Food (part 2)

I've been trying to write about the Gambian fishing industry for a couple of weeks, but the MRC blocking software has been obstructing me ... but after a prolonged bout of pleading, they have allowed me back in at last.

So, I'm going to write more on food : I've started getting into fish here, both the cooking and eating of it, and also finding out a bit about where are how it is caught here...




Most fish here is caught from small boats (like left) that operate on day trips out of the small port at Bakau (see below), with is just 1km down the road from where I live ... so I see lots of these boats (really just oversized canoes!) headed out of a morning, and then sailing back about 4pm.




This is the dock where they unload all the catch at the end of the day, which is done by a relay of small boys carrying boxes of fish out from neck deep water ...







The next stage is the packing in ice and selling of the fish. I went and bought fish last week, direct from the market sellers. I got a big Red snapper filleted and de-boned on the spot for about £2.




Finally, the majority of the fish caught get dried in the sun or in a smokehouse before being transported in-land.








After reading the excellent book "End of the line" (by Charles Clover) about the disastrous state of overfishing across the world, I had totally gone off the whole fishing industry, especially the EU and Japanese fleets - definite recommended reading for budding biological science journalists. Here in Gambia, I'm much more enthusiastic about the fishing industry - although they probably catch too much, they aren't wrecking entire marine environments, and they are really only very small scale operators ... but it makes me really angry when I see big trawlers way offshore - I suspect they are probably EU fish "poachers". But mostly here it is boats like this: