Prior to visiting the villages, we made arrangements to
photograph artisanal pole-caught fishing operations for bonito, a type of small
tuna. In this famously beautiful spectacle, fishers toss buckets of bait fish in
the water, sending the tuna into a feeding frenzy. Fishers then plunge a single hooked line attached to a long
pole into the water, snare the frenzied fish, and toss them one by one into the
boat.
We couldn’t wait to see the operation in play and spent days
tracking down and coordinating with a captain. Finally, he told us the tuna boat would pick us up at one of
the bait fishing boats. So long as
the bait boat caught enough small fish and squid, then we could all go out tuna
fishing, but without enough bait, fishing would be impossible.
We ventured out around sunset and climbed aboard a strange
contraption of wood and wire, which hardly resembled a boat at all. A thin
steel hull supported a latticed platform made of huge wooden beams held up by
thick metal wires. Young sinewy
men moved across the platform like graceful spiders, dropping a large flat
weathered net into the water. From
the center of the boat, an old engine sputtered to life, coughed black smoke,
and fired on underwater lights, which would lure the bait. After about an hour or so, men gathered
the net, slowly, piece by piece, moving from stern to bow, consolidating the
fish.
We waited on board, growing weary with each passing hour as
the net rose and fell, fishing throughout the night, slowly amassing buckets of
little fish. Most of the fishermen
were young men or teenage boys who lived out here for a week at a time. They
slept by day and fished by night, their only shelter a cockroach ridden hut in
the center of the platform, their only food, rice and fish scraps from their
catch.
Finally at about 2 am the tuna boat arrived. But we didn’t
have nearly enough bait to justify making the trek to the tuna grounds, even
after eight straight hours of fishing. Later conversations revealed that
fishers have had a harder and harder time catching enough bait fish. There are
too many bait boats (we counted at least nine in our immediate vicinity) fishing
night after night.
I had (perhaps naively) always imagined that artisanal
fisheries were small scale, subsistence occupations that had minimal impact on
the environment. And yet here in
Raja Ampat we had seen the opposite in both the live fish trade operations and
now the bait fish boats – fishers were putting ever more effort to catch fewer
and fewer fish. The problem lies
not in the method, but in the market.
Raja Ampat’s rich waters have sustainably fed small local populations
for millennia, but surely cannot support a national tuna trade or a global live
fish market. Using artisanal,
rather than industrial methods, will simply slow the process.
