Jambiani Jambo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Five-Gallon Shuffle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Placing Zanzibar on the Map

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

Shishaw Brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Junkyard Gang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound bites

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

Fishynomics

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

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

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

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

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

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