by Robson Green
Nine hours later, I finally get a bite. It’s a dog tooth tuna and it’s not coming in easily. It’s fighting the current and the speed of the boat, and even though it’s small it’s still quite strong. It’s a hard fish to land and I don’t want to get my fingers anywhere near its ferocious canines. A member of the Scombridae family – not a mad Highland clan but a subclassification of fish that includes bonitos, mackerels and tuna – the dog tooth tuna, in spite of its name, has more in common with its bonito cousins than with pure tunas. It’s fast in the water but it’s the impact and bite that kills the prey. One down, I think to myself
My next fish comes five minutes later. It’s a good fighting fish and we have a decent tussle. I reel it in but am unfamiliar with the species. Junior calls it an ‘oyung-oyung’. It’s definitely my first one of those. I manage to land it. It’s a strong, compact fish with a powerful jaw lined with triangular razor teeth and a blue-green skin. Junior tells me that in English it’s called a bluefish. Bluefish are found all around the world in coastal areas favouring continental shelves, surf beaches or rocky headland. (I’ve got a continental shelf problem: everything’s on the way down.)
My mood has soared and we all head en masse to the market to see what we can get for this brace of fish. I tell Junior about my desert island experience in two days’ time and he says, ‘Robson you are a natural, you could survive on any one of these islands.’ Then he gives me double thumbs-up. I am optimistic. I am actually really good, I think.
At the small open-air market I get 200 pesos, about three quid, for our catch. I give the cash to the children of the locals who have gathered around to watch us film and everyone’s happy. The people here are incredibly charming and friendly in spite of their abject poverty. It’s paradise here but surviving in paradise is far from easy. I’m sure I’ll be OK for a day and night, however.
Port Pilar Harbour
Today we’re heading out to the mighty Philippine Trench forty miles from the shore, and our target is dorado. I have the idea that we will only eat what we catch for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have cooking facilities on board our fishing boat and I intend to show off my culinary skills like a Northern Rick Stein. The four deckhands, wearing classic lampshade hats, ask me if they can bring some food on just in case. I say, ‘No way. We’ll catch loads of fish. I caught two in five minutes yesterday.’
‘Yeah, after nine hours.’
‘Shut up, Craig. Right, everyone turn out their pockets for contraband. If this show’s going to be a success we have to play by the rules. I don’t have anything on me. Does anyone else?’
They shake their heads.
‘Are you sure?’
They nod.
‘Good.’
We set out to the trench. I am experiencing a great high today. The sun is shining; life is good. Deep down, I wonder if I am experiencing one of my manic episodes but I don’t think so. I breathe in the air. I am a fishing god, I tell myself, and I am buzzing with energy and chat. As we are trawling, Junior explains he is looking for bird life, floating debris, which makes false reefs, or any other natural indicators that put us in the right place for a magnificent dorado. We are fishing as nature intended and I can’t wait for our first strike.
Junior says, ‘One year I went fishing every day of the year to work out the best days.’
‘Three hundred and sixty-five days? Wow. And what did you discover?’
‘The fourth day before a new moon is the best.’
‘Is that today?’
‘No,’ he laughs.
I suss out the tiny kitchen area, which is basic and no more than two feet wide. As I leave a deckhand enters and places something quickly in a cupboard. I open the door and find a tin of corned beef inside. I look at him.
‘Oh, ye of little faith. I’m very disappointed. That’s really bad.’
He looks at me sheepishly. The four of them go into a huddle talking in Filipino, probably calling me a name used by British carp fishermen.
*
Six hours later I am feeling like a prize James Blunt, as we have got nothing. The sea is getting lumpy and the sun is due to set in seven hours’ time, which seems a long way away but we need to get back to shore in that time.
Jamie says firmly, ‘We have to catch a fish and we’ll stay here all night if necessary.’
We are starving, I’m feeling faint and I am getting some filthy looks from the crew. I sidle up to the one with the corned beef – I can’t remember his name so let’s call him David.
‘Psst, David. How much for the tin of beef?’
‘What?’
‘How much?’
We are very subtle; it’s like scoring shabú – methamphetamine pills – the drug of choice in South East Asia. I give him a large amount of pesos and wander casually down to the toilet to gorge my contraband. After seven hours of nothing to eat it doesn’t touch the sides. As I wander out, Craig catches me.
‘You bastard. You fucking sneaky bastard.’
I start to giggle nervously. Craig is furious.
‘Jamie! Peter! Robson’s just snaffled a whole tin of corned beef.’
I walk upstairs. Peter looks grey with hunger and Jamie regards me like a bitterly disappointed teacher. But I feel much better. I have a new lease of life.
Another seven hours later the effects of the corned beef have worn off and we still haven’t had even a sniff of a fish. If I thought I looked bad when I arrived, I now look like I’m decomposing. I hear a rustle and see Craig open a bag of crisps.
‘Where d’you get those?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
He shares them with everyone apart from me in retaliation for the bully beef. Craig produces another bag of crisps, again none for me. He eyeballs me, munching mouthful after mouthful. I ignore him and talk to Junior.
‘Well, the fishing’s been great but the catching’s been appalling.’
Junior says, ‘In all my years of fishing, this has been one of my worst days.’
I believe him. I am a jinx and a corn beef criminal. Suddenly, two terns appear above us out of nowhere. Junior points; they are flying high – they have seen something. We see it too: it’s drift-wood, no more than eight feet long and six inches in diameter. Junior turns the boat around; we trawl the lines past it, and bang! I’m into a mahi-mahi. Also known as a dorado or dolphinfish, this creature’s brain size in proportion to its body is large. Some say this is one of the most intelligent species of fish as it can follow simple instructions, but I say, ‘Did they invent the internal combustion engine? Was Pythagoras a dorado? Let’s put it in perspective.’ They’re about as bright as a Sunderland Supporter after a heavy weekend on the piss.
As I wind in the dorado, he comes to the surface and leaps. He’s magnificent, his vibrant green, gold and blue skin glistening in the setting sun. Dorados fight hard and they fight aerially. He jumps again like a Lycra-clad acrobat doing somersaults. Morale has soared, the crew is going to eat and it’s going to be delicious.
I shout, ‘I have caught us supper. You all doubted me but I did it!’
The aerial fight cranks up a notch; I must bring this fish in. I give it one last leap and he jumps off the hook and is gone. The crew is catatonic with shock and I am in the seventh circle of hell, but Jamie is going mental, shouting, ‘That was fucking brilliant! One of the best sequences I have ever filmed. The under-fish triumphed – adversity works so well on telly.’
We all want to deck him.
‘Fuck the programme! We want something to eat.’
I am so pissed off with myself. The deckhands won’t look at me, especially the one who sold me the corned beef. He’s visibly stiffened with internal rage. To make matters worse, Jamie declares he wants us to fish into the night and catch a swordfish. We beg him to let us go home but the footage has given him a second wind. He gives me a piece of bread.
‘Thank you, master,’ I snivel.
But Junior has a cunning plan. We are going to d
rop a line for swordfish very deep, and with six miles below us we’re never going to touch the bottom. We bait the rod, which is huge and a bit like a marlin rod. The swordfish is a billfish and is known as one of the ‘big five’, along with blue marlin, black marlin, striped marlin and sailfish. This striking, dark grey fish has huge black eyes, which help it to see in the deep water over half a mile below the surface, where it resides in the daytime. Its bill is massive in proportion to its body, which it uses like a sword to cut down its prey. It is thus known as the gladiator of the sea, from its name Xiphias gladius (from the Latin gladius, meaning ‘sword’).
To help us catch, Junior lets the boat drift using the wind. In order to slow a conventional boat down, skippers use something called a drogue – an underwater parachute that impedes forward motion. Junior doesn’t have a drogue because he can’t afford one, so ingeniously he uses palm leaves, tied in such a way that they have the same effect. He says nature always solves the problem of a lack of technology. The second part of Junior’s plan is to use two kerosene lamps to try to attract squid. We use a lure like a plastic shrimp with upturned barbs on the end. I drop it ten metres and slowly pull it up towards me. I do this about a hundred times before I finally catch a cephalopod (Ancient Greek for ‘head-feet’, as these creatures have no body). The squid I pull up is seven inches in length and basically a meal for one. By this time I am so tired and hungry I am starting to hallucinate. Junior suggests we use my one and only squid as bait.
I say, ‘But I don’t want to use it as bait, I want to eat it.’
He says, ‘We will catch many with that one.’
I do as I am told and I slowly pull up the hand line.
‘Oh, my God, I have got another one!’ I cry.
‘It’s the same bloody one!’ everyone replies in unison.
All in all, I catch two. Fishing for swordfish has been a complete disaster. It’s the wrong conditions and by 3 a.m. we’ve all had enough. We’ve been twenty-two hours without a proper meal and Craig is beginning to gnaw the edge of the boat, like a pony on its stable door. He’s started to kick the side of the boat as well; he is not a happy pony. He is even unhappier when, after finally reaching land, he hops out of the boat and promptly breaks his ankle. Cameramen with broken ankles are not good news, but luckily, unlike ponies, he can be mended and not shot.
The doctor back at the hotel bandages it up and tells Craig not to walk on it. We could have saved him a job and the production company a call-out fee. The fixer, Enrico, steps in: ‘It’s OK, guys. I know how to operate a camera.’
Thank God for that – we can sleep easy now.
‘Ooh, looks sore. You OK, mate?’ I say sympathetically to Craig.
‘Yeah, it’s just bloody annoying.’
‘Get some rest. [pause] Oh, and Craig, by the way, your broken ankle – it’s all about karma. That was for the second bag of crisps. The first bag of crisps was fine. We were even. Level playing field. But not sharing the second, you Kiwi bum pirate? The universe knows, Craig. The universe knows.’
And the universe does indeed know because, back in my room, as I deliver my final piece to camera about how exhausted I am, a bug starts flying around my head, dive-bombing me like a kamikaze pilot. Argh! It’s a beetle the size of a blackbird.
‘Go away!’
I get a wet hand towel and start to flick at the air, incandescent with fury. Neeeoooooowwww! It goes into flat spin like a World War II bomber at my head, pulling out just before crashing into my ear. I fight back for another ten minutes, waving what I later realised was basically a white flag around my head, before passing out fully clothed and face down on my bed. God knows what it did to me that night. I don’t want to think about it.
I’m feeling like shit the next day but if I’m slightly off colour it’s nothing to the pain poor old Craig is in. However, he carries on like a true champion cameraman. We’re going out by boat to a small island called Kasulian with a guy called Charlito. This area has been declared fishing-free, to encourage fish stocks to recover, and the initiative is going so well we’ve been given special clearance to fish here – just enough for our supper.
I’m on a banca again and this time we’re using hermit crabs as bait. The crabs live in beautiful shells that are shaped like the ice-cream part of a Mr Whippy. Cruelly we have to tease them out and then use them as live bait on our hand lines, but this is what the locals do and I’m not here to judge, I’m here to learn.
‘Charlito, I’ve seen some hermit crabs in my time but these are enormous.’
I look into the turquoise waters at the reef below where I can see there is an abundance of coral reef fish but none is more than three inches in size. We throw out the hand lines while Craig films everything from a special chair. If you watch the sequence you’ll see everything is shot from chest height!
Looking into the sea below, it’s like a tropical aquarium. We can’t be eating these, surely?
‘Charlito, they’re a bit small, don’t you think?’
‘Then we need many,’ he says.
The hand lining is not going according to plan, mainly because the crabs are four inches bigger than the fish and our bait is actually scaring the fish away! Charlito is becoming restless. Suddenly he produces an enormous spear gun out of nowhere.
‘Let’s go snorkelling!’ he commands.
What is so impressive is that he’s made his entire diving kit himself, including his goggles from discarded rubber and plastic for the lenses, and his flippers, which are wooden panels attached to his feet. I decide to be a spectator today. What I’m about to witness is akin to blasting a sparrow with a twelve-bore shotgun. The head of the spear gun is bigger than some of the fish! It doesn’t feel right to me but it’s completely normal to Charlito, and, more importantly, it works. It’s a crude method but it gets results – and the fish he needs to feed his sizeable family.
We eat five of these pretty fish-tank fish each with casaba, a type of muskmelon that is grown on the island and looks like a honeydew but tastes more like a potato. The fish taste nice enough but it truly is like eating Nemo.
*
Back at the hotel, I decide to do some research on why the fish are so small in this area and stocks so depleted. I find my answer swiftly: it’s all down to dynamite fishing, a method whereby desperate people can kill whole shoals in one go with a lump of dynamite and an accurate throw. But it’s disastrous long-term as whole reefs are disappearing and thus ecosystems are wiped out. And reefs take a very long time to recover. Dynamite fishing is illegal but sadly it’s going on all over the Philippines.
This afternoon the production team has arranged for me to meet an ex-dynamite fisherman who is now helping to educate other fishermen about the importance of protecting the reefs. We travel to a very different part of the island from where our hotel is located. It’s a poor, dusty village with a collection of sparse shanty huts. We are greeted by Tootya Alvarez, who did six months inside for dynamite fishing, and his judge, Bimbi, who translates for me. As we walk towards a lagoon that Tootya and others destroyed, he tells me, ‘I did it because it’s very easy to catch fish. We can catch a large amount and it will be big money for us.’ And do you know what? If I were in the same position as Tootya I’d probably do it, too. It’s a means of escape from poverty.
‘How much of the reef has disappeared because of dynamite fishing?’ I ask.
‘Outside the lagoon, the reefs are not good anymore because they are already annihilated, but inside the corals are starting to grow already,’ says Tootya.
Thankfully, with the help of local investment and efforts to conserve the reefs by former dynamite fishermen like Tootya, attempts are now being made to help the damaged reefs to recover. It is now illegal to fish in certain areas, such as the one I went to with Charlito after permissions were granted. This work needs to continue or a bad situation could, further down the line, turn into an environmental and humanitarian crisis, where the local people literally have no fish t
o live on.
Desert Island
Late next morning we leave Siargao. It’s castaway time and I will be living on a desert island completely on my own for twenty-four hours. I’m apprehensive but also really looking forward to getting away from this smelly crisp-munching rabble. Craig’s ankle is still buggered so we’ve left him behind and brought our back-up cameraman, fixer Enrico, with us.
We are heading south to the uninhabited island of Tabili. Two hours into the boat trip and I’m beginning to think this is a really stupid idea.
‘How far away is it?’ I ask.
‘About another half an hour,’ says Jamie.
‘What? You mean I’m two and half hours away from civilisation and, more importantly, help? I thought I’d be just across the way like Lindisfarne to Seahouses and if, for whatever reason, I needed to swim back I could! I’m going to be miles out, in the middle of the Pacific all on my own. What the hell have I signed up to? This isn’t funny.’
We arrive at Tabili. It’s basically a mound of sand with a few palm trees. I beat my chest in an attempt try to knock down my growing anxiety. Don’t worry, I tell myself, you’re the Ray Mears of the North. You are Ray Mears!
Are you out of your fucking mind? comes the reply. That’s like saying Dame Judi’s bloody Bruce Parry.
We start shooting some footage of me preparing for the next twenty-four hours and it quickly becomes apparent that, although Enrico is a lovely guy, he’s perhaps not a natural behind the camera. Jamie is getting increasingly agitated but we muddle on as best we can. In the end, Jamie decides that the best solution is to shoot the whole of the island sequence on my diary camera, and with that said everyone buggers off on the boat, heading straight to the hotel bar, where it’s trebles all round. I watch the boat become a speck in the distance. I am alone with only my camera and my thoughts. It’s a weird feeling but the sun is setting so I need to be practical and make a fire. I gather together fire-wood that I collected earlier and, using coconut husks as kindling, create a small fire. Well, it’s easy when you know how and you have a Bic lighter.