Saturday, November 5
Saturday I went with Jonas to watch the fisherman pull in fishing nets on the beach. I’ve been wanting to do this since I came to Cape Coast but I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen. Luckily, Jonas is the perfect person since he knows about fishing and he knew their schedule. So I told him about this a couple of weeks ago and he made it happen! The fishermen go out early in the morning before the sun comes up with their boats to put the nets in the water. Then they let them sit there until early afternoon. I think they start pulling them in early, but I’m not sure when that starts. We got to the beach around 1:30 to watch them pull for about 30 minutes until they got the nets fully on the shore. It’s so much hard work, and for such a long time! We watched two different nets be pulled. It was fascinating! The first net that they pulled had a lot of tiny fish in it. It was so heavy and you could see them straining to get it in. Plus the waves made it harder to pull. It’s amazing to me that these men do this every day except Tuesday (that’s their day off). I asked Jonas how much they might get for all of these fish. He said maybe they would get 50 or 100 cedis today. Basically they sell all of these fish and they divided up among however many people are there to pull in the net. So it’s not very much money. And this is their livelihood. Such hard work for what seems like so little gain. But they are hard workers! There’s no doubt about that.
What happens when they get the nets pulled in is they then divide the fish up and put it all out in these big bowls on the beach. Lots of women come there to buy the fish from them to go sell at the market. Jonas told me that some of these women are the wives of some of the men who are pulling the nets. So hopefully they get a little bit more at market than they get buying it here. Because buying it on the beach is like buying it wholesale and then you mark it up at retail price when you go sell it in town.
When I told Antoinette we were going to watch the fishermen, she told us to get her some fish so we did. This is the bucket of fish that we got for her. The guy wanted 70 cedis for it but Jonas told him we would give him 50 cedis. I thought that was insanely cheap! That’s about like $4 USD. And there were three octopi in there along with several big fish. I can’t believe how inexpensive things are here. And with the fact that the dollar has risen in value, it devalues the Ghanaian cedi, so it’s even cheaper for me even though it’s more expensive for them. It’s really weird how that works and I don’t like it for my Ghanaian friends and neighbors.
Anyway, after the first net came in, we watched a second net be pulled. It came out in three different clumps that they had to pull from the ocean. But what I learned is that there were lots of clumps of what I learned was whale snot in there. They look like huge jellyfish with no tentacles. They are perfectly round and very symmetrically formed. But someone on the beach could see that I wondered what it was and told us that it was somehow he explained that it’s stuff that comes out of the whale’s nose. GROSS! Though they pulled all of that out of the ocean, they just left it on the beach because you can’t do anything with it.
This is WHALE SNOT!
My editorial in this video is before I learned what this was. But you can see how big it is...
I asked Jonas if what they pulled today was a good hall and he said not really. He said it wasn’t as much fish as they would want it to be and they aren’t going to get very much money for it. So that was not great. Even still, it was so cool to go out there and watch them do this.
After that, I wanted to take some pictures of the big boats they use to take the nets out to sea. They are just amazing. They are huge and very picturesque. These boats don't have any motors on them, so the men paddle out to sea to drop the nets. Some boats do have motors, but this type does not.
Here are some pics of that part of the adventure.
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