Poison Fishing
- 11 Dec 07, 04:21 PM
Posted from: Wijint
We got up pretty early to trek to the fishing spot. It was a bit of an epic trek! There was loads to carry: I had a basket full of leaves weighing about 20kg, which I’d strapped to my head and we had the massive Z1 camera.
Quite a few of the crew were finding it hard. The path was built of logs but there were a lot of very muddy tracks and the path went through a few boggy bits with raised logs above waterways or patches of mud, or half submerged in mud. If you weren’t balanced then you spent half the time well above the knee in very muddy water.
We ended up being strung out over this long, long path, and according to Steve, quite a few of us looked like we had just woken up in a bad dream. Willow was wearing socks and sandals, which was pretty difficult for her to drag her foot out of the mud. I was wearing canoe shoes, which worked pretty well. Some people were wearing wellies, which needed frequent emptying. It was quite a trek.
When we arrived we got ready for the fishing trip: first we pounded the leaves, then packed them into rattan baskets, which you put into the water and move rapidly so that the white liquid of the poison sluices out. There are two types of poison here: one that kills the fish and one that asphyxiates them. We were using the poison that asphyxiates them – so they rise to the surface.
Once we’d sluiced the poison into the river we then started wandering downstream with our harpoons. I caught my shins pretty badly on the different sticks under the water. We travelled downriver for an hour or two, I got a fair few fish and at the end speared a ray.
Unfortunately, we only found out later, that a small kid got stung by another ray and was in desperate pain but we did our best with the medical kit.
This blog was transcribed from an audio recording
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