Gone Fishin'

These past two weekends the sun has decided to peek through the clouds and we jumped on the opportunity to spend some time at the beach. For those of you who don't know, my in-laws have a great apartment in a small fishing village called Portosin. They only go during the summer months, and the rest of the year it's empty. So every chance we get we like to get out of Santiago and spend some time wondering around looking at the boats and breathing the ocean air.

I love Spanish fishing boats. They are all brightly colored. Red, Blue, Green. The older ones are made of wood, but now the newer ones have metal hulls.

Fishermen from Portosin catch sardines, mackerel, anchovy, sargo, pescadilla, rodaballo, hake, bream, anglerfish, etc. But many times they have to go up to the Basque country or down to Portugal to find whatever they can get and bring it home. Other fishermen have to leave Portosin altogether, as was the case for our friend Suso who has to go for months at a time to Mauritania in Africa. Fish keep getting harder to find due to overfishing, so the fishermen have to keep going further out.

Not only is it getting harder to find fish, but it's also a dangerous livelihood. A few years back Suso was out off the coast of Africa with his crew and his boat sank. Luckily they all made it into the life raft and were rescued, but not all are as lucky. They still haven't found the fishermen whose boat went down a few weeks ago off the Galician coast.

The fishing boats come in all shapes and sizes. We spent about 30 minutes watching a little old man trying to get into his tiny little motorized row boat so he could try his luck out in the ria. He couldn't seem to find the best way to manuever it and get in without getting wet, and then once he finally got in he couldn't get the engine started. We left the scene chuckling. Needless to say, about 5 hours later we took a walk to the docks at dusk and saw the same little man coming back to shore with the engine sputtering, drinking a beer. I wonder if he caught anything?

crab pots

When the boats come in at night (or early morning) you know they're coming long before they actually arrive. A loud siren sounds. One siren means sardines are coming. Two for mackerel. All the buyers make a run for the auction house. In come the boats. There's lots of commotion. The ice machine cranks up. The seagulls swarm and hover over the boats. The auction begins. Another long day's (or night's) work is over.

I love strolling through the port area with the piles of crab pots, fishing nets, bouys, and wooden crates. I even love the smell of the fish.

The fishermen work hard, but they also know how to play hard. In a village with only 1,000 inhabitants there are 11 bars. On any given day you can walk into La Parrillada and see groups of old men drinking cognac and playing cards.

Galicia is full of these quaint fishing villages, but Portosin is special to Jose's family because of the many summers spent there since he was a child. The population has grown, the old fisherman houses have all but been replaced with apartment blocks, and a large part of the beach has been turned into a parking lot, but the fishing boats still come and go like they always have.