Balancing on the edge of the wooden catamaran, Anura Aparekkag stares long and hard at the blue waters lapping at the sides of his boat. ”No fish today. No fish yesterday. They are too scared to come back here,” he says.
In the two hours since leaving the sands of Koggala, the 5m vessel has plied the waters along the coast in a futile search for fish that once could be scooped out of this ocean by hand.
The last time anybody managed a sizeable haul was before the huge waves broke over the palm-fringed beaches, about 20km east of the southern Sri Lankan city of Galle. ”We can get 7 000 rupees [$69] on a good day. Even when it is bad we will get a few thousand rupees [for the catch]. But since the tsunami there is nothing here.”
For Anura (36) the cost of coming back to shore empty-handed is high. With three children to feed, he cannot afford to be without cash for long. He cast his nets for the first time this year earlier this week, having spent three days looking for his father, Siripala. The 75-year-old’s body was found under the rubble of a nearby house.
The fisherman, who leads a crew of seven, then spent a week searching for the boats, nets and motors that had been swallowed up by the ocean. Of the six catamarans that Anura and his crew worked on, only one survived. ”One net can cost 100 000 rupees [about $1 000]. Almost all of them were gone and we had to fix them before going out,” says Anura.
Everybody has a theory as to why the ocean is empty. Some point to the daily arrival of a troop transporter on Koggala beach from the USS Duluth which disgorges bulldozers, trucks and marines to help with the relief efforts. Such a big ship must have scared away the fish. Others claim that when the tsunami receded the waters withdrew, driving away marine life, before roaring back to smash the coast.
Whatever the reasons, everyone agrees that there are fewer fish swimming close to the shore. Further up the coast, in Beruwala, more than 1 000 catamarans are gone.
Here a group of fisherman on the beach, which is littered with the smashed hulks of trawlers and matted clumps of nets, begin drawing a net closer to shore. When the catch arrives, nobody can disguise their disappointment. Swimming between the nylon loops are half a dozen small fish known locally as pannava .
”We would not even get 10 rupees for this. How can we feed our families with so little to sell?” says Jayanta Chandresree, a 48-year-old fisherman.
The effects of the tsunami on the Sri Lankan economy are becoming apparent. Subsistence fishermen are the backbone of the industry, and an estimated 100 000 coastal fisherman, whose average income was a meagre dollar a day, are now unemployed.
Sri Lanka harvests 300 000 tonnes of fish a year and the tourist trade and domestic households bought almost all of it. But after the killer waves, seafood dropped off the menus of hotels and is unwanted in the kitchens of many homes. Sri Lankans have avoided the fish, believing that Indian Ocean sea creatures have feasted on people who were swept out to sea.
Now there is not only little in the sea and few boats ready to catch it, but seafood sales have plummeted. Earlier this week, a delegation of fishermen delivered a crate of fish to the presidential palace. Having talked their way into the building they managed to drop it on to the table during a Cabinet meeting, begging officials to eat the contents.
What remains unclear is how fisherman affected by the tsunami will be compensated. Most of those who work along the rim of the Indian Ocean do not have insurance for the kind of disaster they encountered in December. ”There are about 100 big boats damaged here. Each one employs at least 30 people,” says Dhammika, a fisherman who works on a trawler in Beruwala.
”But we cannot fix them because the insurance does not cover for tsunamis. The government needs to help us quickly otherwise the whole industry will sink.” – Guardian Unlimited Â