Local Fishing Trip

Today I went out fishing with the blond sweedish couple Onna and Pauli. It was the best day I have had so far!

I interviewed Solep in the morning – to try to get an illegal immigrant islander perspective as another steakholder group. Unfortunatly, his thai is very much comprised of practical words no academic ones. When he didn’t know what environment, problems, or nature, meant I knew it was going to be one of my shorter interviews. I did ask him what were the good things and bad things about living on Lipe and she said for good that there were no police so he didn’t have to be afraid because he has no passport.

Jaeng arrived after breakfast and Solep told him that his (soleps) mother had broken a vein in her head and was very sick. It was so sad, because there is no way Solep can go back to burma to see her. Shirtless, with a chest cut from hard construction work, in a towel smoking a cigarette, he started to cry. Jaeng made sure Solep had a way to call home, and wasn’t going to go to work today.

Jaeng gave me a ride over in the morning on his red motorcycle. Onna and Pauli and I sat in the shade of the beautiful Castaway resort where the tourists are staying, while Jaeng rounded up our boat. There were three men onboard, a famously good fisherman named Pi Mon, another younger fisherman named Joy, and a thirteen year old boy named Jehw.

On the way out Pi Mon showed me the lines we would be using. The put a weight at the end of a plastic ring wrapped with a lot of fishing wire, then above the weight five hooks baited with duck feathers or frayed bits a shiny plastic rope. We drop the end into the sea, very deep, until it hits bottom and then bounce the line up and down, as the boat drifts along in the currents. After a minute or so we pull up the line, to check. Sometimes it comes up laden with many fishes!

We spent the day cruzing around all over the archipelago. Sometimes we would go far out into the ocean, to where the big fishing boats had dropped foam floats with food for the little fishes. At the first one of these we arrived at the same time as one other boat. Pi Mon pulled up his line with our first fish, three or four small yellow Sargent angels. He tossed them back into the sea one at a time, brining each fish to his face for a second as if sniffing or kissing it. By the last fish, our boat and the other had drifted close to eacother. Mon shouted something at the other solo fishinerman and threw the last fish at the other boat. It barely didn’t make it into the boat and bounced into the sea. The fisherman shouted something at eacother and laughed.

I asked to learn to tie the hooks and the oldermen had the younger boy teach me – which was extremely fun. Once I got a hang of it, they took out a pile of a dozen hooks and said “pratice till they are gone” and everyone laughed, but I was realty happy to tie the hooks. I made my own line and fished with it, and caught over the day…. About five tiny tiny tiny reef fish about the size of my palm! Haha. Pauli got pretty good though and pulled in quite a few good ones.

The sky was big, and the day sunny, and the company lovely. Onna and Pauli learned the words for “fish’ and “big”. Sometimes the ocean would erupt around us as big fish tried to catch little ones and the fish would splash out of the water in a smacking splashing wave. “blah blah blah blah blah’ Pauli and Onna would chant “fish fish fish fish fish fish” the Fishermen laughed and everyone joined in shouting “blah blah blah blah blah yai blah yai “Fish and big fish”.

We snorkled a bit over lunch, with several dog jawed barracuda.

By the end of the day the bottom of the boat was full of fish. We pulled in mackerel and grouper, and several others. Now and again one of the fish would go into a fit of flapping as it dried out. By the end we had a garbage bad a quarter full (40 fish?).

I asked if we could all eat together at Pi Mons house, and the answer was yes. Onna and Pauli were up for the adventure, and went home to shower. I rode into the village wit the men and the fish on a motorcycle side car. As we rode into the village, people, mostly kids, shouted hellos and the fishers and at “gigi” which was nice. We met with Jaeng who was hanging out at Mons house. Suddenly a boy appeared with three half meter baby black tip sharks in his hand! I was surprised and half depressed half delighted. “the little sharks have soft sweet meat!” someone said.

Jaeng invited me to take a shower in a bath-shack in the village, meaning I wrapped in my sarong towel and poured rainwater over myself as I stood on a cement block surrounded by piles of burning trash and meandering dogs and ducks.

Wandering around I saw Mon cleaning the fish behind the house, fluffy kittens interacting with the gangly chickens, and kids flocking around a young woman who was cracking Chiton into a bowl. To imagine a Chiton think of those plated armored things you always see as early under the sea creatures in natural history museaums. These ones live stuck like barnacles onto rocks. The woman expertly stripped them down the grate like bodies of tough hard pale meat. I learned about Chiton in my Organism Diversity class right before coming to Thailand the first time and had been so excited to try them when I heard they were eaten in the islands. But this was my first sighting! I tired a piece of the meat, it was… extremely hard and I chewed very cautiously. It was not bad, I decided, although not exactly good tasting either. But I was so happy to eat it!

The kids flocked to look at pictures, and suddenly one said next to my ear “excuse me, she wants to look” and I almost jumped out of my skin. It was a young boy, about 6, who was talking. I remembered suddenly hearing gossip this kid who spoke english and Thai and had a chow lay father and farang mother. He was great!

My camera ran out of batteries so Onna Pauli and I went into town to buy fruit for dinner, and I ran home to get the charger. I met Jaeng there, which was hilarious, since we had just been talking in the village about how far it was back to Sanom beach when neither of us had been planning to come home before dinner. Solep was using Jaengs motorcycle to buy a huge bag of something, (cement? Rice?) and Jaeng and I sat together on a log as sunset came and talked until Solep returned.

Onna, Pauli and I arrived before dinner was done. The village was ripe with barking dogs, and the houses on slits, and trash fires, and as I led them to the house I saw struck by the place in their eyes – the way someone might see it if they hand’t spent 7 months of the last year living in cities and villages all over Thailand. He houses were big in a way – big for shacks? Big for things on stilts with corrugate roofs? They were sort of tossed together beyond the sandy road and into the patches of swamp and jungle. Inbetween were bird cages, and birds loose, bath cement slabs, and parked motorcycles, and bits or garden, and outdoor sitting platforms, and dogs, and kids, and bicycles, and trees stacked with barrels and fishing poles… all sorts of things! Large TVs were playing cartoons or the news from inside many of the houses.

We arrived and they met Jaeng and several others and we were ushered into one of the houses to watch T.V. and wait for dinner to be ready. We gave the host our bags of fruit which I was told to put in the corner of the kitchen. Four kids were running like crazy all over the house, one was doing her homework aloud. One older girl laid out a blue mat in front of us, and when she walked about a chubby little boy started doing running slides onto the mat, crashing and laughing and rolling around where he landed. At one point the first girl came back in and saw him, shouted at him, hit him, shouted somemore and left him face first and silent in the center of the floor. I was worried this would overwhelm my Finnish friends, but no worry. “I guess that was going to be our kitchen table” said onna. “no running on the kitchen table” said Pauli “I guess that’s what just happened”. The english speaking kid started chasing the table running kid with a toothpick and chaos resumed.

Omg. Too much to write. Diner!!! Jaeng, Mon, and the three of us ate together and what a meal!!! First there was sweet and sour fish in a thick red sauce, then salty fried fish, (all we had caught today), the stirfried vegtables.. but that’s just starters. After that there was cold lime salad of chopped Chiton. Thai people have never eaten this. Siad Jaeng introducing the Chiton dish. It is a Chow Lay specialty. And last but not least was a big spicy bowl of sauce and shark meat!!!

This was a source of internal conflict for me. I’ve been not eating fish this trip, to not put one more pressure on the fish population here. I’m torn because its so local, and the chow lay seem to harvest in a somewhat sustainable way (line fishing or trap fishing) but only becuase its part of the island culture and certainly supporting the local people! So I decide I would eat a little fish, when it was offered to me by an islander and it would be rude or inconsiderate to refuse. Anyway, there was no putting the sharks back in the water. I wish i could have seen them there, not on my plate, but I also didn't want to pass up such a once in a life time opportunity.

The shark was, unfortunately, really good.

So that’s how I came to be in a fishermans house, eating my catch of the day, and rock chiton salad, and baby shark, on a tiny remote tropical island, in the middle of the ocean, off the coast of Thailand, on the otherside of the world. [Later Pouli and I joked about making sure to say it was baby shark, because how much more demasculating it was to say "i at baby shark" b "i ate shark meat"]

The baby shark meat sort of fell apart in your mouth it was so soft. Jaeng mentioned shark fin soup and shook his head disapprovingly. I thought of all the shark fin soup in the world, and didn’t understand why the rest of the shark wasn’t around either – unless the meat gets very tough as the shark gets older???

After dinner, we and several village men, and Darius and Bee (from Café Lipe), sat together and some people smoked cigarettes and others drunk coffee and we told stories. Jaeng told a story (which I actually understood 80% of without the translation by Bee) that went like this:

A long time ago Python was very venomous. He wasn’t like today, but had strong strong venom and everyone was afraid of him. One day a farmer was working in a field and he found four or five big crabs in his field. He wanted to take them home for dinner but he didn’t have any bag, or anyplace to put them, so he put them in his shirt. Soon after he surprised Python and Python bit him in the leg, and since python was very poisonous back then the farmer fell over dead. The cows flying over saw the farmer and came down to see him and peck him, but then they saw his chest was still moving and alive! (he wasn’t actually alive, see, he was dead as dead but the crabs in his shirt were all moving so the crows thought he was alive.) Python doesn’t have any vemon anymore! They said. His venom is no good anymore, it has no value! And they went around telling all the other people and animals. Now, python was really upset/angry that his vemon was no good anymore and he spit up all of his venom. Then many other animals found the venom and took it forthemselves: the kind cobra, the spiders, the bees, and all the other animals that now are poisenous, the last to get there were the ants. Since they were last only some got venom and some didn’t. The red ant was so angry that he didn’t get the poison like the other ants that he sucked in his stomach, and that is why the red ants have such skinny smalls waists.

The conversation also turned serious: like to a 12 year old boy who died while hooka diving about three years ago. To the dangers of this kind of diving, and how many many people used to die from it, because the chow lay didn’t know, Jaeng said. Why do they still do it, if they know its dangerous? I asked. I dunno said Bee, Jaeng said its not as dangerous now because they know not to stay down for many hours and to come up slowly… still sounds very dangerous, I said. Everybody seemed to agree with this. The number 100 came up as the number of people who have died from this type of diving since it first came to the village… I don’t think that it has an particular accuracy, but its scary.

When I couldn’t keep my eyelids open anymore I walked home with Bee and Darius. I felt I had crossed some sort of “coolness of my life” bench mark – like this is the SIP I always wanted to do, or learning how to tie a hook and line and fishing in a tiny wooden boat with locals was something I had always had on the list of amazing things to do before I die, I’d just never known that specific item was on there until today. On my bungalow hammock and wrote a “life list” before falling into bed.