I am retired but I stil go out to the sea, now for pleasure as a sport. Since I was 15 I’ve been a fisherman and so were my father and my grandfather. If I was born again, I’d be a fisherman again but I wouldn’t start at 15, but at 10.
My boat is now operated by my sons; my four men make a living on fishing and they make it with the boat; they live from their own effort and depend on nobody but on the sea. They don’t want a different job.
When I was a costero, four out of my five children, including my only girl, were born while I was away fishing. Someone would pass on the news on the radio so I learnt that the baby was born. When the baby girl was born, I remember that when arriving onshore I run to check that it was not a mistake and at last I was a father to a girl. I celebrated big time till late that night.
Twice I have fallen into the sea while fishing and my fellows rescued me, cause I cannot swim. Once in the Mogan area, while fishing tuna, I threw my line and the animal that bit it was so big that pulled me out into the water. The second time it happened trying to fish a sixty o seventy kilo tuna fish amongst other three fishermen, as we all were trying to pull out the fish but it got two of us thrown into the water.
I have owned 5 vessels, each one slightly larger than the other: the Virgen del Carmen, 7 metres long; the Matilde Deniz, 9 metres; the Angelita, 12 metres long; the Cooperativa Naval, a 15 metres long and the Paquita Perez, 18 metres. This last one is the one now my sons own.
My 9 metres boat, the Matilde Deniz, was dubbed ‘el rabito’ (the little tail) because it had two prows. The aft and the prow were pointy and the moganeros [people from Mogan] dubbed it with such nickname as they said my boat had ‘a prow and a little tail’. That is why some people would call me ‘rabito’.
I remember one night we caught a shark evil as hell. We fought with it over two hours and every time we approached the boat to it the shark would take a harpoon or something else into the water. He flew over the water and we held the line tightly so it wouldn’t snap. When we finally killed it and hoisted it onboard, helped by another vessel as we couldn’tdo it on our own, we realized it was as large as the boat. 7 metres!! That animal weighed over 500 kilogrammes.
