Fishing for Our Supper

Our week in Sri Lanka was incredibly relaxing and stress-free (after we got there).  Having done five family beach vacations, I've refined over the years what we need to have the best possible (i.e. least stressful) vacation, and this year I was able to get the mix of housing, food, and location just right.  Thankfully everyone loves swimming, so we were happy to spend the entire week doing the same thing every day.  

We would wake up, have a breakfast of massive amounts of fruit, pancakes, eggs, and bacon.  Then we would put on sunscreen, walk through the coconut grove beyond the pool, and onto the beach where we would swim.  Halfway through the morning, we'd reapply sunscreen, go back to swimming, and eventually end the morning in the pool.  Lunch was more fruit and toast.  After some quiet time to avoid the intense sun, we'd swim again in the late afternoon before having a delicious dinner of Sri Lankan curry.  

One morning Joseph and Eleanor had gotten their sunscreen on first and didn't want to wait for us, so they headed out to the beach.  A few minutes later we went out the gate to find Joseph and Eleanor hauling on a rope that was coming out of the surf.  A local Sri Lankan waved us over and told us to help pull the rope, so we all found our places and started hauling.  

After a few minutes, we realized that we were helping the local fishermen to pull in their catch for the day.  They would start out the morning by paddling their boat out past the surf line and laying a long net that could stretch as long as a kilometer.  Then they start pulling it in by hand.  

We were drafted at the beginning of their pulling and didn't realize exactly what we had signed up for.  It turns out that pulling a rope is a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of long hard work when you're pulling a rope that is attached to a kilometer-long fishing net.

At first I thought that we'd were just pulling the rope until the first buoy made it to the shore which is still a long time to pull a rope in the hot sun and increasingly hot sand.  But as we made it to the first buoy and started pulling in fishing net, I looked out to sea and realized how far out the buoys stretched.  

After awhile, it turned into a rhythm.  Walk the net until you reached the coil at the end, then go back to the surf, get a new spot, and walk it up to the pile again.  After 10-15 minutes, walk down the beach to a new spot and resume pulling.  

As I looked down the beach, I noticed another team of net pullers who also were hauling in their fish for the day.  But as we kept pulling and walking the rope down the beach, I realized that we were all pulling in the same net - they were just on the other end.  

Both teams continued to pull, and after almost an hour and half we met and began to haul the net with the fish out.  After all that pulling, we were excited to see what got hauled out of the sea.  When the net finally emerged, it was filled with about a thousand pounds of flopping, squirming fish.  The fishermen opened the bag up, pulled out a couple of live fish, and handed them to us as thanks for our help.

We walked back to the house with aching hands, burnt and abraded feet from the rough hot, sand, and a newfound appreciation for the hard work that the fishermen undertook every day.  We handed the (now dead) fish over to the cook for our dinner that night.  When we ate them deliciously seasoned and grilled, I can definitely say that I have never appreciated fish like we did that night.