Our first stop was on the beach out near Dixcove (about 5 hours west along the coast from the capitol city of Accra - unless you spend 2 hours looking for a currency exchange bureau in Takoradi, in which case it is 7 hours and you barely arrive before dark - not that we would know anything about that). We stayed at a cute little conglomeration of round huts built using African materials and methods (http://www.ghanaspirit.com/) and run by a Ghanaian/British couple.
We awoke the first morning at 5:30 to rhythmic counting and yelling outside our window. I got up to look and said to Leslie, “Come look. Some guys are playing tug-of-war with the sea.” Well, they weren’t really, but it looked like it. A large
wooden boat with about 6 oars on each side had taken fishing nets out at dawn. All but three oarsmen then jumped out and pulled the ends of the net to shore. One side at a time, about 12 men pulled the two sides of the net (in a big horseshoe) in to the beach.A guy at the back would call out the cadence in rhythm with the waves so that as a set of waves was coming in they would pull the rope in, then the man at the very back anchor it to a tree. Then, when the undertow pulled out, they could all rest with the big tree holding the rope fast until the next set of incoming waves.
It took about two to three hours for one set of nets to be pulled in on both sides. The closer the nets came the more people joined in pulling them in and holding the nets up out of the water to prevent drag and tangling, and folding them to
carry back to the village for the next day. Finally, when the last bit of net came ashore they had somehow transferred the contents to a net sleeve – what I can only describe as a fishnet stocking (ha!) – also for carrying back to the village. Any fish that fell out were raked into a pile and sorted into a big pan for someone to… yep, carry back to the village – on her head. Waste not...Two sets of nets were pulled in over the course of the day. Some days they do all that work for hardly any fish at all. Apparently the government has sold the rights to offshore fishing to the Koreans, so there is little left for the local fisher folk. This day, they seemed relatively happy, but as you can see, there are only a couple big fish and loads of small ones. I have seen a lot of
smoked / dried small fish like this in the market so that must be what they do with them. I don’t know how the big ones are handled, although they seem to have a good market with the three nearby beach resorts – although “resort” is a relative term, as we only had electricity for about 4 hours each evening and no hot water.
We’re not complaining, though! They had the best banana chocolate crepes ever! We have happy faces, lots of seashells, and sand in our… Oh, never mind. I don’t want to make you jealous!
XO
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