Empowering the Fishermen

Even in the calm weather the 35 meter trawler was tossing uncomfortably in the long ocean swell. It was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles from nowhere. I had just scrambled aboard a fishing vessel from a small rubber boat which I had used to cover the short distance from our stopped oil tanker.

In 2002 I was on a product tanker chartered to provide bunkers to fishing vessels operating in the rich fishing grounds off East Africa.

The skipper remained inside the bridge watching me hauled up by his miserable fishing hands. They had already been at sea in the small trawler for six months. Another three will pass before they touched land.

“Nee Hao Ma”, I shouted at them. ‘How are you?’

It took some time for the Chinese crew to comprehend my accent. Then they broke into smiles.

“Hen Hao! Bu Hen Hao!” ‘Fine! Very Fine!’

My knowledge of Chinese language didn’t exytend beyond that. I stepped onto the deck strewed with nets and fishing remains, I wondered, a little disdainfully, how lucky I was to be on a luxurious tanker.

I entered the small bridge and handed over the papers to the skipper. Along with it I gave him a small plastic bottle containing a sample of the oil that we had transferred.

The Japanese skipper was furious at me for entering his precious bridge without taking my shoes off. He took the sample from me and threw it out into the sea with a mighty heave. Then he proceeded to put his scrawl on the papers.

Meanwhile I took in the surprisingly neat and clean bridge. Prominently placed on the sill was a compact electronic charting system. It had digital charts for the entire region equivalent to 350 paper charts. The cumbersome chart table with paper charts that clutters a small bridge was missing.

Fishing vessels are not covered under the IMO regulations. In India for example they come under the local state maritime board. Any equipment it has is due to the support received by the company/state to which the fishing vessel belongs. Not because it is mandatory.

In the Indian Ocean there are a lot of fishing vessels coming from the far-east and Mediterranean. Local fishermen operate generally near the coast. As a community the Indian Ocean littoral states are poor and do not possess sophisticated vessels. In India fishermen are perceived as the under-privileged class. They do not receive the same support from the state as fishermen from developed countries do.

Their boats are nowadays fitted with GPS track plotters. They need digital charts on them to venture out to sea far from their home-ports. It’s not possible to maintain paper charts on a small tossing vessel.

A common enemy of the Somali and the Indian fishermen are the poachers who come from distant lands. Many Somali fishermen over the years have graduated into pirates. Earlier they were trying to protect their waters all by themselves as they did not have functioning governments. Today they have become the targets of the world navy including the Indian navy.

I wonder if we have unwittingly helped the common enemy of the local fishermen of the littoral states in this complicated state of affairs.