6/04/02 | To fish or not to fish

We consider ourselves basically honest, ethical people. We usually try to play by the rules. But when it comes to fishing, sometimes it's hard to know what the rules are.

Some countries make their rules perfectly clear. In the Bahamas, the mandatory cruising permit fee of $100 includes a fishing license, with the local regulations listed on the back. No spearfishing is allowed in Bonaire, but anything goes in Martinique. Taking lobster is prohibited in most countries during the summer months, when they breed, and many countries have marine parks or other protected areas where no fishing at all is allowed.

Frequently, the local people are either exempted from, or outright ignore, the regulations. For example, although fishing is prohibited in the marine park which encompasses the area of West End, Roatan, locals are permitted to fish with handlines. But although lobster season was closed while we were there, we were still offered lobster for sale by local divers, and the restaurants still continued to have it on their menus. This sort of thing always makes us uneasy, since it's really the tourism industry that is driving these guys, the huge prices (relatively speaking) that lobster commands, and its popularity on the tourist restaurant menus.

We have conflicting information about Glover's Reef, the first of the two offshore atolls we are visiting in Belize. Some guides say it is a marine park, others say it is not. We do know that the lobster season has been closed here in Belize since March 15th. But when we arrived, the first things we saw were half a dozen fishing skiffs, with lobster divers working the reef. They were spread out across a short section of the south end of Glover's, methodically picking over the inner edge of the lagoon, leapfrogging each other to the west as each diver finished cleaning out the lobsters in his area. In the afternoon, a somewhat larger boat came by to collect the catch and deliver supplies. The next day we saw them again, a little further down the reef, hard at work even as we were making breakfast at 7:00.

So, what do we do?  We decided that if commercial fishing goes on here, then we can fish too. Just outside the reef where the lobstermen were, we found hogfish, grey and mahogany snappers, porgies, goatfish, and jacks. We speared a few snappers, then, as we were near the lobster divers, we decided we could take a lobster, too (since otherwise it would just get taken by them!). We found several, and took just one, first checking to make sure it wasn't an egg-carrying female.

It wasn't until we got up to Long Cay, halfway up Glover's Reef, that we learned the situation. There's a sort of resort run by Slickrock Adventures (out of Moab, Utah, amazingly), and a dive shop called Off the Wall Diving on Long Cay, and we talked with the dive operation's boatman, Junior. It turns out that part of Glover's Reef is a marine park, and the section we'd seen the lobster divers working (and that we also fished in) is not part of the park. Up where we'd moved to, the patch reefs inside the barrier reef were off limits, but outside the atoll was "fishable".

And boy, did we fish! The hot, windless days ensured that we'd spend as much of each day in the water as we could. Under normal conditions, the entire east side of the barrier reef would be assaulted by huge breaking waves, but in these calms it was easy and pleasant to dinghy out on the "windward" side to snorkel. Besides being the only legal place to fish, outside the barrier reef the water is crystal clear. (We spent one afternoon snorkeling on the inside, and although there were a surprising number of fish and lobster, the water clarity was only okay.) We have seen more huge groupers here than we have ever seen in one place, of several different species:  Nassau, tiger, yellowfin, and in particular black groupers, which have very beautiful markings. Most of these groupers were too big for us to even consider spearing -- they'd simply swim off with our spears! We spent twenty minutes just hanging over a gigantic school of schoolmaster snappers which were swimming in a loose circle around a set of reefs, in one set of crevices, out another, over and over and over, hundreds of them flashing yellow fins and silvery bodies. Not very far away we saw a school of the larger and less common dog snapper. There were only a few dozen, nothing like the much larger school of schoolmasters, but each fish probably measured at least 18 inches, and several were pushing 3 feet. We'd gotten all the meat we wanted that day, so Britt and I just hung out and watched them. Britt (who can stay submerged for what seems to me like a couple of hours) descended and clung to a rock, and darned if the largest dog snapper didn't swim almost right up to his nose and look him in the eye. Animal magnetism?  Fish magnetism, anyway!

A few mooring buoys sit on the edge of a sandy area, right next to the wall which drops off out of sight, and after a deep but exhilarating snorkel there, we came back with our tanks. (Of course, while snorkeling near a dive buoy we never bring our spears. We also don't spear fish where we can be seen by divers, "tourist-snorkelers", or by any tourists hanging out on the beach. And we never hunt using SCUBA, only snorkeling.) The dive was tremendous; we zigzagged among towering coral heads, surrounded by many big groupers, snappers, triggerfish, and filefish. We even saw two sea turtles, one quite large. It astonishes us that the reefs are in such good shape after being pummeled by Hurricane Mitch a few years back. Mitch leveled a small cay near Long Cay; on the chart it's shown as a wooded island, now it's just a sandbar barely big enough for a small tent.

This place is a jewel. We are having a wonderful time, fishing until we have our "quota" -- enough for dinner and the next day's lunch -- and then just enjoying the sea life that swims around us. But it's a sad thing that places like this are so rare. It's not its status as a park that has kept the big fish here; we're fishing outside the park boundaries, and there are still plenty of fish. Even though we are at the moment the only yachties here, Glover's Reef is not really off the beaten path for cruisers (although there are far fewer in the western Caribbean than in the Bahamas or the eastern Caribbean). And although we saw what looked like a fairly intensive commercial lobstering operation, we have still seen many lobsters.

What seems to us to be the common thread among places with a lot of sea life is that none of them are very close to where people live. The Out Islands of the Bahamas, the Aves of Venezuela, these outer Belizean atolls -- all of these places are far from any local population. Anywhere that local islanders can fish, they do. And after years and years of fishing in places like Puerto Rico, Grenada, and the San Blas islands of Panama, there simply aren't that many fish left. The fish taken by cruisers (most of whom don't fish, in our experience) don't make a lot of difference. So rules where locals are allowed to fish, and visitors aren't, don't really address the problem. And of course there needs to be enforcement; for example, Bonaire prohibits any sort of spearing, but the islanders reportedly spearfish anyway, and we certainly noticed a dearth of large edible fish.

We're currently anchored in another marine park, this one at Half Moon Cay in the Lighthouse Reef atoll, where we motored (another flat calm day) from Glover's yesterday. No fishing for us here. Not just because we're in a park -- we caught a wahoo yesterday on the way up! (We caught a booby too, stupid bird. It then flew around the boat just above the water, wrapping the fishing line around our keel. Britt had to jump overboard to free the line and the bird.) As soon as we anchored near a few small coral heads, Britt set up his filet table and went to work on the wahoo, tossing the scraps overboard. So instead of the reef fish feeding us, we fed the fish! I put on my mask and snorkel and went overboard to watch; a mutton snapper slurped up the big pieces, while a coney (a small seabass) and several yellowtails argued over the smaller bits. Eventually the mutton snapper got full and wandered off, to be replaced by two barracuda and a big black grouper. After Britt had gotten all the big hunks of meat off, he jumped in with the carcass and a stainless steel knife, so he could watch the fish scrabble over the morsels he cut for them. Finally we got back aboard, leaving the bones for those vacuum cleaners of the deep, the stingrays; we saw one approach just as we climbed out of the water. This morning there was not a single scrap of that fish left on the sand.

So we'll be just sightseers here, while we work on polishing off this wahoo. Then we'll get on the fast track north, to Isla Mujeres and then to Florida.