The Wharf

These pictures are from January 14th. Andrew, a young barber in the church at Roadside, took Katie, myself, and his mother to the wharf this Wednesday morning to see the fish being brought in. He picked us up around 5:30 that morning. It was really enjoyable and we hung around there for about an hour and a half, just observing and talking

1
This is taken across the river from the wharf. The morning was beautiful, especially the sunrise.

2
This is the side of the river where all of the action was taking place, the actual wharf.

3

Here is Katie with Andrew and his mother. Behind them are the many boats and the structure with the red roof (or "zinc") is where most of the nets were stored.

4
These nets are pretty cool. They reminded me of our being fishers of men and brought to mind the different accounts the four gospels record that deal with nets, fishing, fish, etc. The nets (I am told) are about a mile long and are left out in the water for a span something like 4-8 hours and then are drug in.


5 This is the unloading process. The fish are all stored in the icebox, the blue box behind the pile of fish. While they are out at sea, they just gut the fish and throw them into the box until they arrive. The guys were cool about having their pictures taken, which was nice!

6
From the boat the fish are all piled onto the docks under the roof, like this. The guy in charge of selling the fish (in this case he's the guy in the blue jean shorts) just stands there and hollers his price until someone takes it. Parts of it reminded me of an auction. Those ladies are buying and I'm pretty sure they are some of the ones who work in the market and chop them up with those huge machetes (I'm still not used to calling them cutlasses).


7
This is Troy, a random man we met. The fish he's got here are called menari. I'm not sure about technical names for things or spellings with these things, I just wrote them down how they sounded.


8

Here is Katie with a pile of the fish one of the customers picked up. The kinds of fish on this table are carass and snapper. The snapper are the large orange-ish ones in the picture, I think the rest are the carass.


9

This is me with some interesting fish. The large one was called "coffer", I'm not sure what the one in the middle is, and the one with the feelers is called a Gilbacker and is a very expensive one (I was told it was around $8000...that's $40 USD).

10 And they're off...