Fishing: tools, techniques and practice

Dear all, todays article is about sea creatures  and how to catch them, in case you are ever stranded and starving....

Just as a side note, we are currently in camp 6, which is the remotest area we have explored so far. Didian is 47km from the closest town, or a days boat ride away. All is great and  I will summarize this trip in pictures and words later.

For now let's start with the tools used for fishing. We are going to go from the commonest to the least used objects amongst the Agta.  It is worth noting that this order is more or less the contrary for the local non-Agta population.

The batek, so widely employed that in Palanan, the local dialect, fishing is said to be mag-batek. The main version of this tool is made of an iron rod between 60cm and 1m called the pana.

Bateka in the sea.

 It is sharp on one end, with a nail to stop fish from escaping once pierced.

Batek: focus on the front nail.

 The other end is U-shaped in order to fit the elastico. This is, as the name suggests a loop of rubber, which comes in all size and shapes, open on one side and closed again by a piece of string that will lodge into the U of the pana. The last part, which is optional, is a piece of nylon string linking both parts. The string acts to keep the pana tied at all times in order to avoid loosing it.

Batek: focus on the string piece.

 This is a requirement for fishing in the sea and only an option in the rivers where it is usually pretty easy to recover the pana once shot. Speaking of the sea, here the design is enhanced to create a real speargun. A wooden structure supports the pana and a bent nail acts as a trigger. Once again see pictures for a clear illustration. I had the luck to find a pana in the sea and a friend made the rest of the batek for me.

My batek freshly assembled.

The panas are also used in a group of three in order to go cugita spearing, i.e. octopus. The technique is quite complex and I wish I could share the video footage with you.Once the animal is spotted, hiding in a small coral hole, the Agta spears the three panas with a certain twist of hand in order to attain some specific point in the beast. Then, it is all about turning and twisting. If the animal proves resistant then a big rock permits to crumble the coral and access the octopus hiding in a now ink-filled mini lagoon.

In third position, comes the classical fishing lines, only used by the Agta at the coast. The idea is to go on a small boat with as much as 30 lines, with many big hooks and bits of octopus. Then throw to the depths, and wait. From my experience this was mostly carried out at night time and the yield wasn't great: nothing.

Last but not least, are the nets. They are used in all possible ways with different results. At the coast, it is deployed by walking out in shallow water and throwing it from a rock into the waves. Trying to capture fishes from a boat, all of this works. Hard to tell which technique works best, it is only sure that the yields are comparative to mag-bateking or slightly reduced. Inland, and on the rivers, I only witnessed one occurence where a small net was set accross a shallow river. Then a troop of ten or so mag-batekas came downstream driving the escaping fish to their end. This technique seemed very efficient.

As we are talking about nets it is worth noting that in the rivers a different structure is used. Made of a vine rope with banana leaves attached, the tool spans accross the whole width of the channel and is dragged up- or downstream. Even if this does not block the passage of the fish it certainly makes them turn as they do not dare to cross under the leaves. On the other side, the mag-batekas are ready to throw their panas in to the manufactured school.

Banana leaves net.

I had the chance to get hold of my very own batek at the coast so I went to try a tool a 8 year old Agta kid is the master of. After half an hour of work I had shot maybe thirty times and not even grazed a fish, nowhere near a catch.

The fish killing move.

 In the meantime our companion caught five small fish and five shrimp with her barehands! Not the most promising start for me.Then, in Caniapan it took me a bit of time to get the technique right as I kept getting the wire caught in the rubber. But after watching and following a kid the day before in a lagoon it felt more like the pans could defeat a swimming animal. Thirty minutes and thirty shots later I still didn't get anything but I was getting closer. Maybe , I thought, my batek is at fault as the pana is old and bendy. I needed to be sure. I aimed for a small fish swimming near to shore. The elastic strung, the spear takes speed and get stuck in sand, and to my shock, this included a fish. It worked, I caught the first fish of my life and even if it did not constitute a nice meal for me, it did for a crab logging near our tent.

Catch of the day.

To conclude our fishy tell, in the river it is hard to spot any fish as one fights strong currents, whereas the sea is more forgiving. That is why, I guess that with a life of practice people get usually half a kilo of 10-15cms fish from the river per trip, compared to up to fives kilos at the coast, with individual fish reaching 45cm and nearly 2 kilos.

Oh, and I also went octopus catching. This resulted in 4 hours of walk in the sun and no animal spotted by me or my companions. Fortunately, a man of the group and called me over to demonstrate the extraction, which I captured on video and include here a picture from it.

Octopus hunt with Jimmy.

Love to all,

Wasabi.