The highlight of this week was wednesday, when I went fishing for a large, Mackeral-looking fish called Tangigi which often grows to 4 kilograms here. The fishing trips for Tangigi are overnight, starting at 5 pm one day, and ending at 7 am the next. I arrived at Mano Jimmy's house at about 4:45 on wednesday, expecting to go fishing with Don-Don, Don-Don #2, and Bong-Bong, and Mano Ben-Ben, but instead met two new men, Edgar, a 38-year-old fisherman with an honest face and dedicated work-ethic, and Ali, a 53-year-old man, wise to the ways of the ocean, resigned to the variable luck of fishing, and very knowledgeable about the coastal community. Ali, Edgar, Mano Jimmy, and I all got onto the boat about 5:30 pm and headed out. The fishing vessel is about 20 feet long, about 3 feet wide at the middle, with bamboo outriggers and a tarp covering the middle area of the boat where the motor is contained. Edwin blew out air bubbles in the gas line, and dipped the hose into a new gallon jug of diesel, priming fuel manually into the motor to start the stream of fuel, and after wrapping a cord around the crank shaft of the motor and giving a solid yank, we were off, sputtering efficiently into the middle of San Juanico Strait, in Leyte Philippines, for a night of Tangigi fishing, a new experience for me, and all too familiar for my three companions.
At 6:15, we were at our destination, Edwin lit our kerosene lanterns for the evening, 4 were mounted on the boat, and three others sat on styrofoam floaters, and they would serve as a visual indicator of where the end of our net was, so that other boaters would not cross lines, and so that we would not lose our bearings. Mano Jimmy and Edwin let out the 1400 meter net for 30 minutes, until our kerosene lamps in upturned vodka bottles were but a speck on the horizon of dark water underneath a cloudy sky. Then we slept, or tried to. Everyone claimed a section of plywood covering the hull of the boat, and I sat down in the cockpit, where I thought I would be fairly comfortable. I couldn't have been more wrong. As my three companions snored, and the little boat swayed, I reshuffled a thousand times, in hopes of getting comfortable. Nothing worked, and I remained awake until 10:30, when we all arose to get ready for taking the gigantic net back into the boat, a net so long that it completely filled up the front half of the hull of the little boat.
We didn't catch anything, nothing, tangigi, or flounder, or skates, or anything, and I have yet to find out if this is normal, to not catch anything and have tried with so much diligence. But, everyone continued on, Edwin started the motor, and we headed further into the darkness, headed for who knows what. I didn't understand much, but that Mano Jimmy was complaining of hunger and an aching stomach. After taking the boat for about 10 minutes, we stopped along someone elses kerosene lamps floating in the water, and began checking the net attached to it for fish. I was dumbfounded at what I was witnessing. I know that cultures are different, that some things are accepted here that aren't where I'm from, but I consider it fairly universal that you don't mess with someone else's catch, you don't take someone else's livelihood, but that's just what Jimmy and Edwin were doing, and before traveling onward, we had harvested 6 or 7 eels from someone else's nets! I understand that my presence may have caused them to feel that they had to have something to prepare for the midnight meal, the nets may have belonged to friends or family of my boat mates, but at the moment, I was outraged to be an accessory to an act that would get you shot in Virginia. At about midnight, Edwin made a fire in a metal can, with the remaining kerosene from thelamps, and on top of the fire he put a cast iron bowl with seawater, and cut pieces of two of the eels we harvested earlier. After about half an hour of wondering if the little flames would escape and be our demise, the meal was ready, and we poured the broth and meat over cold rice, and ate ravenously, all of us.
After we ate, we cranked the engine again, and headed out to another part of the ocean and repeated the process, setting out the kerosene lamps, and dashing the long net out, one armlength at a time. After setting out the net for the second time, we all found our positions once again, and tried to sleep some more. Before too long though, it began to rain, and apart from the motor, the other post-19th century invention came in handy. Four grown men rolled down the sides of the 3-foot-long tarp and huddled under it, and what little comfort there had been, was lost. We had full bellies, and in cramped positions, we listened to the drops of rain on our tarp. Ironically, it was the closest I've felt to the peace of camping in the Virginia mountains in the past year. The night was not hard for me, because this remained a novel experience, and I was relatively noncommital to whether or not we caught fish. However, I was struck with how different the night and the rain, and the silence would have been if, like my companions, my livelihood and that of my family depended on what those nets would yield. These men would do the same process the next evening, and the next, whereas I was fortunate enough to have made it a choice to come out and go fishing.
The second net didn't yield much more than the first, we caught a small, flat reef fish, and a saltwater tilapia, probably 2 kilos. The sun rose and the heat returned as Ali and Edwin pulled in the net once again, complacent in the relative misfortune for the night. When we returned to shore, we all jumped out of the boat when we reached knee-high water, and pushed the boat to a good docking location that wouldn't be too deep at high tide. And when we returned to his house with our fish that we had caught, tired limbs, bloodshot eyes, Mano Jimmy told me to choose which fish to take home. I hadn't even helped to throw the net out or take it in, I just sat and watched as these men worked all night to sustain themselves, and Jimmy wanted me to take a fish, as thanks for coming. I was dumbfounded, he seriously wanted me to take a fish, one of the 5 fish that we had in the bucket, and I saw then that to people here, at least the guys that took me fishing, it means more to have someone who cares, someone who respects their way of life enough to spend time, than it does for them to have other 'basic' needs met for the day. I refused the fish, and hopefully did not offend them by doing it, but we slapped shoulders, smiled, joked about my bad luck, and parted ways.
The next night, it rained again, harder and longer, and while I was laying on the mattress inside listening to the rain on the roof, 'recovering' from the fishing trip, Mano Jimmy, Edwin, and Ali were no doubt huddled again under the same tarp, surrounded by the same water, pulling the same net, with the same hope of a good catch.
