Let’s go fishing!

I am on Bunaken island, a small island of Sulawasi, Indonesia. There are two main line of work on the island: fishing and scuba diving. I had explore the scuba diving already and thought that I should look into the fishing scene while I was here and I had finally some time. I am staying in a homestay and as it happens, the man of the house, Barto, is a fisherman. The plan was to spend a day on his boat with 11 men.

It is not that I am a fan of fishing really. No thrill for me in catching a fish. It is a living animal and I prefer not to be responsible for its death. I will eat fish though… I went fishing already in a rowing boat and it was easy for me to sit there reading, hoping to make enough noise on the bottom of the boat so that my boyfriend will not catch anything. Maybe he was just not very good at it, but we never caught anything!

It is 3:30 am and we have to get up. Of course I slept like crap since I was somewhat excited to do some thing like this and I did not want Barto to wait for me. We walk through dark streets towards the beach and it is strange because there are plenty of people on the street since they are also going fishing. We sat on the beach for quite a while. Some of the fisherman are late and there is one of them that went to drag the boat closer to shore. Not that close though, I had to wet my pants pretty much all the way to get in. Hein, it is a rainy morning anyway so I know I will be getting wet no matter what. And hop we go!

The day is divided in two activities. The first task is to get enough small fishes that will be used as bait for the bigger fish. We got into a shallow area and we waited a little bit. Suddenly the men are screaming like little kids, really excited, pointing in one direction. The boat turns around and one side of the net is dropped in the water with one man. As the net gets unwrapped, more men jump in the water to hold it down so the small fishes do not slip under it. They wear snorkeling mask and keep looking in the water, still excited. Once the net is all in the water, the boat has circled around so the two ends meet at the boat. Two men starts pulling on the net while others make sure that the two sides stay closely together. The small fishes are put in water at the bottom of the boat that I will call the basement since I don’t know what it is in English. You want them alive! That is when I saw the first murders of the day. A trumpet fish, 2 catfishes and a calamari got caught in the net as well and the men decided they would keep them. The amount of small fishes is disappointing. They have to release the net about twelve times before they are satisfied with the quantity in the boat. They are wet are shivering. They change and get dried before eating breakfast and moving toward the deeper ocean to catch bigger fishes.

The second task is to locate the bigger fishes which is not easy at all. For the first two or three hours, it was the dolphins that we followed. The tunas were always closed buy and they were all following groups of small fishes.  There are one driver, one who throws the small fishers over the heads of the eight fishermen and one man who keeps on cleaning the deck so that nobody slips on fishes.

It is traditional fishing using bamboo poles. There is still a fishing line that runs all along them and they use homemade colorful bait. When there is no dolphins hanging around the tunas, it becomes more difficult to find them. They jump above the water when they feed on small fishes and when you look at the ocean, there are a lot of areas where they could be. When you see whitish water, you get there as soon as you can and start throwing more small fishes in the water to try to get them to follow the boat. When you hear the fishermen screaming, the chase is on! Or the fishing is on! They lower their poles and move it up and down. They are eight there on the end of the boat so their lines get tangled together sometimes. When a fish bites, the bamboo pole flesh and the fisherman bends backward. It looks pretty exhausting.

The first tuna to hit the floor was impressive. It is much bigger that your regular fish and even if you see them in markets, these ones are moving like crazy! Lots of blood and so I am sure they get hurt. They can not not feel anything, ouch, it is hard to look. I keep on telling myself that that’s their living and they don’t cheat. It was a bit worse when one of the guy started hitting some with a stick so that he could put them in the basement where they died.

They caught 63 tunas that day and everyone was a bit depressed. The whole month of May had been like that. The small fishes are harder to catch and so they bait the tunas a little less. In March and April they used to catch up to 400 tunas. It makes a difference in their wages. We ended the day at the market as the sun was going down. They got 50000 rupias per tuna which is about 7$.

Overall the day was really good. Some awkward moments when all the men kept talking I assumed about me since they kept looking in my direction. I wish I would have understand what they were saying. None of them spoke enough English to translate if there was a joke being told. There is also the time I asked if  I could jump in the water, I wanted to pee so bad! They were looking pretty hard at my bikini and my white skin let me tell you. Even the guys on the next fishing boat stared. I did not realized that it would be such a show! I was exhausted, a little sun and wind burned.