Fishing.. as a spectator
Trip Start
Mar 01, 2006
1
249
551
Trip End
Dec 01, 2007
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Rapa Nui,
Chile
Monday, January 22, 2007
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After the dive I tried to loose no time and go fishing. Roger, the Tahitian landlord, gave me advice and told me he would join me on the rocks in fromt of the camping grounds. I did not go quite where he told me, cause I was with german Simone and we wanted to see the turtles that usually showed up near the harbour. I was unsuccessful at fishing at a couple of places, and then saw from afar Roger going for his fishing.
I left Simone to the turtles, which eventually did not show up, and joined Roger.
It was immediately apparent that my line was not long enough to fish where Roger was, but maybe it was better that I could not give it a go: basically, Roger was on top of a 2m lava rock, overlooking the waves crushing just under him, and occasionlly splashing the rocks all around. The kind of place you wouldn't even think of going to.
Then, on there he was just moving around to throw his line a few meters away, in a deep spot.. Then he would walk on the slippery rock back to his bait: bread and chicken. He would bite the raw chicken (beuark) to get a piece out of it and tuck it on his hook. Then as he walked back to his smallish platform he would spin the line at the same time and release it when it was the good timing with the waves.
I was standing close to him, and every five minutes a serie of waves would come and completly splash and soak us. That was fun.
The spot was well chosen, though, as you would expect from someone fishing there over the years: When standing on the top platform, the water did not hit you directly, thus limiting the chances of taking the fisherman away: it rather fell down on him after crashing on the rocks and shooting up in the air. There was also a natural small pond where he could store the fish he had caught.
That was another funny point: if it was a small fish, the fisherman would let it on the line and smash it on the rock to stun or kill it, before removing the hook and putting it in the storage pond. But for the big fish, I guess there was a risk of breaking the line and loosing the fish while doing that. So he would put it on the rock, grab it with his hands, and bite the head of the fish. The fish did not seem to enjoy the treatment at all, flapping frenetically under the pressure on its brain, and then giving a last flap before stopping to move at all. Then the print of Roger's dentition could clearly be seen on the fish head. It was quite horrible.
Then a friend of Roger came to fish with him, just running bare footed on the real hard and sharp lava rock. They would stand there together, throwing their lines and fishing at the same time, almost loosing balance, almost slipping, almost falling, but not. Note that to anyone falling from where they stood, I would have given a 50% chance of dying quiclky from falling on that hard and sharp lava rock all around, and a 50% chance of just having really serious injury necessiting chirurgy. Anyway they had been doing that for years.
And of course, when daddies are doing all that, they can't really tell off their kids for dangerous games, so Roger's little girl was just playing with her puppy dog running aroung in the lava rocks, where any fall would have meant certainly a lot of blood spilled around. I myself slighlty hurt a rock and lost a bit of my toe in the process.
In the evening it was my turn to cook for Simone, who had cooked for me the day before, so it was vegetarian fried noodles. I still joined Roger and Martha and their friends to try the fish, and it was good. They had eaten a huge quantity of them, there were fishbones scattered all around. That's a polynesian thing: they go mental on fish, they just can't help it but eat it and eat it and eat it.
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