Gone Fishin'

One of my favorite things in Indonesia is one that I keep forgetting to mention, so I'm gonna make a whole post about it. It's fishing. I thought that I'd gone fishing before back in the U.S., but fishing here in Indonesia is a whole new ball game. 

From what I've seen so far around Sulawesi, there are three ways people fish. The first way is an ol' bamboo stick with a piece of string hanging from the tip and a bent wire at the end. A lot of the people who don't have any money or anything just kind of do that to pass the time, and I wouldn't exactly use the word effective to describe it. The second method is one that I've seen used at Pulau Kodingareng, and that's the one where you just throw a bomb into the water where you want the fish from. A bunch of guys just get into a boat, with a 'bomb' thing, toss it in, quickly move the boat  away, and BOOM! After the bomb goes off they paddle back to collect their catch. Yeah, they catch a lot of fish this way, but this seems like cheating to me. Plus, it's not exactly the most 'environmentally sustainable' method, either. And it's also, understandably, pretty dangerous. I've seen three men so far at Pulau Kodingareng with arms that have been reduced to nubs attached to their sides when they didn't move away from the boat close enough. 

The last method, and my personal favorite, is the one that I've gotten to test out a few times when I was at Bira Beach. I saw it kind of by accident, when I was snorkeling by myself along a reef about 100 meters away from the shore when a couple of little kids popped up beside me out of nowhere. I asked them what they were doing, and they replied that they were fishing. The two boys each had a slingshot in one hand and a long, sharp spear looking thing in the other. They each waited by the coral, and when the fish that they were waiting for passed by, they each put on their googles, took a deep breath, and plunged under the water to the reef below. When they had the perfect moment, they would both pull back the cord on the slingshot, releasing the silver spear and (if they were successful) the fish would be too caught off guard to swim away quick enough, thus giving the boys dinner to bring back to their families. 

It's a really interesting relationship that the people of Sulawesi have with the ocean. They throw their garbage in in, bathe in it and get all of their food from it, too. It's their entire life. 

In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away.

-Shing Xiong