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Seashore Foraging & Fishing Study

Fishing Methods  5 - Coarse & Even Coarser Fishing 

Hook & Line

After the exploits of the long-distance Payaw fishermen, the ordinary line-fishing in the lagoon and estuary is positively tame.

This small boy must have read Huckleberry Finn, or his dad did. He has the look of every small boy forced to go fishing - bored out of his mind, not catching anything, and bitten to death by mosquitoes. 

But the use of a fishing rod is very rare. Most fishermen use a only a handline wound on a piece of wood.

 

For the usual small fisherman out in his baroto the catching of fish every day is what keeps him and his family alive.

There's nothing very exotic about the hook and line fishing methods of Siargao Island - they are much the same as they are worldwide, for very good reasons. Methods tried and tested over centuries, if not millenia, have a habit of sticking around.


Digging for bait - sand worms at high tide

Only the names are different:
Bira Bira - A feather jigger, or several of them strung down a length of nylon - you just jig the line back and forth - it distracts and catches schooling fish

Palangre - Like the method used by the Payaw fishermen out in the ocean, this is a multi-hooked long line, set with buoys in the lagoon - specially for Bayo - Long Toms. 

Uyong-Uyong - This is a very idiosyncratic local way of fishing for squid. You make a payaw (fish attractor) from the crinkly dried flower stems of the coconut tied to a rock-weighted bamboo base frame, and anchor it in about 30 dupa (fathoms - about 60 metres), with a polystyrene foam indicator buoy. Then you fish using a home-made uyong-uyong shrimp lure, hand-carved and polished, with a very realistic shrimp colour, and even nylon antennae.

But someone will always find a better way. 

Even Coarser Fishing 

Dynamite transformed for ever the face of Filipino fishing. 

 

Dynamite was introduced after World War II, when American GIs were very profligate with their use of explosives. (In Guiuan, Samar, near where General MacArthur landed to be met by a phalanx of press photographers, the USAAF built one of the world's longest runways and blew up an entire lagoon to make a swimmin' hole for themselves).

Miners also found out how to use explosives. It's made from a powdered mixture of black gunpowder (from fireworks), ammonium nitrate or potassium fertlizer cooked (dry) together, maybe some sand to bulk it out, some silver paper (and wax if you want to waterproof it) and some fuse wire, readily obtainable. The casing is a Kulafu medicinal wine bottle, less than a bottle of Coke, and a great deal more fortifying.

In it goes, and pop! You've got a load of stunned fish (and stunned everything else - all the plankton, crustaceans, fish fry, corals, and all the other semi-invisible but essential inhabitants of the reef).

Now, it's a very common method, and so productive a practice that it is extremely difficult to police. The Ex-Mayor of General Luna, Jaime Russillon, a physically imposing man, has almost completely stopped it in his own parish, by very physical persuasion. He just 'smacked' anyone he caught using dynamite.

But in other municipalities on the island, and in isolated bays and coves, out of sight, it is still very, very common. 

I have seen 'dynamiters' operating brazenly within 50m of me. One night, camping out on a 'primeval' isolated beach, a small boat came in, manned by one man and half a dozen small boys. A Coke bottle flew out, made a small  'phoomph!' and the boys jumped in. They must have collected almost a kilo of very small bulinaw - anchovies - stunned by the explosion, worth about 80c. Then they went away again, quite unmoved by our shouted protests from the beach (I should say, in our defence, that there was a coral reef  between us and them).

Mind you, there are quite a lot of local ex-fisherman about,  missing at least one arm, who didn't time their fuses properly.

Serves 'em right.

"In terms of effort, the highest catch per unit effort (CPUE) is reportedly dynamite fishing, which averages 17.5 kg/man-hour and has an average income of PhP 439/man-hour. This method has the added distinction of being illegal as well. Increased CPUE (in overfished areas) tends to reflect decreased fishing effort". 

"In Cabilao Island (Loon) some residents act as lookout for dynamite fishers, mostly relatives or friends, who are afraid of being caught by law enforcers. Once the blasting is done, they receive a good share of the catch. Scared that the dynamiters are armed, the other fishermen pretend not to notice and do not report the incident to concerned authorities. Meanwhile, they also dive for dead fish left uncollected by the blast fishers.Two types of dynamite fishing are prevalent in (South Bohol): blasting near the water surface and blasting underwater at depths that require the use of compressors.
Sometimes, the fishermen release dynamite to kill a small school of fish and leave the dead fish in the water. A second release is done when bigger predatory species come into the area to feed on the smaller fish". 
Rhythm of The Sea

Poisons

Fishermen in the Philippines have used tubli roots and lagtang beans, natural poisons, but none the better for being that, since time immemorial.

See: Eco-Friendly Poisons

Now, however, there are more sophisticated nasties around:

Insecticides - Indrin and Malathion are very effective at killing insects, and they are also very useful for catching Banagan - lobsters. At P1000 ($20) per kilo at source, anything is worth trying to catch the very few lobsters left.

One of these is sold in many small sari-sari (general food) stores, quite openly, as lanit. It's dispensed, like much of the food sold to the poor (the majority of Filipinos) in small single portion sachets. The Philippines is one of the few places where I go to buy cigarettes, and always have to specify: "A whole pack, please".

Cyanide  

"Mostly used by spearfishers to catch groupers and other larger species, cyanide has been used in a variety of ways. One of these is spreading the cyanide powder on bread or mixing it with cooked rice when preparing fish baits. The bait is dropped onto the water, with the fisherman pretending to use a hook and line.

Another technique is suspending underwater a transparent plastic bag filled with the poison and some small fish to attract bigger fishes. Once there is a bite on the line or a school of fish moves near the area, the line is pulled hard to rip open the bag and release the chemical to the water. In 10 to 15 minutes, the stunned fish rise to the surface of the water.

The most common method is pouring the cyanide solution into baby feeder bottles and squirting the chemical into coral reefs and crevices killing the corals and stunning the fishes. This method has been employed by collectors of live grouper species.   

Cyanide supplied in the profile area (Bohol) originates from Cebu City. The poison is sold in plastic packets for about PhP 35 ($0.70 - End user price) per small cube, which can last up to 3 days of fishing.

The presence of cyanide on poisoned fish is difficult to detect because of the absence of testing facilities. Also, regular sampling of fish is not done.

According to the fisherfolk, fish poisoned by cyanide have reddish, blotched eyes and foul-smelling intestines. They also deteriorate faster than those caught without the use of poisons.

Stories among the small-island communities in the area tell of some cyanide-using fishermen. They place cyanide into their trousers and wade in the water, gradually releasing the chemical. In a few minutes, fishes and other marine organisms just float on the water surface .Other chemicals are similarly being used to catch fish. The fishermen simply scatter the powder poison on the water and wait for dead fish to appear on the surface.

In rivers, fiercely toxic agricultural pesticides are dropped upstream. The stunned or dead fish are collected by hand or nets downstream or near the estuaries. The human health effects of eating fish caught with these various poisons is not well known, thus people do not worry about it gaining a foothold in the area".

Rhythm of The Sea

Dynamite & Cyanide - A Contrary Opinion

Dynamite is  pretty weak - it doesn't blast the reef to pieces half as much as the annual storms and typhoons. So the emotional upset caused by the very word 'dynamite' is pretty much nonsense.  It's weighted trawl nets, drifting anchors and sheer over-exploitation that have caused the problems of coral reef depletion.

Clearing mangroves to provide access to the sea for towns and fish farms hasn't done much good either - it removes a vital filter between the land and the sea, that once prevented sedimentation smothering the coral reefs.

And then there's all that nonsense about taking thousands of years to grow a coral reef. 

15000 years ago, the sea was lowered by about 100-150m during the last Ice Age. Coral reefs do grow slowly, of course, but the ones that exist now must have grown at least an average of 0.33cm a year to get where they are. And they were stopped, every so often , by getting too near the surface. 

Of course they don't take thousands of years - they grow, stop for about a millenium or two, at the right depth, then start again. I regularly snorkel on a flourishing mini-reef that is only 10 years old. It has grown on the rockpile left over after a new pier project ran out of money.

Cyanide (and other poisons) are used regularly to catch large live fish for export to the Hong Kong and other Chinese markets, where live fish are very much appreciated - but this is only a variation on the very old use of tubli poison vine on fish.

Used in excess, of course dynamite is harmful. It stuns the big fish, but kills stone-dead many of the plankton, etc, that their offspring might feed on.  (Although plankton have a way of surviving quite a lot - they have to put up with hurricanes, typhoons, being eaten by almost everything else in the sea, excessive sunlight, excessive dark, cold and hot temperatures, etc. - but 1 or 2, surviving from the 100,000+ siblings their parent conceived, will, against all odds, survive).

So I don't feel too strongly about dynamite and cyanide. They are perhaps just honourable technically enhanced traditions carried on by individuals into the 21stC. Their use hasn't been globalised - yet.

When we get fat little bald corporation men in Houston giving away these things as 'promotions' then we should worry. (Or if the US sends in its smart Army to rid us of 'terrorism').

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Richard Parker  - Siargao Island - April  2005 (Last updated Monday, May 08, 2006)  

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