June 20, 2021
Somehow the Gazette managed to miss the Big Event of the Summer up here in the Heights, namely the highly anticipated premier of Lin Manuel Miranda‘s film version of…In the Heights. While the excitement swirled around the venerable United Palace movie house up here, the Gazette was in the place where it all began: la República Dominicana.
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Even though the food, music, and language are basically the same here and there, there are differences too. Just a couple hours drive from the very NYC-esque (noisy, crowded, and dirty) Capital city there’s a small town called Rio San Juan. It’s on the Atlantic side of the island, not too far from the kite surfing capital of maybe the world, Cabarete.
Here you’ll find a small (Population 17,000) fishing town that’s been here since God only knows when, and where you’ll still find lots of people carrying on a fairly traditional way of life. The day we were there they were busy scraping boat bottoms, preparing fishing gear, carrying outboard motors, untangling nets, and launching small boats that would travel far out to sea, The Gazette spoke with one local fisherman and accompanied him on his rounds that afternoon.
Mario is a fisherman in RSJ who’s been at it for around 35 years. He’s probably forgotten more about catching fish than most people will ever know. Armed with nothing but a homemade harpoon, fins, a snorkle, and a lifetime of experience, Mario free dives for a couple of minutes at a time, descending to the ocean floor where he peers into crevasses and underneath rocks while looking for the fishes he aims to catch. We tagged along to take some fotos but it was no use trying to keep up with him. Not only can he stay underwater much longer than we can, but he performed dive after surface dive for several hours while we were out there. Mind, this is a low tech fishing style: a homemade harpoon for diving and a bottle wrapped round with lots of monofilament line for fishing from the boat. The anchor appeared to be a cement filled Clorox bottle with a couple of rusty rebar hooks sticking out to grab ahold of the seabed.
But just like ‘it’s the photographer, not the camera’ that makes a good shot, it’s the fisherman, not the gear, that lands the good fish. Mario and his partner, Leandro, who stayed in the boat and caught fish with a hook and a line, together pulled in about a dozen and a half real nice ones.
We asked Mario what changes he’d observed over the years and he said there were definitely fewer fish nowadays than in the past. Primarily over fishing is to blame, he said. In addition to the locals, who don’t do much more than subsist off fishing, big fishing boats from as far away as Jamaica come here to fish, or rather to *over* fish, for extended periods and they take home a huge haul from this area.
If he could change one thing to make it better for the local fishermen, we asked Mario, what would it be? No fishing in the months when the fish reproduce, which is basically around July in the Summer and December in the winter, he said. Not that anyone would ever listen to a man who knows these waters like he knows the back of his hand, but if they ever did, there would be more fish for everyone.