Controversial Fishing
By a Staff Writer
“I got out of one kind, and into another!”
Tuna fishing has become controversial since the U.S. government limited the number of porpoises that may be killed in the nets of the tuna fishermen. “Awake!” interviewed Roger Soares, who for years operated his own boat. Now retired from tuna fishing, he is involved in another kind, and it too is controversial.
“THE purse-seine net encircled the herd of porpoises, its top edge supported by cork floats, the rest of it sinking many fathoms down into the water. It formed a circular wall of net with no bottom and deep enough to enclose the yellowfin tuna that swam beneath the porpoises. As others pursed shut the bottom of the net, I and a couple of other young men jumped into the water to help the porpoises over the corkline and set them free. It was dangerous work, for sharks were also encircled by the net.”
Thus Roger Soares described one of his jobs in the early days of his career as a tuna fisherman. It emphasizes one point: responsible fishermen value the porpoises and try to save as many as possible.
“Roger, how did you get started,” I asked.
“Through my dad. He is Portuguese. Most of the tuna fishermen out of San Diego in those days were Portuguese, Italian or Japanese. He started when he was 10. It was pole fishing then; the nets came later. He and his brother worked together, finally got a boat of their own, and eventually several boats. At 16 I started working summertimes on my dad’s boat. It was pole fishing, with bait. At that time, 1956, there were only five or six bait boats on the West Coast that had converted to using purse-seine nets made of nylon. A couple of years later I worked with nets—that’s when I would dive in to help the porpoises over the corkline.”
“With the sharks?” I prompted.
“With the sharks. There were some injuries. One boy I knew died from a shark attack.” After a pause he continued: “By the time I was 21 I became captain on one of the boats, a big purse seiner,”
The Porpoise Becomes a Factor
“And with the purse-seine net,” I said, “porpoise and fishermen become involved.”
“That’s right,” Roger said. “When it was all pole fishing it was noted that the yellowfin tuna were often under the porpoise herds. So when the nets came into use they were dropped around the porpoises to catch the tuna that swam beneath them.”
“Is it known why the tuna swim under the porpoises?” I asked.
“There may be some kind of communication. Maybe the porpoises kick up a lot of feed with their diving and jumping, and the fish grab it. We also find tuna under logs and debris, because of the shade or, possibly, sound created there. Maybe that’s why the tuna swim under the porpoises—the shade from the porpoises. There may also be other reasons.”
“However,” he continued, “not all porpoise herds carry tuna under them. We don’t know why. We have to look for certain signs. Are there fish jumping around them? Are man-of-war birds circling high overhead? Do you see little white pigeons close to the water? These are telltale signs that tuna are present.”
“After you’ve located porpoises with tuna under them,” I asked, “how do you proceed?”
“Speedboats are sent out to turn and bunch up the porpoises. The tuna remain underneath them. The net is stacked on the back of the boat, one end attached to what is called a purse-seine skiff, the other end to the big boat. The skiff slides down into the water pulling one end of the net down with it. The big vessel makes a circle around the porpoises, pulling the net along behind it. All the while the speedboats keep the porpoises within the encircling net until the circle is closed. Then the bottom of the net is pursed shut . . .”
“You mean,” I interrupted, “as you would draw the purse strings to close a money pouch?”
“Exactly. Then the corkline holding the net at the surface of the water begins to be drawn in until it tightens around its load of fish, and, of course, the porpoises also. In the past many porpoises died in the nets and the environmentalists were incensed. The U.S. government set limits on the number of porpoises that could be killed, and this enraged the fishermen.”
Coping with the Quotas
I asked about the quotas.
“In 1977,” he informed me, “the quota allowed a kill of over 62,000. The fishermen killed 24,100. By 1980 the quota had dropped to 31,100, and only 12,400 were killed.”
“How were the fishermen able to cut the kill rate so much?” I asked.
“By what they call a backdown maneuver. When the bottom of the net has been pursed, or closed, the upper corkline is drawn in enough to lose its slack and form an even but still big circle all the way around. The boat is put in reverse and as the boat backs up it puts a drag on the net loaded with fish. This causes the floating corkline farthest from the boat to sink a foot or two beneath the surface of the water. This becomes an escape route for the porpoises. Men go to this area and help porpoises over the corkline.
“Not all get across. Some will dive instead, and they may get their snouts entangled in the net and suffocate. To cut down this loss, fine-mesh netting in crucial sections has replaced the coarse netting. Originally the nylon mesh openings were four and a half inches (11 cm), and porpoise snouts poked through it and the animals became entangled. With the fine-mesh netting the snouts will not penetrate and no entangling occurs.”
“How big are the nets?” I asked.
“When I first started they were 450 fathoms long and 36 deep. A fathom is six feet. Now they are over 1,000 fathoms long and go down 70 or 80 fathoms.”
“I’m sure that it has cost the fishermen time and money to save more porpoises,” I said. “Even so, I read that a few years ago a catch of tuna was worth a million dollars. It must be much more now.”
“It’s more, but fuel prices have skyrocketed. A boat out four or five months spends several hundred thousand dollars on fuel alone. The food it carries for the crew costs more. Mortgage interest is higher. As you said, meeting the government’s kill-rate quotas costs time and money—something their competition sailing under foreign flags doesn’t have to worry about. And, finally, all of this is still a gamble until you have your ship’s hold filled with tuna.”
“You make it sound ominous.”
“The fisherman makes a good living, but on the basis of an hourly wage, it isn’t all that much.”
“You’re retired now,” I said. “You must have some good memories of your years at sea.”
Memories
“Yes, I do. Men working hard as a team. Big catches. The sea, peaceful and calm. Or exciting storms as wind and waves go wild. And the porpoises. They are so smart. There are some that can never be caught. They won’t be bunched up by the speedboats, won’t react to anything we do. They see us coming and leave, taking the tuna with them.
“And yet, smart as they are, why don’t more of them jump over the corkline and escape? The fishermen think it may be their sonar that reports the line and the net as obstacles. One time while in the water I was helping them over the corkline, and one of them came up to me and put its snout under my arm and kept shaking its head in the air for me to get its snout over the net. I was touched. I understand how people can become emotional about them.
“One experience I’ll never forget. We had sighted a big school of porpoises. We knew it carried lots of tuna under it—fish were jumping, birds circling. We also saw two killer whales—like Shamu at Sea World, only these were wild. They were stalking the porpoises, one on each side of the school. For half a day they followed the terrified, fleeing porpoises, tiring them out. At times three or four porpoises would leave the school, trying to lure the whales away. No success, and the school, exhausted now, bunched together. The whales then raced into the center of the school.
“I still hoped to get the tuna that were under the porpoises, so I steered the boat into the middle of the school, hoping to scare off the whales. But they know no fear. Suddenly one of them shot out of the water 10 feet (3 m) from me and grabbed a leaping porpoise in midair, like a dog snatching a bone. I’ll never forget that leap and his disappearing into the crystal-blue depths with the porpoise in his mouth.”
We both sat silent for a while, thinking. Finally I asked, “You’re retired now. Why? You’re still a young man.”
“There are a number of reasons. I quit in 1972. The pressure was increasing. The industry was having more and more problems. The environmentalists were on our backs. The government put us in a regulatory net and kept pulling the purse strings tighter and tighter. That wasn’t all bad. It did make the fishermen save thousands of porpoises. However, it also increased our costs and cut down on our catches. Mainly, I guess it was the pressure. I felt as if I were in a goldfish bowl, with government and groups taking pokes at me. I just no longer felt up to all the hassle, so I quit.”
Roger smiled as he added: “I got out of one kind of fishing and into another, and both of them controversial.”
The Other Kind of Fishing
“That,” I said, “calls for some explaining. I know the kind you got out of, but what kind did you get into, and how did you get into it?”
“Jesus tells what kind, at Matthew 4:19: ‘Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ The ‘how’ is a longer story.” He took a moment to marshal his thoughts, then began.
“I was a Catholic. My wife, Elizabeth, was also. I became disillusioned with Catholicism and all religion. Our biggest fights were over going to church—she wanted to, I didn’t. I would go, then walk out, and the children would leave with me. That really upset her. ‘You’re setting a bad example,’ she would protest. ‘I’m sorry,’ I’d say, ‘but there’s nothing here for me.’
“I believed in God. Out fishing I’d seen many awesome displays of his power, and I often thought of the 107th Psalm 107:23-30: ‘Those going down to the sea in the ships, doing business on vast waters, they are the ones that have seen the works of Jehovah and his wonderful works in the depths; how he says the word and causes a tempestuous wind to arise, so that it lifts up its waves. They go up to the heavens, they go down to the bottoms. Because of the calamity their very soul finds itself melting. They reel and move unsteadily like a drunken man, and even all their wisdom proves confused. And they begin crying out to Jehovah in their distress, and out of the stresses upon them he brings them forth. He causes the windstorm to stand at a calm, so that the waves of the sea keep quiet. And they rejoice because these become still, and he leads them to the haven of their delight.”’
By this time Roger and I had been joined by Elizabeth. She related her eventual disenchantment with the Catholic Church when a “Las Vegas” night was held. There was gambling, the husbands were dealers, the wives cocktail waitresses, a homosexual priest was there—the whole evening was a blow to her faith in the Church.
“Two things then happened,” Elizabeth recalled. “My daughter came home from Catholic school one day and said: ‘OK, Mom, that’s it. I’m not going anymore.’ I was shocked. ‘What do you mean? Don’t you want to learn about God?’ ‘I’m not learning a thing,’ she said. ‘There’s bad language, bad conduct. I’m wasting my time.’ So I took her out. I was worried, prayed a lot, and wanted God to be in the lives of my family.
“It was about that time that the second thing happened: a tract was left at our home.”
Roger took up the story.
“My wife gave me the tract and said, ‘Why don’t you read this? It sounds good.’ I did. It sounded good. We learned later that it was from Jehovah’s Witnesses and that my mother had been studying with one of them for over a year. She sent this Witness over to talk to us. I got into an argument with her. ‘How do you know your religion is the right one? Religion’s a big rip-off!’
“Nevertheless, the outcome was a Bible study in our home. I sat in on it only to monitor it: it might be Communistic and I didn’t want my wife and children brainwashed. The result? Not Communism, not brainwashing, but proof from the Bible.
“That first study was on a Monday evening. Tuesday evening we went to the Witnesses’ meeting at their Kingdom Hall, and before the month was over we went to one of their conventions. My wife and I were baptized. This happened in 1976. We’ve been active Witnesses ever since.”
“Wasn’t that a fast switch for you, from thinking religion was a rip-off to devoting your life to it?” I asked. “How do you explain that?”
“What I learned about the Bible impressed me, yes, but I think that at that time the main thing was the Witnesses themselves, especially the children. They sat quietly through the meetings, answered questions, were used on the programs. We also went through the Witnesses’ printing plant at their world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. Again it was the examples we saw—hundreds of young men and women devoting their time freely to produce Bible literature.”
New Fishing, New Controversy
“I suppose this connects up,” I said, “with your statement that you’re into a new kind of fishing now.”
“It does. Earlier I quoted Jesus’ words to Peter and Andrew, fishermen who were letting their net down into the Sea of Galilee at the time. He told them to follow him and he would make them ‘fishers of men.’ Immediately they entered into this new kind of fishing, and that’s the kind I’m into now.”
“You also said it was controversial,” I reminded him.
“We prefer it not to be,” Roger said. “However, Jesus warned that it would be, that it would divide families and bring persecution from men and nations. Jehovah’s Witnesses have found it to be so. Their work as ‘fishers of men’ has even been banned in many countries at various times. In my tuna fishing there was some justification for the government regulations; there is no justification for interfering with ‘fishing for men.”’
We sat silent for a moment, then Roger summed it all up, saying: “So you see, this is the second time around for me in controversial fishing. Only this time the controversy is not over the saving of as many porpoises as possible, but the saving of as many people as possible.”