. Piercing stares or no acknowledgement at all. Very few things are more intimidating in life than a commercial fisherman’s stare, even for those accustomed to the trade. I think the Quellon dock is fantastic.

Lots of fish come into Quellon. It is a major port for many of the boats which fish to the south, stretching towards Patagonia. Almeja (clam), merluza (hake), congrio (kingklip, the eel/cusk-like fish highly prized in Chile), dorado (a congrio-like fish, not the speedy and iridescent dorado, aka dolphin, often caught in the tropics), caracol, corvina, and peliyo are all commonly fished here. Luga (red algae) is harvested by divers, transported in larger vessels (tenders) back to the dock, and here in town there are two plants which dry the algae and ship to Santiago, where it is where it is used as a thickener in many products, including shampoo and ice cream.

Almeja are harvested by divers, using dive boats similar to those from Dalcahue. Today the dock is piled with clams, in places 3 feet high. Wild-eyed men shovel the clams into 40 kilogram bags. On average, I’m told boats will bring in between six and nine bags’ worth of almeja per day. This is the result of a long day’s work for five fishermen, three buseos (divers) and two marinos (men working the deck). Here and now, almeja are worth 170 pesos per kilogram. This works out to around $15 per fisherman the day.

I’m told that commercial divers for luga spend most of their days in 40-50 meters of water, but I’ve also seen divers in the intertidal harvesting what appears to the same leafy, inedible algae. Like those used to harvest almeja and navijela, most boats are between seven and eight meters in length. Boats are paid 200 pesos per kilogram for the crop. Like most of fishing, the pennies (or pesos) add up, bit by bit. These fishermen all take great pride in their boats, and most show every sign of really enjoying their chosen livelihood.

Pressure on divers’ ears when 50 meters below must be intense. I’m told that the acclimation is brief. I think tolerance for pain is pretty damn high in these parts.

Larger longliners are moored just off the dock. Pablo, a young deckhand on an 18-meter longliner, lets me in on a few details of his fishery. Pablo and the seven others aboard the Mar Bravo use fixed hook and line gear, very similar to that used in Alaska. Only the mantles of squid are used for bait, and they mainly fish for the congrio and dorado, both well-endowed with fins and valued for their firm white meat. Cod, one of the most evolutionary successful finfish in the world, are caught here too. The boat heads out to fishing grounds for 15 day stints, then returns to it’s native harbor for a week or so to rest it’s engine, it’s crew, and to restock. For many of the days on the water, when not in transit, the crew gets very little sleep. Fishing continues around the clock, and the larger crew allows for them to cycle through three-hour naps. Hooks always need rebaiting, fish need to be gutted and iced in the fish hold, gear has to be set out and hauled back. This is remarkably similar to much of the halibut longlining in Alaska, and Pablo and I, separated by language, culture, and around 10,000 miles of Pacific Ocean laughed at our parallel paths in life, despite the small differences. We headed into town for a celebratory beer.

Isamar II and the Dalcahue dive fleet

2008-12-15T10:41:00.001-09:00

Esteban, a Dalahue native in his late 30’s, does not have the imposing attitude or build of the stereotypical Gloucester or Kodiak fisherman. Clean-cut and hair combed, he rows his tiny yellow dory out to his boat wearing clothes that seemed more suited for church than for fishing. Yet aboard his pride, the Isamar II, it is immediately clear that he knows exactly what he’s doing. An attitude or broad shoulders, while sometimes the accompaniment of a salty fisherman, can just as often be misleading. Esteban, without need for ceremony or costume, is plenty salty.

The Isamar II is one of around 100 dive boats which fish around Dalcahue. Amazingly enough, I hadn’t even recognized this fleet of boats, which are all colorful, low-profile crafts around seven meters in length, as a distinct fishery until this morning. My eyes had been quick to identify the modes of fishing I was familiar with- longlining, gillnetting, pot-fishing for crabs- and had somehow overlooked or misinterpreted the function of a bulk of the Dalcahue boats. Trickery of the eyes!

To give my embarrassed senses a bit of credit, dive boats, when at rest, have very little gear on deck which might give away their line of work. This is exactly what makes this type of fishery so popular with small-scale independent fishermen- small capital costs for gear and a relatively small boat. This is what distinguishes the artisanal fleet from the industrial fishing vessels, which usually use larger boats, expensive gear, require bigger crews, and are often owned by a corporation or a fish processing plant.

Aboard the Isamar II, the day’s first task was to briskly offload the catch from the day before. This time of year, navijuelas, razor clams, are the targeted species. From the outside this shellfish seems to be more closely related to a cigar than the classic bivalve, although when cooked there is no mistaking the clamminess. About 300 kilograms (700 pounds) of live clams, in mesh bags of around 30 kilograms (70 pounds) each, were brought out of the boat’s hold and passed onto the dock, where they were weighed and then carefully piled in the back of a small pickup. Esteban settled up with the buyer, and we cut our lines from the dock and were off.

The crew aboard consists of Esteban, Cesar, and Jose. (Cesar is the exact likeness of George Clooney, and middle-aged woman in America would doubtless swoon over him. Luckily this hadn’t gotten to Cesar’s head, if he was aware of it at all.) I had offered to help with any work, but my primary goal was to not get in the way. These three were old hands at their work. The Isamar II has two sister ships, Yely and the Don Jose, and the three boats travel together to fishing grounds and share information freely. This time of year, the trio of boats were concentrating on an area only an hour or so from town.

South Americans have a traditional drink, yerba mate which is native the nexus of Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, but has crossed many other borders and is quite popular in Chile as well. Loose, shredded mate is placed in a small cup or gourd, boiling water is added, and the scalding hot drink is enjoyed fairly quickly through a filtered metal straw, a bombilla, before being passed to the next person in the room. There is a special ceremony surrounding the communal drinking of mate, perhaps somewhat like passing around a peace pipe. Mate drinkers the world over are cringing at my sacreligious description, and I can only apologize. Perhaps, after learning more about the importance of the drink, I’ll remedy my description. Regardless, I’ve mentioned mate here because it plays an integral part in the fishing day aboard many of the small boats: the day begins, is split, and end ends with this custom. I can easily see how the drink can easily be a celebration for fishermen who routinely spend eight to ten consecutive hours on the ocean floor.

After the morning mate, Esteban and Cesar quickly suit up. Jose is in charge of maintaining the air supply for the divers and maneuvering the boat to keep the divers within range of the air hoses. Despite the warm air, the ocean is still cool in these parts- I would guess in the mid 50’s- and the two divers don full wetsuits, as well as masks and fins. They strap on lead weights to the back and legs to reduce buoyancy, each grab a long mesh bag and a modified pair of longnose pliers, and without fanfare, slip overboard. For Esteban, the transition church-going clothes to submersion in the water takes less than 10 minutes.

Now only Jose and I are on deck. Jose starts up a rusty five horsepower engine and eases the throttle to a slow idle. This engine serves to pump pressurized air into a holding tank, which in turn supplies the divers with air through long yellow hoses. The hoses disappear into the dark water. Bubbles give clues as to where each diver is working. Jose is kept quite busy tending to a number of tasks. These are the often overlooked parts of fishing, regardless of the quarry: he lights a fire in the galley stove, repairs a radio, prepares a hearty meat soup from scratch, rewires a speaker. All the time, he is continually lengthening or uncoiling one of the diver’s air hoses, checking the pressure of the tank, or pulling the anchor and bringing the boat closer to the divers. The three boats are sometimes within shouting distance, and a joke is occasionally passed between decks. The tiny, heavily-bearded man aboard the Yely is especially entertaining to watch listen to, and he darts around deck almost as quickly as his high-pitched exclamations jump across the water.

The boat is an exhibition of marine resourcefulness and healthy frugalty. Recycled wood utilized for non-structural parts of the galley (for those new to the boat world, galley is the marine equivalent to a kitchen/living room; the head is the marine version of a bathroom, although the Isamar II doesn’t happen to have one. A five-gallon bucket or waiting suffice.) Potable water is plumbed into the galley in an entertaining blend of garden hose, PVC, and copper piping. Twine is devined by unraveling strands of large frayed line. The diver’s belts, on which they carried heavy lead weights, have been repaired countless times.

Twelve meters down, Esteban and Cesar work the muddy sea floor, probing each dime-sized divot with their adapted pliers, carefully pinching the delicate shells of the clams, pulling straight up, and then smoothly depositing the living cigar into their mesh bag before shifting their attention to a new depression. Too much pressure from the pliers crushes a clam’s shell and makes it less valuable; too little pressure and the clam, sensing danger, flees with astounding speed for the center of the earth. The 100 centimeter mud dash of a razor clam is almost certainly a benthic mollusk world record. In speed and physique, naviquelas are the greyhounds of clams.

After filling their mesh bags, the divers rise up to the surface, pass the 30 or so kilograms of clams up to Jose, swing themselves aboard, take a leak, and quickly return to the water and disappear for the bottom. This happens every couple of hours. Why they both seemed to go through the effort of getting aboard, seemingly only to pee, is beyond me, as the wetsuits are two-piece. Perhaps this is a brief excuse to take a break from sucking compressed air through a tube. Something most of us take for granted when at work.

By noon, I estimate about 200 pounds of clams are aboard. At the Dalcahue dock, fishermen have been getting around 500 Chilean pesos per kilogram (roughly 30 cents/pound). The two divers took a short break to enjoy a bowl of Jose’s soup and pass around the steaming matte. Once again, the divers slip backwards overboard and descend, leaving only bubbles and two snaking yellow hoses as markers. The clams accumulate on deck, and Jose carefully stacks them in mesh bags and sets them out of intense stare of the sun. Constant adjustments on deck, constant searching and plying below. This is tiring, repetitive, physically demanding, honest work- these are the characteristics that define commercial fishing all around the world. By evening, I estimate 600 pounds of clams aboard- slightly less than the boat’s catch yesterday. A rough estimate of the boats total gross for the day is around $200 US dollars. After expenses, each fisherman may go home with the equivalent of $40. While not a large amount in the US, this is significantly better than minimum wage here in Chile, which converts to roughly $10 per full day of work (assuming an 8-hr shift).

Esteban and George Clooney climb aboard, looking somehow reluctant to quit. This is exactly what they’ve done for the past few weeks and is exactly what they’ll continue to do tomorrow and the next day, yet for them this is no reason to cut short today. With impressive efficiency, the two divers shed their wetsuits, wash both the suits and themselves, and are back in civilian clothes, hair combed, before the kettle water has time to boil. Pass around the mate, pull the anchor and we’re off.

According to Esteban, this is how most days go aboard his boat. They fish for five or six days a week, and most days they sleep on dry land. Sometimes they venture out for multiple days at a time. When there is a closure on razor clamming, they instead target almeja (think your “classic” clam), or they’ll dive with gaffs and hook the bottom-loving congrio (an eel-like, cusk-like fish) in the gills and stuff it into a bag. I would love to witness this spectacle, as I imagine the congrio are anything but willing partners in the activity.

With the colorful 24-foot Isamar II, some very basic equipment, and lots of perseverance, Esteban, Cesar, and Jose each support a family. Their shellfish and fish are either sold fresh in one of the Dalcahue markets or are processed in the fish plant, which is located no more than 100 yards from the top of the dock. The route that the harvested fish take once caught is as simple and straightforward as the methods used to catch them. This very simplicity may just be one of the keys to a sustainable fishery.

One busy little port

2008-12-15T06:54:00.003-09:00

A proper fishing tale is on its way. Here's a more general perspective of Dalcahue...

DALCAHUE, CHILE
Targeted fish: merluza (hake), congrio (kingklip, an eel-like fish), manta raya, pejegallo (elephantfish), almeja, navijuela, otras (clams of several varieties), jaiva (dungeoness crab), sentoya (king crab), choritos (mussels, mostly cultivated), ostras (oysters), occasionally pulpo (octopus) and bacalao (cod)
Methods of fishing: gillnet, longline, dive, mariculture, crab pots
Footwear: black rubber boots or snorkeling fins
Favorite local sayings: Si, po. Any short sentence ending in “po”. (This is the local equivalent to New Englander’s “Yessah”, or Newfoundlander’s “Yis, bye.”) Pesca gordo (the big fish)- the boss
Local food: curranto (mix of shellfish, meat and potatoes, cooked in an earthen pit), pinchanga (mix of meats, cheese, picked vegetables, egg, french fries), completos (basically a hot dog with extra fixings)
Drink of choice: Cristal beer, Fanschop (beer with Fanta added), pisco sour, Nescafe (cafecito)
Local entertainment: weekly craft fair, food and traditional dance festivals at the fairgrounds, handline fishing from the ramp, eating lots of ice cream
Local music: long drawn-out love songs, especially by Luis Fonsi; reggaeton
Select Local Fishing Boats: Tiburon V, Tamara, He-Man, Rosario, El Guerrero Arco-Iris, Lidia, Pamela III, Elisset, Taimar, Cachalote, Yely, Isamar II, Don Jose, Karina

Merry Mariculture

2008-12-12T06:18:00.000-09:00

I would be misrepresenting the marine fisheries of Chile if I didn’t at least mention the extensive aquaculture. Although my perspective may be biased towards the (more) wild and (more) natural fisheries, aquaculture may well be viable and sustainable for some species, despite the scowls it often receives in Alaska. The difference between aquaculture and wild fish, when examined closely, is somewhat hazy, and in this blurry gray lies hatchery-raised fish. “Pure” wild fish are more rare than many people realize.

Along the coast of Chile, few areas with decent protection from wind and swells are without the telltale buoys of aquaculture. By area, the aquaculture seems to be mainly devoted to salmon (I believe mostly Atlantic, but some coho), but by volume I suspect shellfish may account for the bulk of cultivated fish. Aquaculture specific to shellfish is known as mariculture, and around Chiloé mariculture abounds. From hilly vistas in most any coastal town, literally thousands of neatly aligned buoys can be seen, marking strings of growing shellfish.

In Dalcahue, I passed a few hours with yet another exceedingly patient Chilean by the name of Mario. Mario is a worker in one of the cultivo marinos located roughly a kilometer from the Dalcahue docks. He has nice wrinkles from smiling and sports a black gorro (hat) that has seen better times. While his days may not have the excitement of the unknown that characterizes the chase for wild fish, Mario spends his share of time in and on the water, and shows the roaming gaze into the distance common among mariners in any country.

Mario cultivates choritos (mussels) for a small mariculture business, one of roughly 1,000 such ventures in the Gulfo de Ancud, he estimates. A main line is stretched between two buoys 100 meters apart, each buoy anchored to the bottom. Between 30 and 80 lines drape down to a depth of eight meters below the surface off this main line, and farms are usually established in 15 or more meters of water. On these secondary lines which hang vertical, chorito hop on and grow in the sunny upper water column. No rocks needed. Mario’s company buys tiny seed mussels collected from the wild, and then carefully creates this webbed home in a food-rich zone for these shellfish to fatten. After a year of growth, the bivalves are ready for the market (although if you gave the choritos the choice, they’d probably politely decline, preferring to keep swinging on their artificial vines).

Mario tells me that cultivated choritos are superior to those harvested in the wild, but that on the market choritos are valued equally, regardless of origin. He works six days a week, eight hours a day, with duties ranging from setting up the buoy-line infrastructure, to planting the seeds, to harvesting. For this he brings home 160,000 pesos per month, Chilean minimum wage, roughly $260 US (or $11 per working day). His work as international mariculture spokesman was unpaid but highly appreciated, and hungry mouths around the world reap the benefit of his sweat. Mario smiled slowly when I told him this (what odd things gringos say!), and then ambled up the dusty street with his son for a late dinner. A farmer-fisherman swapping muscles for money, mussels for bread.

Latino love songs and a man in drag

2008-12-12T05:45:00.003-09:00

Isla Chiloe has preserved it's traditional customs more than other parts of Chile, which have embraced commercialism and consumerism much like Americans. Still, the tunes coming out of most homes, cars, and stores, even in the small fishing towns, has been fairly mainstream latino music. Luis Fonsi, a Puerto Rican native, is a phenomenal hit right now. I'd be willing to bet I've heard this song (No Me Doy Por Venecito) at least a dozen times per day...In the hip talk-show scene of Chile, one odd character, Rupertina, is quite famous. She is a man in bad drag, and although I can't fully understand her sense of humor, she's a household name. Check her out if you like: In addition to slow love songs, young Chileans also love Reggaeton. It's pretty hard not to like the beat. Here's a very popular artist down here, and a song that's an sign of the global influence of the internet and virtual friend network. As best as I can interpret, the singer is singing about a virtual girl who doesn't actually exist... Other popular artists here in Chile, if you are now converted, include "Camila", "Alexis and Fido", and "La Oreja De Van Gogh". This is contemporary Chile, and it's broadcasting even into the small coastal towns.

Dalcahue dock life

2008-12-09T17:43:00.003-09:00

I’ve been posting myself on the Dalcahue dock, speaking with every boat that ties up. So far, I´ve had lots of friendly encounters, have made a couple friends, and have only one enemy- the sun- which is determined to turn me into a sentolla (king crab). Dalcahue is located on the eastern shore of Isla Chiloe, looking out towards the Golfo de Ancud, which is thick with islands big and small. Most of the boats are moored in the protected channel between town and the nearest satelite island (Isla Quinchao), but they tie up to the dock to take on supplies or to offload.

There are boats here ranging from 20 to 60 feet, painted every imaginable color, and every craft is wooden. Most are set up with living quarters in the forepeak, a fish hold midship, an aft cabin, and small covered deck in the stern. From what I’ve gathered, all of these boats fish within the gulf (of Ancud), and they take trips ranking from five to 15 days in order to fill their holds while still being able to keep ice and thus preserve their catch. Boats are rigged as longliners, gillnetters, and boats loaded with small pyramid-shaped crab pots. Other are tenders set to transport fish, or boats which service the mariculture farms all around. As a great alternative to buoys, here they use big chunks of white styrofoam. I’ve seen Argentine hake ande eel offloaded, and this morning a boat delivered around seven tons of haiva (dungeness crab). I’ve seen a few incidental king crab and manta ray, which are also directly targeted here at times. Sea lions (here called lobo del mar, sea wolf) and dolphins pass by from time to time.

More than any other offload, the smaller boats have been delivering the strangest fish I’ve ever seen. It has large pectoral fins, a tail similar to a thresher shark, an iridescent body, and a probiscus scout that might be best described as a trumpet! A wild-looking fish, known here as pejegallo. As best I can tell, it´s known in the english-speaking world as elephantfish, is apparently exported to Japan, and looks like something that would live only in deep ocean trenches.

All of the fishermen I’ve spoken with have been very patient with this gringo. I’m sure it´s hard enough for one of these guys to understand a foreign accent and limited vocabulary. Add to that a guy who speaks especially slow and with halted speech in his native tongue, and now you’ve got a real challenge! After hearing me out, most of the fishermen have either told me that they’re just getting in from a trip and are about to rest for a few days, or that they simply don’t have any extra sleeping space whatsoever. This is undoubtedly true.

I did have one offer to go gillnetting for the eerie elephantfish, and I was told to meet at the dock at midnight for a five day trip. Unfortunately, midnight came and went and the boat never showed- perhaps they hended to leave early. There I was, walking the dock at one in the morning, no plans for where to spend the night (not uncommon for the evening, but uncommon for this late). Luckily I’d made good friends with Alexandro, the harbor securty guard, and he kindly offered to let me sleep on his floor when his shift finished. The offer was especially generous for a man who was about to finish up an eight-hour shift which earned him a meager $10- about enough for two decent meals here- and I gratefully accepted. We continued with our two-way language lessons as we walked towards his house.

Describing a place as being at a cultural crossroads must be a journalistic cliche, but since I’m no journalist I think I can get away with it. Here you see fishermen rowing ancient dories out to their moorings, but I’ve been questioned continuously about La Pesca Mortal (The Deadliest Catch). The town was without power yesterday for “system improvements”, but cell phones are everywhere. This is just life here, I think. I’ll keep watching, and hopefully soon I’ll jump aboard for a fishing trip.

Saludos del Sur

2008-12-06T17:31:00.001-09:00

Warm greetings from Delcahue, Isla Chiloe, Chile. I decided to venture down to Chile, because this country has an immense coastline, because fishing is very important to its economy, and because I’d never been south of the equator. I’m now sitting at 45 degrees south. It really is summer down here when it´s winter “up there”.

I didn’t many any binding plans as to where I’d go once I arrived in Chile. The basic plan was to ask as many people as posible as to which region of the country had significant comercial fishing this time of year. Once I’d gotten enough responses, I made a decision, moved to the area recommended and repeated the process. In this manner I’ve continued heading south to a small town of Dalcahue, by way of the town of Castro, Isla Chiloe, the small city of Puerto Montt, and the capital of Santiago.

For those interested I’ll include a brief mention of observations I´ve made as I passed through these various towns. The hot item in Santiago this Christmas, it seems, are dancing plastic ponies and robotic, cartwheeling stuffed-animal dogs. Puerto Montt is rich with hand-knit shawls, sweater, and socks. Isla Chiloe is full of amazing little hawks, which also somehow also resemble pigeons, almost too common but endowed with the ability to move in ways which never get dull to obseve. I’m temporarily calling these pigeonhawks unitl I learn their true name. Castro, amazingly enough, has buildings bragging more of a color spectrum than Newfoundland. Delcahue has shellfish everywhere you turn- in its art, crushed shells lining its streets, on restaurant plates. Clams, mussels and oysters are being cultivated just offshore, markets offer lukewarm shellfish to anyone brave enough to dare. And all parts of Chile are well endowed with breasts. I don´t intend for this to be inappropriate or sexual or funny, and no I haven´t been looking any more than at the shells or pigeonhawks. I believe it´s just a fact here in Chile- an honest observation- not to be taken any farther than that. Delcahue also has lots of small fishing boats, so I'm excited to see what's going on on the water in these parts.

Rusty scallop boats and shiny lobster trucks

2008-12-01T17:24:00.004-09:00

DIGBY, NOVA SCOTIA
Targeted fish: scallop, lobster, herring, dogfish
Methods of fishing: side dragger (trawl), onshore and offshore traps
Footwear: Dunlop, Viking, and Baffin rubber boots
Favorite local saying: “They’re all a-gone uphill.” (fishing north in the Bay of Fundy); “So you ain’t a Bluenoser?”
Local food: fried scallops
Drink of choice: Alexander Keith’s IPA or red
Local entertainment: Hard telling. Judging by stickers on fishermens’ trucks, watching NASCAR racing.
Select Local Fishing Boats: Chief Charles Paul, Marianne Louise II, Greyhound, Maybe 99, Royal Fundy, Secret Sea, Artemis, Thundercat, Surchin IV, Elva G, Undaunted, Chief William Saulis, Fundy Retreiver

While waiting for a Brazilian visa application to bump its way through the Brazilian-American beaureacratic pinball machine, and since the constant wind hitting the southern Newfoundland continued to keep the boats at bay, I decided to spend a few days exploring the fishing scene in Nova Scota. The province has an interesting way of controlling fishng effort for lobster, while still keeping fresh “bugs” heading to market. A rotating schedule ensures that some part of the province is open at any particular date. After glancing at the chart of openings, I pointed my sails towards Digby, which lies on Nova Scotia´s west coast.

Digby, it turns out, is a beautiful town founded (in the conceited Anglo-American sense) by Loyalists who were booted from New England around the time of Paul Revere. If a person was ever inclined to buy a authentic five-bedroom Victorian-style house with an expansive yard and ocean view to match, this may be the only place to get the wntire package for less than Sarah Palin’s October wardrobe.

More than its lobster, Digby’s true claim to fame is its scallop fleet, which was once the largest of its kind in the world. A glance at the town’s boardwalk shows that tourism now plays a big role in the local economy, but just behind the flashy signs lies a struggling region. Somehow, though, Digby seems to be struggling in an amazingly elegant way.

The scallop fleet is comprised of side draggers, meaning that they drag their trawl off one side of the boat (usually the starboard it seems) rather than astern. To me, side dragging isn’t an intuitive thing for a boat to do. It seems to be asking for trouble. In my perspective, it also ensures an awkward-looking, asymmetrical boat. This is of course all irrelevant when the scallops are plentiful and the price is high.

These days, the scallop population is in a rut (fishermen maintain that scallops have always had huge natural oscillations in regional populations), and the state of the fishery is evidenced by the impressive amount of rust visible on the draggers. Shortly after inquiring, I was offered the chance to take a fill in job on one of the draggers. A great chance to really see the fishery. If I wanted to go, the boat was leaving at two in the morning (that night), and coming back after a week or so.

A blend of tides, temperment, and testosterone make late night departures common in the fisheries. This didn´t worry me a bit. The volume of rust covering the deck of the boat did. I decided to pass up the opportunity.

In my pass through Digby, I witnessed two other fisheries- targeting lobster and dogfish- and these may well exhibit the range of profitability in the world of fisheries. Roughly a dozen lobster boats steamed to and from the Digby docks. The boats were incredible hulks of modern design, half as wide abeam as they were long. Sternless 50 foot boats that stretch 25 foot abeam seemed like their decks were made for pickup basketball, not marine travel. I’m more accustomed to the smaller and much more sleek and unassuming Maine lobster boats. A small efficient boat like those built for Maine’s craggy coast just wouldn’t cut it in a fishery which offers huge rewards for being able to set 400 traps in one trip. There certainly were lots of big, new trucks near where these lobster boats tie up.

A few miles out of town, half-way down a long, thin peninsula known as Digby Neck, I ran into an 50 year old deckhand stripping rusty hooks from old groundline, spilling out of a cracked plastic bucket. He explained to me that he longlined for dogfish in the Bay of Fundy. Sometimes the sharks were “uphill” (up the bay), sometimes the were “downhill”, but the price was always the same- 11 cents per pound. Not really enough to pay for gas and lunch. Pick one or the other. Once in a while you lucked out and caught a halibut for dinner, he said. I immediately felt spoiled, but perhaps I shouldn´t have. Digby is yet another place where people fish for more than just a way to pay the bills. What else would you do, and where else could be better?

Three parts to the puzzle

2008-11-30T10:53:00.001-09:00

In trying to piece together the internal tickings of at least one fishery here in Newfoundland, it seems like three factors come into play, and have a huge influence on all island fishermen and a noticeable effect on entire rural communities. Although unrelated, I throw all three together here. Keep in mind that I’m attempting to showcase the perspective of island fishermen I’ve spoken with and so in turn my information may be biased, slightly incorrect, and is certainly under-researched. It is, however, the reality for the fishermen I’ve met.

The Moratorium
In 1992, after conceding that the Grand Banks groundfish stock was showing unmistakable signs of a complete collapse, the Canadian government (FAO) closed Newfoundland waters to all fishing which targeted groundfish. Foreign vessels still fished waters, while even subsistence fishing was prohibited. Communities which had been created around cod fishing were abruptly altered. Unemployment and alcoholism rates rose, and people began leaving the small towns for St. John’s or headed off-island. I’m told that the moratorium effectively killed the nearshore fishing fleet. The midsized fleet quickly diversified to target other fish, and the existing non-cod fishermen (say, lobstermen) were suddenly competing against a crowd.

Today, 16 years after the moratorium, the event is still a bitter subject on the docks, causing widespread head shaking and cynicism, and many fishing grounds are still closed. Although some have pointed out that the value of upstart fisheries (mainly crab and shrimp) since the initial moratorium exceeds the highest value ever attained in the peak of the Grand Bank cod fishery, fishermen are quick to point towards a common sight in many of the outport towns- the rotting skeletons of small fishing boats. Clearly, the internal structuring of the island’s fisheries was significantly altered, and fewer nearshore boats survived.

Employment Insurance
Known locally as pogey, EI is the Canadian parallel to collecting unemployment in the US. This social program, for better or worse, plays a significant role in the dynamics of Newfoundland fishing communities. The design is interesting in that a person can collect from EI only if he/she has a work history from that year, and increased wages earned while working qualify a person for higher EI benefits. This is intended to help seasonal workers, such as fishermen, make it through the offseason.

Fishermen are entitled to two claims per year, for as long as six months per claim. I’m told that some fishermen are strategic about their work: they fish for an intense period in the spring, collect EI for the summer, fish for another spell in the fall, and return to their pogey for the winter. As far as I could tell, there is no stigma attached to collecting EI. A few younger fisherman had their own nickname for the program- unenjoyment insurance- and spoke of how dull winter life was in the outports, with no work to make the time pass by. Nothing to do but spend money, drink, and get into trouble, they told me. Work was more fun than this.

Out of curiosity, I wandered into an employment assistance office one day, and began asking a friendly lady who worked there about the specifics of their EI program. She told me unabashedly, but in a quiet voice, “Everybody around here collects in the winter, and then goes and works on top of it. I mean everybody. I even used to collect and then work part-time here in the office. It’s just part of life, how we get by. But don’t tell my boss, I’m not sure if she does that.” In Newfoundland, it seems that pogey is in bed with fishing, and that seems to be fine.

Tar Sands of Alberta
Newfoundland has a population of 450,000 people or so, and is losing a trickle of people every year. In recent years, a major draw out of Newfoundland has been the lure of quick money working in the oil fields/tar sands of Alberta. Who cares, eh? Well, young males from the island outports are the main group heading out west, and this is the demographic that in years past would make up the bulk of up-and-coming fishermen.

By enticing a particular slice of rural Newfoundland off-island, petro-based work in Alberta has a indirect, but significant, effect on Newfoundland fishing communities. Young fathers are away from home for much of the year, or young families decide to emigrate west. Reliable deckhands are hard to come by, and so turnover on the boats is high, accidents are more likely, and skippers’ jobs are more stressful. In some families the fishing baton isn’t relayed to the next generation. Perhaps this in an inevitable transition, but the effect is apparent and has come up a bunch in conversations around town.

Just one perspective on three issues facing Newfoundland outports. Perhaps this spoils the simple, romantic image that some have about commercial fishing. Perhaps it should.

Fresh frozen

2008-11-26T10:46:00.001-09:00

This time of year, Americans celebrate a holiday to give thanks for food and family (no news to any readers I’m sure, but hang with me…) The way this is expressed, strangely enough, is by eating huge volumes of food. Of course the origins of an autumn feast are logical enough, but at some point the celebration of abundant local food became a holiday with standardized fare, for many families involving food shipped from distant farms and factories. Sharp minds like Michael Pollen (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) explain the range and effects of globalized food markets much better than I could here, but I find food stocks and diets in outport Newfoundland interesting and possibly indicative just how far out of hand these markets have gotten.

Newfoundlanders traditionally leaned on salt cod for export and income, but also as a staple of their diet. On any sunny summer day, split and salted cod would line the rocky coast; in later months the dried cod would be stacked like cordwood out of the weather and whittled away through the long winter. One American friend, who had visited the island decades ago, told me that I’d be impressed by the “rounders”- small codfish brined and dried whole- atop nearly every roof in the outports.

In Fortune, I haven’t seen a single rounder on the roof. I’m told that salt cod is now sold as a delicacy, and few islanders eat it much. Although Mansfield, my friend and host, is in the process of drying out some salt fish (mostly pollock and haddock, and a few very small cod which probably deserved to be rounders), his are the only fish I’ve seen drying in all of Fortune. Did the scarcity of cod in recent decades force rural Newfoundlanders to shift toward processed, imported food, or is this apparent shift away from local seafood mainly due to a preference for beef, pork, chicken, and Little Debbie snacks when given the choice?

My first walk through the meat section at Fortune’s small supermarket really surprised me. The big three- beef, pork, and chicken- commanded nearly all of the cold space on two walls. A discerning palate could choose from dozens of different cuts from each land animal. But where was the fish? I finally found the dusty nook that made up the whole of the store’s seafood menu. The choices: farmed Atlantic salmon, cod tongues, salt cod, and, advertised as a “new product: fresh-frozen cod fillets”. A product of China, read the label. Cod, probably caught in the north Atlantic (although perhaps Pacific cod caught in Alaskan waters), frozen and shipped to China, and there thawed, processed, re-frozen, packaged, and distributed around the globe (and marketed as fresh). I doubt I’m the only person who finds the extensive post-mortem travels of this cod, now resting in a town famed for its truly fresh cod, outrageous and somewhat tragic. Does this surprise anyone else?

If locals aren’t getting their fish at the store, they must be getting it themselves, direct from fishermen, or from the processing plant in town, I thought when leaving the store. But after being in town for a while, I see no easy options for getting fish. Everybody tells me that Mary Brown’s, a local fast-food chain, has the best (chicken) legs in town, but nobody can tell me where to find fresh fish. Mansfield tells me that fishing for cod or haddock in a skiff near the harbor is not worthwhile. His freezer and pantry is a nice contrast to that of the town’s store: salt cod and pollock (his own work), cloudberries, partridgeberries, bags of whole frozen brook trout (known as mud trout in these parts), frozen Dolly Varden, frozen cod fillets (a product of Newfoundland), moose, blueberries, cranberries, whole skinned rabbit, salmon, canned rabbit, canned trout, canned moose. One small and lonely box of chicken nuggets sits alone, intimidated by all the local wild food surrounding it.

Yet Mansfield tells me that his freezer and diet is the rare exception in outport Newfoundland these days, and my freezer sleuthing in other homes backs that up. Although pizza seems less common than in the US, fried chicken and red meat is the norm, seafood is rarely put on a plate, and an onlooker like myself has a tough time telling the difference between American and Newfoundland cuisine. I’m not out to paint globalized food marketing in any particular light, but I do think that mainstream diets in North America are often detached from fresh and local foods, and that there’s more to a meal than just its taste. I once saw a picture of Michael Pollan wearing a shirt once that read, “Vote with your fork.” Something to chew on.

A welcome roof

2008-11-20T10:26:00.003-09:00

Just after getting back from the Miss Maria, I was invited to live with a local couple, Mansfield and Loretta Matterface. I’ve been with them since. The timing was great, as the weather up here is getting fairly nasty for open-air camping. Loretta can spin together a mean soup and has resurrected many good stories about her working days as a line manager at the fish plant. Mansfield, who goes by “Mans”, is a lifelong fisherman- a skiff lobsterman who earned his pennies setting along the steep shores of Brunette Island, located 10 or so miles from Fortune. He also managed shorter careers as a side dragger and fish plant worker. Now retired from fishing, Mans is revered as the town’s master rabbit snarer.

Four-wheelers are very common in these parts, and seem to be the transportation of choice to get to the Post Office and anywhere beyond. Mans has the one thing that trumps a four-wheeler: an Argo. An argo is the Cadillac of off-road vehicles, and capable of amphibious travel. Having an Argo makes Mans something like royalty in the outdoorsman’s court. His prowess at trout fishing, moose hunting, terr hunting (a routine unique to Newfoundland, involving hunting the fishy-tasting common murre on the open ocean in skiffs) solidifies his status as royalty.

Lately, the wind has been keep Fortune’s boats at bay, and so I’ve been going into the woods with Mans. For an owner of an ATV deluxe, he’s surprisingly happy to go by foot. He’s taught me how to set wire rabbit snares: a loop of light-gauge wire about the size of an average man’s fist, not, “big enough to catch an elephant,” and stressing that I take my time, “no need to set in a rush, working like a cat handling a musket”. Rabbits have little runways in the moor-like country, which are visible to the keen or experienced eye. Much of interior Newfoundland is this moor-like country, something like a alpine swamp, beautiful at a distance, perfect for moose and rabbits and a damn pain for most anything else. Setting a snare along these runways, sizing it properly, and disguising it well sometimes leads to rabbit stew the next evening. Some people put rabbit near the bottom of their edibles list, but Mans feels otherwise, telling me that he finds it delicious, “a notch above squirrel”. I’d have to agree, especially with the latter. So far, Mans’ snares have outperformed mine 6-0. Until the wind settles, I’m an eager rabbit-snaring apprentice.

Rolling with the Miss Maria

2008-11-12T09:15:00.007-09:00

Just back from a cod fishing trip out to the St. Pierre Banks, aboard a 42’ fiberglass boat we’ll call the Miss Maria (name changed to protect any possible issues). Strangely enough, many people in town, baffled as to why a stranger would show up in such a small town in late fall and then proceed to ask around for fishing work, have come up with the theory that I’m an undercover cop. This is quite amusing to me, but despite my insistence that I’m no Mounty, a I think that several of the fishermen still don’t believe me. For this reason, I kept my camera and audio recorder tucked away for the whole of the trip. A shame, because my words won’t do any justice to portray the fishing scene I jumped into.

The skipper of the boat, Paul, had heard about me from the town rumor mill. He agreed to take me out for the next trip, as he was one guy short. At this point in the year, he was gillnetting for cod. The boat had remaining 17,000 pounds to catch. (Cod are managed on a quota system, with each licensed boat being granted the right to catch and sell a set number of pounds.) The marine weather had been notably foul as of late, and fishing had been at a standstill, but we’d cut loose from the docks the next decent weather window. Paul struck me instantly as a fair and kind-hearted guy, not all that much older in years than myself, but with a full family to support and a full lifetime of fishing experience.

The anticipated break in the weather came the very next night. Paul made the calls to his crew, all scattered in local outports on the southern Burin peninsula. They had an hour notice to pack and leave for a four day trip. One of the regular crew wasn’t around but his dad jumped at the chance for the fishing work. Paul had gotten good reports from relatives on the fishing grounds and was anxious to lay gear on the “numbers” (coordinates) they’d given him. Approaching the wharf in the dark, I could see a bustle around the boat. Several plant workers were manning the ice machine, loading the boat with 5 or so tons of ice shavings. The crew was rolling out of the shadows- sweatpants, and boots, cigarettes and a duffel. In no time we were off and out of the tiny harbor.

The confidence I’d gained at understanding the Newfoundland dialect quickly vanished as I tried in vain to talk with the crew. Tom, Kenny, Kenny, and John, and I made up the crew, and these boys communicated in animated growls. Their rough voices erupted from the darkness of the wheelhouse, loud but always friendly. I couldn’t make out more than an occasional word. The spirit was more of a reunion than of work, and during the 12-hour steam out to the fishing grounds, the boys proceeded to have a blast, simultaneously laughing, talking, and smoking. I only wished I could have taken more of a part in the conversation. Mostly I laughed along with them.

Once we’d arrived at Paul’s numbers, out went the gear. Bottom gillnetting is something I’d never seen before, but the process is very similar to other methods of fishing for salmon and halibut- it’s kind of a salmon (surface) driftnet/halibut longline hybrid. I should apologize in advance, as this description will bore any folks that fish and will likely still be confusingly vague for those who haven’t...

Gear is set off the stern. Out go the buoys and line. Then a rubber sack filled with rocks- an anchor substitute- go out, followed closely by the net. Each grid of the net measured six and a half inches, stretched diagonally. Fish, unable to see the thin translucent net, swim into it, and are tangled. Each net is roughly 100 yards long, and fishes the bottom 2 fathoms of the water column. Small floating corks are fixed to the top edge of the net. On average, ten nets are linked to make a fleet, although this can vary. The Miss Maria fished four fleets, and we set in around 30 fathoms of water. The other end of the fleet wraps up with another bag of stones, riser line and a buoy. Time to set the next fleet.

After making four sets, we grabbed a quick bite in the galley and proceeded to head back to the first fleet. Gear was run through a hauler mounted near the starboard rail, and was then pulled toward the stern and carefully restacked for the next set, after all fish were picked from the net. Paul ran the hauler, while two of the crew picked fish and two of the crew stacked the net. I also picked fish, but primarily stationed myself at the gutting table. All fish needed to be gutted and packed below deck in ice.

Thus began what turned out to be a 35-hour marathon of fairly continuous working of the gear. Night’s curtains had lifted about when the first gear was set, and picking and resetting saw day slide back into night, and the night ebbed back into day. Paul had put us on the fish from the first set, and up came the cod. This was very surprising to me, as over the course of my life I’ve been told countless stories about the complete collapse of the northern codfish. Here were big cod-in abundance- showing up in the net. Surprise!

Up came pulses of cod, many nearly four feet long and pushing 40 pounds. Although most of the catch was cod, a good many haddock and pollock also came aboard, along with the occasional hake, monkfish, wolfish, sculpin, whelk, and rock. The rocks were released unharmed. One wolfish, named for their large jaws and fang-like front teeth, latched on to the bottom of my rain bibs and absolutely refused to let go for several minutes. The crew found it hilarious that the strange kid from away was hopping around with a stubborn fangy fish hanging on to his leg.

The rest of the crew continued to give every appearance of having one hell of a good time. Hours wore on and it seemed like they had just two modes: work or smoke. At every moment they weren’t on deck working the gear, they were hand rolling smokes and inhaling them at impressive speed. Tom, one of the Kennys, and John would make normal chain smokers look like timid first-timers. Food and rest were luxuries better left for shore, but smokes were critical to the success of the trip.

Somewhere there in the middle, Paul explained that they usually take short breaks between hauling fleets for (silly) things like grub or a nap, the combination of good fishing and a predictions for a nasty blow made him want to try to get done and out before the weather became too lousy to fish. Daybreak of the second day saw a building sea and lots of fresh wind. “She rolls,” is what Paul had told me about the boat before we left the wharf, “but she’s never not come back.”

On came the fish, up came the weather. Radio chatter said it was blowing up to a crisp 45 knots. Even starting with a calm sea, wind like this can make a mess of things fast. Roll she did. There aren’t too many jobs where you get paid to work with a honed filet knife while riding a bucking bronco. We had our quota’s worth of cod, plus a couple thousand pounds of haddock, just about the time when Paul confessed it was getting a little to sloppy to be hauling gear. I agreed. It was hard enough to stay fixed to the deck.

There we have it. A few hours of cleanup and icing down the fish and the boys were back at their preferred mode. Smiles, laughs, and unintelligible rough exclamations all around. We’d managed to catch the quota and had avoided the bulk of a nasty blow, condensing a four day trip into two. I rolled into a bunk for a couple of hours of rest, surprised but thankful to discover that a seatbelt had been installed into the bunk. This device might seem out of place, but at this moment it was the difference between a little sleep and a one-way trip to the galley floor.

We steamed back towards Fortune- diverging at one point to trade an ailing scallop dragger a few gallons of hydraulic oil for scallops- and made it safely back to the harbor. The crew drifted away into the dark, as suddenly as they’d appeared only a couple of days before, to resume their land lives. They’d likely remain on call for other fishing work, would cut firewood for winter, and would help with their kids’ youth hockey teams. Lives on land and water were probably entirely different for these guys. I could now see why fishing, although work, was also a reunion of old friends, an extreme (and financially practical) version of a night out with the boys (this is the gender-neutral use of "boys", as a woman could also be one of the boys in this sense). Go out, roll around, catch some fish with the boys, roll on home with money to support the family. Although I’m only basing it on this one trip, I think this may speak to life in many outports of Newfoundland.

Arts and crafts, Newfoundland style

2008-11-08T17:54:00.004-09:00

Here are a few links which showcase the scenic beauty, wit, and musicianship of Newfoundland. "Great Big Sea", a band you may already know, certainly isn't the only artistic talent from the island. Especially for its small population, Newfoundland is rich with art. I'm told that St. John's boasts the highest density of artists in Canada...

A clip showcasing harbours around the island. As you can see, many outpost towns are very small.

Here's an (audio) clip of a locally famous trio of comedians: "Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers". A good taste of the accent as well, although not nearly as thick or authentic as many of the folks I've met in Fortune....

Here's a great song, by renown Newfoundland band "The Navigators", accompanied with more photos from around the island:

Fish are where you find them

2008-11-06T06:20:00.002-09:00

In the infancy of my planning this first phase of my project, I’d wanted to come to eastern maritime Canada to try to hop on with a very particular class of boats – those involved in the giant bluefin tuna hand-harpoon fishery. I’ve gone out a few times with my friend Kirk in Maine, scanning the open ocean for any sign (a V-wake, fin, or a grand ol’ baitfish frenzy) of a 500-1,000 pound fish, which must then be stalked and, with luck, hit with a hand-thrown harpoon. If you ever have the chance to take part in this fishery, beware: all other worldly excitements pale in comparison, so the rest of your days may be spend secretly wishing you were chasing a massive bluefin. It will permeate your dreams. I could pine on about tuna fishing for hours, and I’ve had only a small taste of the fishery.

With tuna fishing set as an initial goal, another major goal was to see Newfoundland, which we’ve agreed is steeped in fishing history. It seems that Newfoundland’s history was shaped by fishing as much or more than any other region of North America. Why not tackle both goals- chase giant tuna and visit Newfoundland- with one stone? Well, perhaps I should have done a little more homework…

Offshore of Newfoundland, the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream collide and create one of the largest thermogradients in the world. This steep temperature difference is ultimately what creates the highly productive Grand Banks fishing grounds. I’m getting off track, but my point is that tuna are generally warm-water fish, but will venture into northern waters to take advantage of this natural blender. Newfoundland is bathed on all sides by the cold, productive, oxygen-rich Labrador Current. The few remaining folks that chase giant bluefin (this is a dying fishery, as Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks have dwindled significantly in the past two decades) are based out of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, or Glouchester. This I discovered since arriving here.

Newfoundlanders have no difficulty in finding fish species with sufficient local abundance to target and bring to market. I feel like a fool for letting my imagination force-fit a particular fishery to a particular place. A wise skipper in Alaska once told me, “fish are where you find them”. Lesson relearned. Here and now in Fortune, Newfoundland, it looks like cod is the ticket. Cod it is.

Tough Buddy

2008-11-03T10:29:00.003-09:00

Alaskans enjoy basking in the perceived toughness bestowed upon them by folks in the Lower 48, and many Alaskans are indeed deserving of the reverence. However, after having spent a few days here in what is likely a typical small fishing town of Newfoundland, I am ready to conclude that Alaskan tough guys/gals have nothing on these hardy folks. Not that it’s a contest.

Walking out of the one and only diner in Fortune the other evening, I was hailed from the deck of one of the few bars in town. An older man, a shrimper on rare leave from his boat, and his wife insisted that I come join them for a beer. After a few failed excuses, I agreed, and was quickly welcomed as a guest of honor. This, at a bar in Newfoundland, is a bit dangerous.

After only a minute or so inside, both my hands were holding drinks, and a new fellow, now trying to also offer me a warm welcome, tried to hand-feed me a cigarette. I declined, but offered to join him on the porch for a chat. The conversation was entirely one-sided, as I couldn’t understand even a single word that came out of his mouth. Trying to reciprocate friendliness in some way, I pointed out an unfinished cigarette that lay in the grass below the deck.

Before I’d finished my one sentence, my new friend vaulted over the rail towards the nicotine, headfirst. His spirit had trumped has current hand-eye coordination. My buddy’s shoulder, elbow, and nose shared the impact of the crash, and as he staggered to his feet with the cigarette, his flattened nose gushed blood. This phased him little, and the change of viewpoints made him aware of my foreign rubber boots. He quickly grabbed my right calf, peeled the top of my boot down a bit, and thrust his face towards it. A sentence came towards me, somewhere in the middle of which I thought I heard “insl’t’n”. I judged he was checking out the warmth of my boots. Blood now streamed down my boots, inside and out. I backed off and got my buddy a few napkins. He opted for a large paper tablecloth and proceeded to drink and smoke freely. I’m fairly sure he was about filled to the brim with both drink and smoke, but he didn’t seem concerned, and was still hard at it when I left.

Early the next morning, on my way down to the harbor, I saw “Buddy” once again, walking his kid to the bus stop. He gave me a quick nod. I’m not sure if it was a nod of recognition or one to acknowledge a stranger. Up here they greet a newcomer as warmly as a drinking buddy. Up here, there are some tough buddies.

Qualitative Stats

2008-11-02T08:51:00.005-09:00

One way of comparing maritime regions and regional fishing culture, past, present, and upcoming. I’ll update and improve this, hopefully with sound clips, but I wanted to post a start. I think that boat names can be especially revealing, showing sentiments and attitudes of a region and the local fishermen. I’d love to expand this list, so please chime in with news from your favorite wharf...

HOMER, ALASKA

Targeted fish: salmon (mainly pink, sockeye, and coho), halibut, crab, Pacific cod, herring
Methods of fishing: purse seine, drift gillnet, setnet, longline, pots
Footwear: Xtra tuffs (ubiquitous brand of rubber boots)
Favorite local saying: "I can see Russia from my house!" (still working on this one)
Local food: Finn’s pizza, fresh Anchor River king salmon
Drink of choice: Homer Stout
Local entertainment: The Mule (3-Legged Mule, local band), Salty Dawg Bar, Downeaster Bar, Hobo Jim, razor clamming, sea kayaking
Select Local Boats: Galway Girl, Renaissance, Neptune, Boulder Bay, Nuka Point, Dark Star, Thalassa, Hanta Yo, Time Bandit, Centurion, Vind Saga, Malamute Kid, Heritage, Provider, Foreigner

FORTUNE, NEWFOUNDLAND

Targeted fish: cod, snow crab, lobster, whelk, capelin, squid, haddock, scallop
Methods of fishing: bottom gillnet, pot, jig, longline, trawl
Footwear: rubber boots (Dunlop, Baffin and other makes)
Favorite local saying: any sentence, ending with, “Ol’ buddy!”; “He’s a charmer, that ‘un”; “Eye til you, b’y!”
Local food: traditionally, fish and brews (salt cod and hard bread, soaked to desalinate and then boiled to soften); cod tongues, pea pudding; more currently fried chicken, chicken balls (battered fried chicken), wedgies (similar to homefries)
Drink of choice: Screech, Black Horse beer
Local entertainment: Going out on the machine (4 wheeling), Chrissy’s Bar, moose hunting, rabbit snaring, bingo
Local music: unique derivative of Irish music, for example "Shanneyganook" and "Buddy Whasisname and the Other Fellers"
Select Local Boats: Sarah Marie, Golden Girl, Partners III, No Name I, Lloyd’s Pride, Skeena Irene, Bradley Venture, Newfoundland Voyager, Courtney and Austin, Cape Bonavista, Moreton’s Harbour Mist, Maggie Chantal, Link Brothers, Miranda and Marshall, Silver Seas, Caitlin and Boys

To the outports, in search of fish!

2008-10-29T08:36:00.001-08:00

Fortune, Newfoundland. After exploring the capital for a few days, and after gathering up as much of the current fishing news as possible, I’ve now made my way to the southern coast. I’m looking to check out the fisheries in the town of Fortune, population roughly 2,000, located just south of the town of Grand Bank and on the tip of the Burin Peninsula. A beautiful little town here. Local fisheries are well developed for cod, snow crab, lobster, capelin, whelk, and squid. Other fish, including haddock and pollock are frequently delivered as bycatch. Boats in the harbor range form 16 to 70 feet, although it seems that most of the boats around at this time of year are between 34 and 45 feet.

In a town this size a newcomer can’t simply slip in unnoticed. Small town affairs avoid the eyes of few. The first couple of nights I’ve slept under the stars, definitely pushing the limits of my sleeping bag’s thermal capabilities. This, due to stubborn and foolish tendencies, is nothing new for me. Weather around these parts is variable this time of year, but wind is frequent, and sub-freezing temps are not uncommon. Luckily, no rain so far, and days have been packed with checking out boats and “fish talk”, which to my delight, every resident seems as keen to do. Lots of valuable insight offered up for those who want to listen, filter, and salt. And everybody I speak with seems to know where I’ve slept the past few nights, and any other information I’ve passed up to others in town. I’d better keep my stories consistent…

Some of the boats have wrapped fishing up for the season, but the boats remaining are primarily rigged to fish cod with bottom gillnets. This is a method I’ve never seen before, and I’ll describe in more detail later. It seems that many of the boats fish any and all palatable weather and shift through a variety of fisheries: snow crab with pots in April, lobstering with traps in June or so, whelk fishing with pots all summer, then fishing cod with longline or gillnet gear in the fall. This is different in some ways from Maine and Alaskan fisheries, which seem to be outfitted and dedicated for one or a couple of fisheries, but seldom four.

The Newfoundland accent, especially once out of St. John’s, is truly noteworthy. I was born and raised in a state known for it’s distinctive, thick coastal accent, but this is an entirely new ballgame. When talking with folks, there are often entire sentences where I can’t make out a word. Hard to believe that we’re speaking a common language, with the exception of a few catch phrases I’ve picked up on. This is mainly that almost every sentence ends with a mutation of the words “boy” or “buddy”…although it’s more like “yis b’y” and “g’d bidy” to my ears. The accent is great, but I’m having a heck of a time not nodding in affirmation to a completely unknown question. Who knows what I’m committing to…

Greetings from Newfoundland!

2008-10-20T08:25:00.003-08:00

A hearty hello from St. John’s, Newfoundland. The rugged island of Newfoundland rises proudly out into the stormy north Atlantic and has a legendary fishing history, tracing back to John Cabot in the late1400’s, and likely before. Newfoundland is certainly one of the most historic commercial fishing areas in North America. Bountiful cod attracted early visitors to “cling to the rock”, as the locals say, and it still plays an important role, immediately apparent to any newcomer. Up here, the role of fisheries minister is a very high-level and controversial political position, and is taken very seriously- probably equally as that of minister of the economy- and it seems every Newfoundlander is versed in current fisheries issues, and happy to yarn on about them.

I first arrived in the capital of St. John’s, a city which is home to roughly half of Newfoundland’s half million residents. The rest of the population is scattered in the “outports” (everywhere else on island). Similarities with both Maine and Alaska abound, but the terrain surrounding St. John’s is uniquely rugged, and the downtown feels much older, and rightly so. The harbo(u)r is a thing of awe- one of the best imaginable deep water natural harbor. Beyond the mouth of the harbor 20 footers were rolling in with force, sending spray a thousand yards inland from the high tide mark.

Fishing directly out of St. John’s this time of year is slow. Perhaps these days it often is, as it seems that while St. John’s relies on the urban portfolio to keep it afloat, the heat and soul of provincial fisheries lie in the scattered outports. This is why I’m keen to get out of the city and into one of these fishing-dependent communities. I’ve arrived past the peak, and well past the season for predictable fair weather for the north coast and east coasts of the island. A walk through the boats showed little activity, with the exception of a swordfish boat (I believe the sister ship to the Andrea Gail of Perfect Storm fame) taking on bait and food for a long trip in the Grand Banks. From talk it seems that the shrimp industry is now perhaps the preeminent fishery on the island as of late, at least on the north shore.

A few things have become quickly apparent. The legendary hospitality of Newfoundlanders is in no way exaggerated. It’s fairly uncanny just how happy the average islander is to chat it up or to offer a hand. In just a day or two upon arriving, I’ve been offered rides, drinks, and tours aplenty. One kindly gent offered up, “everything but the kitchen sink, and that if you really needs it.” Uncanny generosity. I’ve learned that when pronouncing Newfoundland, the accent is on the LAND- it rhymes with understand. Saying it any other way is a sure way to raise a few eyebrows. Using the abbreviation “Newfie” isn’t advised either- some take strong offense to it, although Newfoundlanders have a keen sense of humor and are especially willing to poke fun at themselves.

Fisheries Foreign

2008-09-29T22:49:00.002-08:00

I've often thought it would be great to fish around the world- actively working in various fisheries, exotic and exciting to this previously insular American, exploring similarities in fishing practices and cultures across the globe, and forging friendships in the process. The perspective gained from working on the decks of boats in regions across the globe would be invaluable.

Most any boat could use an extra hand, right? This often isn't the case, and in some ways the captain can look at an extra hand as one more liability. My recent foray in the skipper's slippers might have shown me just how valuable experienced crew is. A foreigner who doesn't speak the language, is green to the specific fishery, has never before been on the boat- how valuable is he? Good for a laugh, perhaps, but little else at first. But eventually, after a day or two, if he knows a few knots, knows how to stay out of the bight, and can learn a thing or two on deck, he may be of some meager value to the boat. This is the little niche I'd like to fill. If only plane tickets weren't also a factor.....

Thanks to an especially generous benefactor and a open-minded fellowship committee willing to take a chance on a fool like me, I'll be spended the eight months or more exploring fisheries outside of the US. I'll use the fellowship support to cover airfare, and hopefully I'll be able to swing room and board (perhaps even a beer) in exchange for fishing work. The fellowship transformed an idle dream of mine into reality, overnight.

My idea is fairly straightforward and decidedly non-academic (I'm still amazed that it garnered any support): show up in a fishing-dependent region of a particular nation at roughly the peak fishing season, and then find work on one of the active fishing boats in the area. Meet people. Work with local fishermen. Green cards be damned. After roughly a month of work, more to a different region of the world. Repeat.

For the scholars in the house: nothing particular or specific will be studied. For the others: everything will be studied, although I'm certainly no expert. I'll try to take in all my surroundings, and will no doubt make comparisions and observe trends. I'll likely report some of these on this blog, and I also plan to tinker with creating some on-air radio pieces as well (stay tuned). It'd be unjust for me not to share what I see with others back at home.

Where to go? This question has burned up considerable lamp oil. My goal isn't to see the biggest fisheries of the world, or to visit the nations which dominate world fisheries harvests. Small-scale commercial fisheries, for whatever reason, are my cup of tea. Small fisheries, it seems are abundant the world over. Here's the current list, subject and likely destined to see more revisions:

Canada (Newfoundland)
Chile (far south)
Brazil (Amazon)
Portuese Azores
Tanzania (Zanzibar)
Mauritania
Vietnam
Mongolia (yes, even Mongolia has commercial fisheries)
Finland (Saami region)
Russia (Kamchatka)

...given sufficient time and funds....
Australia
Philippines

I've received many suggestions in formulating this list, and am still open to any others. Please do speak up.

Special Fish

2008-09-29T22:30:00.011-08:00

The ocean is a wild place, and once in a while a real gem emerges. This post is dedicated to showcasing unique, abnormal, or otherwise remarkable...

Part albino halibut...a Pacific cod with scolosis...salmon with a keen eye for literature

More to come...

I’ve seen some creative and borderline offensive bowstem artwork, but this one strikes me as just strange. Newfoundland humor I suppose. Or evidence of the single-minded drive of fishermen…Fortune, Newfoundland 10/29/08

F/V Icky Thump: Season I

2008-09-29T13:18:00.005-08:00

The fishing season wrapped up last week for my small-scale skiff longlining operation. This is indeed a very small-scale operation as Alaskan commericial fishing standards (or most any standards) go, as setting and hauling of longline gear for halibut is done entirely by hand, with no mechanical hauler. For those unaccustomed to longlining, I basically string a thick line (the groundline), between two anchors along the bottom, and also attached to each of these anchors is line (riser line), to the other end of which a buoy is tied. Along the groundline, as the groundline is playing out off the stern of the boat, I attach a hook/leader (gangion)/snap assembly at intervals of roughly 20'. Longliners use a unit of measure called a skate to measure groundline; a skate of gear is 1800' of line. With my skiff, space and muscle limitations limit me to a total of 5 skates, usually split between two sets.

Longlining out of a skiff, at least out of my skiff, is questionable profitable and questionably intelligent. Others have done this out of Homer, and the fishing methods used on my 22' open skiff, the F/V Icky Thump, were basically copied from my friend Kyle, who has longlined out of his skiff for several years now. He in turn learned a few tricks of the trade from others in town who had fished out of skiffs and then wisely shifted away from it, after realizing that hand pulling gear takes a good toll on certain parts of the body.

Renn Tolman, a legendary Homer boatbuilder, originally built my boat back in 1984. His ability to design and build great skiffs out of common, inexpensive materials is surpassed only by his skill at artfully linking cuss words. You can check out a bunch of Renn's boats, and boats built according to his specs, at www.fishyfish.com.

This season the first time wearing the boots of what you could very loosely call a skipper. This meant that I took all credit for catching fish and did my best at blaming others/inanimate objects for any hangups, break-downs, or lack of fish. Fishing out of the skiff is a two person operation, and the friends I suckered into coming out deserve the real credit for the boat bringing in any halibut to market. Mistakes were made and lessons (hopefully) learned, and a few thousand pounds of feisty halibut were proudly delivered to the market. You couldn't get much fresher fish.

Lessons learned:
1. Setting in kelp beds makes for lots of extra work.
2. Skates (think manta rays, ancient cartilagenous fish) are heavy, especially coming up from over 300'.
3. Dogfish are indeed a schooling fish, meaning that when you catch one, you often catch hundreds.
4. It really doesn't make sense to fight against tides or weather. These are massive forces, and unsentimental ones.
5. Straddling a lively 100 lb. halibut may have painful consequences.
6. Nasty weather is a relative term, and nasty can come quickly for a flat-bottomed plywood skiff in Alaskan waters.
7. Sometimes, if you ignore outboard problems but wish good thoughts to the outboard, the problems fix themselves miraculously. But don't try this too often.

Thanks again to the valiant crew, the folks who let me lease their halibut quota, and those who came and fished their quota with me. I'm looking forward to next season when the Icky Thump once again licks the waters of Kachemak Bay.

The Blunderin' Background

2008-09-29T10:44:00.006-08:00

Fish, fishing, and fisheries have always fascinated me, and for better or worse I've spent much of my life around fish and fishermen (this of course also includes women who fish, but I choose to use this word in place of 'fishers'...no harm intended...) In my early years, enticing fish for fun and for food with rod and reel- or with ice fishing traps in the winter- comprised most of my fishing endeavors. In recent years, my fishing energy has mostly been put towards commercial fishing- catching fish for a livelihood. In most cases, fun and food were also included as part of the deal. For the most part, due to the common use of the word up here in Alaska, when I refer to "fishing" in postings I'll mean commercial fishing.

While fish themselves have always attracted me, so too has the social network which is also a part of all fisheries. I don't mean to make this sound overly academic- I like fishing culture. It's a dynamic world, and while the romance of it all dies off quickly with swollen fingers, lack of sleep, a sore back, and especially salty skippers, there are some great attractions to the work. Don't listen to the Hollywood narrator of The Deadliest Catch - fishing for a living is no way to make quick or easy money. I do think that fishing is integral to life in many coastal communities (especially rural ones), and in this sense, fishing is serious business.

The desire to jump head-first into a thriving, healthy fishery led me from my home state of Maine to Homer, Alaska. From here I've been lucky enough to take part in a number of fisheries in southcentral and western Alaska. I've tried to explore different regions of the state and different modes of catching fish, and so instead of working for a long period on a single boat I've worked for relatively short periods on several different boats. To all the tough-guy fishermen out there: in no way am I trying to brag about my experience or to try to sum up an entire fishery just based on what I've seen or heard. There are far more experienced hands in all of the fisheries I've worked in. This is just one view, although hopefully others will feel free to contribute.

In a nutshell, I think many fisheries can be seen as living entities, having a pulse of their own, and being directly related to the health of coastal communities in which they have direct contact (in addition to catching and distributing valuable, healthy protein worldwide). I am especially motivated to encourage sustainable small-scale fisheries and promote local fisheries jobs and healthy food sources. No doubt I'll occassionally rant and get off-topic, but I intend this blog to be used as a forum to discuss and celebrate fisheries of Alaska, the US, and the world (especially small-scale ones). Feel free to post comments, relevant links, comments, or observations of your own.