It's tough to imagine what this photo is but it was early, still before sunrise just south of Congo Town and these fellows had been netting bonefish as they schooled near the beach by the hundreds or more. they've just hauled their catch back upon shore and are busy running it away from the beach.
I heard the price was about $15 a fish in Nassau. They were taking over a hundred fish a netting. Figure that out and they were making $1500 a haul! Of course then they had to share it four or five ways with others with trucks to haul the catch and with freezers. There was a freezer at the Congo Town store run by Mr. Davis with netted fish in it and I'm sure there had to be others around too. Figuring that a good hook and line fisherman can legally take twenty or thirty fish a day and sell them lawfully, it's hard to understand the "tradition" of netting except it's fast and seems easy and lucrative.
Running up the beach with a bucket of netted bonefish. Fearing that I might call the police, I think. Of course, I never did. I was the visitor in their community. But I did witness the local political official watching the netting without doing anything about it. He said they, whoever "they" were-perhaps the police, should lock up the nets and so stop the poaching without jailing anyone, which seemed an extreme punishment for fishing! He, of course, has to live there and is related to many of the individuals involved. Or so I was told and so I understood his reluctance to be involved. I guess I had to agree, silently, about not jailing people but the netting went on day in and day out, even before and after a major cocaine arrest was made just up the beach. I even discovered my landlord returning home with a pickup full of fish and a hundred foot net on more than one day. He didn't look sheepish. Rather he looked satisfied with a good hour's work!
I did manage to get this photo before the fish were run off into
the bush a few days later.
It wasn't really my intent
to take these photos, I was fly fishing for bonefish and had my camera along.
Many shots came out too dark to see because of the early hour of the usual
netting activity. The net was left up on the beach everyday and night for
the nearly two weeks I was there in November (see right). Everyone knew
it was there. It wasn't the only net left on the beach either. Some of the
local residents said they should be cut up into hammocks and serve two purposes
but respect for other's property was too great for that kind of vigilanty
justice.
This was an interesting situation. I was bone fishing and had a fish
hooked when the netters arrived and started quickly hauling their net into
the ocean because my fish was a part of a big school. There was also a big
Lemon shark following the school just ten or twenty feet from us. Despite
my attempts to move away, the netters nearly surrounded me in their attempts
to get to the school and when the school passed me, they had them! Later
on shore, they had a ten pound bonefish dead on the sand as well as one
pounders as they strung fish on lines and filled buckets. I counted 142
fish. Others lay dying in the surf, being picked up by the sharks.
I asked these fellows and others during the week if they thought they were influencing the fishing or depleting the stocks. They said that bonefish had been netted for generations and it never made a difference. I wondered out loud if they knew how valuable that ten pounder on the sand was to a fisherman, calling it a "thousand dollar fish". They looked surprised but didn't believe me. I suggested they were taking from their neighbors when the fishermen didn't come back because of the netting. They looked doubtful about that too but often made an attempt to hide their faces. They were genial but determined to practice their craft, as were others up and down the coast from Driggs Hill to The Bluff that I witnessed. In the two weeks I was there, I figure I witnessed the taking of three or four thousand bonefish and that was just morning and evening netting near my rental house in Congo Town when I wasn't flats fishing elsewhere.
I don't know what the answer is but that something needs to be done to limit the damage of netting seems clear to even the Androsians I talked to.