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Seashore Foraging & Fishing Study

Fishing Methods 3 - Lambo - Line Fishing

The Payaw = FAD - Fish Attracting Device

If the spear fishermen are the local bow'n'arrow hunters in the lagoon, then the long-distance hook & line fishermen going out to the Payaw (now with motorized boats, but before, with nothing but a boat and a sail, or even just a paddle) are, way out, the hunter-heroes.  

They are the ones who go out very long distances, mostly alone, to catch the big pelagic schooling fish, the tunas, the various mackerels, and the big game fish - blue marlin and sailfish.

And the very, very boring Bolis (Skipjack Tuna)

But the very boring Bolis can swim at up to 75km/hr in short bursts, and covers huge distances in its annual migrations - up to 65km a day, and never in straight lines. It's no Ferrari, but the Volkswagen of the seas.

It is practically warm-blooded, able to maintain a core temperature of 25ºC in water down to 7ºC. It's special 'red muscles' along the sides are particularly adapted for fast turns of speed, although they don't taste so good as the white muscle.

Imagine you are a fairly large, but dumb fish, used to following your mates on their seasonal pilgrimages all over the Pacific Ocean. The Deep Blue Sea can get very boring indeed, even to a pretty stupid fish (not much inclined to introspection).

All around you is deep blue, a colour so empty that film & TV-makers use it as a background when they want to paste in something else (your TV weatherman is just acting, with his pointer and his spiel, in front of a Deep Blue Sea neutral background. He is looking at a film in front of him which will be back-screened, and hoping that he dabs his pointer in the right place). 

As a migrating schooling fish your universe is only this very monotonous Deep Blue, for long tedious days. The only way you know which is UP is the dancing light on the sea surface above, and the only way you know WHERE is to follow your mates.

Suddenly you see, breaking the tedious twinkling silver under-waves of the surface above, a dark object, floating, with small darting fish around it. 

A break in the monotony, you think (if you can think at all) and then food - a snack.

But they're waiting for you.

At the Payaw

The waiting fishermen know that the particular bit of floating wood they've found, a bamboo raft they've left drifting for a month or so out in the ocean, an old water tank, or whatever, is going to attract tiny plankton, and then small fish, crustaceans of various kinds, jelly fish, sea snails, etc, who may be just drifting around looking for company, or just for a bit of shade from the terrible sun.

The fishermen have made (or found) just the kind of 'seed' needed to start a crystal growing, though they probably don't know that. Just as a crystal grows out from a tiny disturbance, they've touched off a small and growing zone of active life in the big empty ocean.

They know that the little community created by the 'crystal seed' will attract the bigger fish, and they in turn will attract the top predators.

General Luna's main Payaw is permanently anchored about 15 km out in the Pacific Ocean, straight out through the gap in the reef by Guyam Island - too far to show on the GL map. It is a purpose made raft of double steel tanks. 

In the summer season, fom April to September, when the Amihan, the NE Monsoon has abated, bamboo rafts are also set randomly afloat out at sea, for exactly the same purpose.

Yet another Payaw (the far one), is set about 30km out. Nobody could tell me the exact distance, but it takes 6 litres of petrol to get there, and the fishermen usually stay overnight, making it a two day trip. 

 

And if you thought, you poor dumb fish, that you were just dropping off into the Ocean Motorway Rest Area for a snack, then beware - they've got a full menu of terrible fates prepared for you:

Palangre 

A long, multi-hooked line. Sometimes the 80-200 hooks are baited with real fish or squid, sometimes with bits of old feather or cotton on hooks. This pulls up the medium predators, Bolis (Skipjack Tuna) and Yellowfin (Bigeye Tuna) in the daytime, and Bodloy and Salindato (other medium-large Scombridae - Mackerel family) when they come up to feed at night. 

But the palangre only really works if you are the first, solo fisherman to find this palaw or bit of floating wood.

Crystalit

If there are two of you, then you share, and, to avoid time-wasting line tangles, each of you uses just a handline. A good 2 hour fishin' session should pull in anything from 100kg of fish up. (Worth P4000, about $80, or maybe only half that, if you've caught too many and the public market can't handle them so you have to go and haggle with the fat fish buyer).

When you've got the best part of the main school, you troll about. You'd probably use a Crystalit (a cockerel feather bait on a hook), just trailed along about 50-100 metres behind the boat. (Not quite gentlemanly dry-fly fishing on gin-clear Hampshire trout streams, but damned near it).

But often, you may be part of  a band of up to 20 fishing boats, out scouting the open oceans as a fleet. You spread around, just within sight of each other until you come across something to break the monotony of that big, endless ocean surface.

And the first boats to find the floating wood get the cream, before everyone else piles in.

Sometimes, the paon (bait) is a bangsi (flying fish) with the line threaded through the mouth and body cavity. One hook is placed at the tail, and another midway along. Wrap a little clear plastic round the head to hold the eyes in as it is trailed along. 

You can set a bangsi surface drift net for about 5 or 6 hours in the morning, then, in the afternoon, collect your fresh bait. Then you trail the bangsi through the water at the end of your trolling line, at about 7 knots, and like a silver bullet, it would catch the Devil himself.

After you've picked off the butter from the sandwich, you go for the big ones - they'll be a bit deeper and a bit distant from the mob around the floating wood:

Malasugi (Blue Marlin) and Liplipan (Sailfish) are not gentleman swordsmen. 

They both have long bills (upper snouts) with saw-tooth edges and rough leathery skins, tough enough to make into very usable swords for human battles. But they don't lunge or parry like a fencing gentleman; they give a good hard slap with a back-and-forth, like a top-rank pub bully-brawler. Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks Jr wouldn't have stood a chance against them. 

And the fishermen of Siargao are not gentleman anglers. 

They use a fiendishly simple device called Rentex - a hookless line with a bit of old fluff - maybe some old cotton thread, or combed-out rags; maybe some of that plastic frill you put around Christmas cakes, about 6-10" long - anything tough, long, and tangle-able. That first slap of the bill and the following back-and-forth gets it twisted and tangled; the first act in the drama of the end of the big fish's life.

And the big fish try to worry off the tangle of Rentex, like a puppy with wool (or toilet paper) round its nose, and get more entangled. Their mouths are maybe closed, so no oxygenated water gets through to their gills, and they suffocate to death. Or they may dive, and dive again, and just exhaust themselves. Meanwhile, the fisherman just holds on patiently, paying out line, and winding in as necessary.

 

The Indo-Pacific sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus) can exceed 70mph for short periods. Perhaps you're better at maths than I am - playing the force of a 40kg fish travelling at 110km/hr with a handline is not for ninnies - or gentleman anglers.

There's a technique to local lambo - line fishing  - a GL fisherman couldn't possibly afford a Michigan- (or even a Taiwan-) made casting-reel and carbon/fiberglass rod, so he winds the line round his bent knee in the boat, holding the line braced and taut in his fist, (wound three times, and running parallel past his elbow) and casts off line, from his knee, when he needs to.

No, the fishermen of Siargao are certainly not gentleman anglers. Nor was St. Peter.

Another (very unsporting) method of catching the big pelagic fish is described in

Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Just two years ago, Crisanto, a wizened, sun-blackened old man of 67, set out from the back of Dako Island (on the outer GL reef)  - in a small 8ft baroto, with a friend, and a couple of hand-lines.

see GL map

They came back six hours later, towing a 180kg blue marlin. It took a small tuna they had just hooked, so they played it for four hours. It took six of their juniors to carry it up the beach.

Makes you wonder a bit, doesn't it, about those American 'big game fish sportsmen', harnessed into special swivelling armchairs, with carbon fibre rods, titanium reels, high-tech swivelling lures designed by Japanese manga comic artists, in hired boats with radar and a character captain, costing hundreds of dollars a day, with refrigerated bars and drinks dispensed by butlers.

Just what do they think they are proving ?

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Richard Parker  - Siargao Island - April  2005 (Last updated Thursday, April 27, 2006)  

I welcome comments or corrections on my site and opinions, so please feel free to email me at:  richardparker01@yahoo.com