THE SINKING INDUSTRY

This article sets out to explore the community of the Kalk Bay Harbour in Cape Town, South Africa. Initially, I set out to display how large fishing companies were putting smaller fishermen out of work. I soon realised that, although the fishermen have been suffering, it is much more complicated than man vs corporation.

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Throwing fish onto the loading dock, after a long day of fishing, a hawker comes to intervene whilst Tommy Jurd, the skipper of the Boy Johan, tries to explain the reasons he hasn’t been able to sell any of the fish from today’s catch. The two start shouting back and forth, equally frustrated with one another.

In the early hours of the morning, Kalk Bay Harbour sits in quiet anticipation as the day starts to roll in. The gentle knock of the waves against the Jetty is only interrupted by the continuous beeping of the security lights and the sporadic shouts of fishermen as they begin to arrive for work. One of the crews that are setting up on board is the Boy Johan, a small hand-line fishing boat with bright red trimmings.

You would expect the harbour to pick up into a roaring hustle and bustle by fishing time, yet the Boy Johan is one of only two fishing boats that will be heading out this morning. So how does a harbour that was not so long ago sending out around ten fishing boats on a clear morning, now only send out one or two?

“The fish we’re trying for now, the snoek, we used to catch 100 a man” Tommy explains. Already well into the fishing trip there currently only sit two snoek inside the boat. This is not due to a lack of fishing ability, excluding one member, every single fisherman on board is over the age of 70. They chat merely cracking jokes with one another. When I ask how long one of the older fishermen had been fishing for, another chimes in saying his first expedition was on the Santa Maria. All of the men on board have been fishing in some capacity for most of their lives, the fish they are catching, chokka (squid), and hottentots mostly, are done so with skill and ease. The lines are slowly pulled through the fishermen’s leathery hands, waiting for a bob before swiftly jerking to hook the fish. Although, these types of catch are not favourable and bring in very little cash.

Forget snoek: even reef fish are becoming scarce. “And that’s all that’s left,” Tommy says. Local waters once used to be rife with a variety of species — “white stump nose, geelbeck and cob” are some he remembers — but they have seemingly disappeared from the catch-list. The reason for this? “It’s hard to say,” Tommy explains. “See, the reef fish don’t move around much … so it’s possible that we’re also driving it down. But the consensus is, generally, trawlers, they just take too much fish.”

Overfishing has caused great stress on smaller fishing communities in that they rely on their catch for their livelihood. According to Sassi, it is likely that almost 80% of the line fish species are considered overexploited or collapsed. Even the humble sardine, which is used mostly as bait for the fisherman, is considered to be depleted. Between 2015 and 2019 the total allowable catch of sardine dropped from around 100 000 to 12 000 tons per year when the overall population dropped below critical. This affects the local fisherman greatly as not only does the depleted fish population make it difficult to catch anything, but harsh restrictions end up stinging them much more than larger commercial companies who receive premium subsidies from the government.

Looking around the Boy Johan you’re greeted by the older fisherman catching, pulling up anchor and packing in more swearing per sentence than any land lover out there. Even though this crew can give any youngster out there a run for their money, it doesn’t mean the lack of their presence isn’t felt. “we used to have [young] people waiting on the harbour, waiting for me, they were always looking for a sight…none of that anymore, they’ve gone elsewhere to look for better money, you cannot survive here” explains Tommy.

Across from the boat you may be able to spot some youngsters speeding across the waves, “you may survive if you are on a good ski boat”, Tommy being sure to put emphasis on the ‘good’, mediocre won’t cut it. A lot of people he knows have now sold up their ski boats, even the large ten-man ski boats are not immune, and now these once full-time fishermen struggle to find work with no other experience other than fishing.

Ski boats are incredibly fast, they can also be towed to any docking zone, considering the fact it took the 60-year-old Boy Johan over an hour to reach the desired fishing spot, it makes it hard to compete. Not just that, the rising fuel prices have made it harder for the crew to turn a profit even before they reach their destination.

The older fisherman, who now make up most of the crew, comprise of men who have been fishing professionally their whole lives, as well as those who held previous jobs and are now retired. “Every one of them has had [a different] job”. Tommy retired from being an orthopaedic technician back in the 1990s and set about fishing on the boat he had bought, “I was 47 years old, I’ve been on holiday ever since”. Luckily Tommy was able to retire with a pension since he doesn’t make any money for himself, everything made goes into the boat to keep it going.

As compensation for the boat, Tommy has had to change the profit split from sixty per cent of profit going to the fisherman to fifty. “They’re not very happy” explains Tommy, but the higher split is the only way to keep the boat going, without it he would have to sell up. As for the others, do any of them live off their pensions? “yes, but very small they all left [their previous jobs] very early, in those days you could make good money in a season, they thought wow this is the way to go, but [then] down, down, down every year”. But the higher split is the only way to keep the boat going, without it he would have to sell up.

The boats that now always sit quaintly in the harbour may be picturesque for the onlooking tourist visiting Kalk Bay, but the reality is that most of these boats may never go out again. The cost of running, and repairing, them is just too high a risk with not enough reward, no one seems to want to take them out, or buy them. “A lot of them don’t go to sea, they just lie there, some of them sink,” says Tommy.

Tommy believes there are still some ways to survive in the industry, such as his crew scaling and gutting the fish themselves, then the fish could be sold at R60 a kilo, although his crew are not willing to do so on top of all the work it already requires to just catch the fish. Even though Tommy puts forward this solution, he still doesn’t mince his words when he says that Kalk Bay Harbours fishing industry is “slowly dying”.

Back on the harbour, around eight hours after setting off, Tommy and the hawker have their argument. The hawker, a disgruntled Rafiek Isaacs, is upset with Tommy for saying that he’s refusing to buy the fish that the crew of the Boy Johan had caught that day even though he’s currently the only buyer on the docks. He waves his hands furiously, speaking at a million miles an hour. According to Rafiek it’s the “concept of the harbour, I have agreements with a boat that I must buy his fish, I used to have an agreement with [Tommy], but now he has an agreement with someone else”. Rafiek doesn’t want a surplus of fish that he can’t sell especially the smaller fish as they don’t sell very well.

The hawker system has changed a lot over the years, to the detriment of all parties it seems, a maximum of about three hawkers show up even on a good day. Although, there used to be many hawkers who would come to the harbour and wait for the fishermen. “We would throw the fish up and they would bid on it” explains Tommy, “then about fifteen years ago a hawker moved in and tried to control the price, and he did. He told the other hawkers to all agree its a fixed price, and then they did that”. The fishermen ten years ago were getting R25 a bunch from the hawkers, these days they still get R25 a bunch, and if they bring in surplus, it’s R20.

As for the hawkers, Rafiek comments on the fact that the other hawkers don’t come anymore because no one wants to buy the fish from them. “Petrol prices [are] high, everything is high, so if you live in Edgemead and there’s a guy on the road selling the same fish for R50, and I sell it for R35, you think [he’s] gonna ride from Edgemead to here for a 35 rand bunch?” he explains. Another hawker, Ferial Davids, comments on how there used to be a freezer on the docks for the fisherman, with a change in management the freezer is now no longer there, now, only people who have their own freezing facilities can still sell fish. Ferial is the last hawker on the docks who is actually a Kalk Bay resident. Kalky’s, a fish restaurant on the harbour, let’s her use their freezing facilities as she’s a local. Even though the fish are kept in their facilities Kalkys, along with most of the other restaurants in the area, get their fish imported from elsewhere, explains Shan Gray.

Surprisingly, not a lot of the harbours community are residents of Kalk Bay. Shan has a home in Khayelitsha, yet he spends most of his time living in the cabin of a decommissioned crayfish boat. Also a crew member of the Boy Johan, Shan, now in his 70’s, can’t go home regularly since the trains stopped running late, “when I come back the first train is too late, the boats are already out…to make a living I have to sleep on the boat”.

Shan has been a professional fisherman since the age of sixteen, fishing on various types of boats in his lifetime, most harbouring in Kalk Bay. Many of the boats that Shan fished on now sit dilapidated, he calls them white elephants, “just like the stadium they built there for the World Cup” he says with a chortle.

Before switching to hand line fishing, one of the types of boats that Shan fished on were the crayfish boats. “Crayfish is more money than [handline] fishing” he explains, however, it is still tough to make a living off it in recent years. The government has been issuing harsher quotas in recent years meaning less crayfish is able to be caught, to compensate the fisherman they receive R12000 a year. According to Shan he’s waiting for the payment, which should arrive on Friday, after that he has to make do until the next instalment. Shan, as well as the rest of the licensed fishermen, is allowed to catch 80 kilos of crayfish this year but then he still needs pay a fee to fish on a boat, “they ask me [for] R80 a kilo” he explains.

After shouting for the boat keys across the harbour, Shan descends into the cabin, where he stays, down a small wooden ladder. He emerges after a short while with pictures in hand. In the photos, everyone is smiling, elated with the boats that are filled to the brim with large fish. Shan enthusiastically recalls the events in each photo, the large grin on his face makes the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes crinkle together. The photo was taken in the 1980s, “back then the fishing was good, I used to earn like R40 000 a month” says Shan.

With all the complications surrounding commercial fishing, a lot of people have turned to illegal fishing. Illegal fishing in order to survive has become commonplace in South Africa. According to a report from the Parliamentary Monitoring Group on a meeting between several fishing communities and the Portfolio Committee in 2020, during the height of the Covid19 outbreak, 53% of all applicants who applied to be acknowledged as subsistence fishermen were denied a license. “You know [the government] took our licenses away so how must I earn money? I must go do illegal fishing, but I don’t steal from other people, I steal from the sea, and the sea don’t belong to no one” says Shan. “The big companies, they’ve got lawyers, they’ve got contacts in government. Me? How can I call a lawyer to fight for my fishing license.”

Yet through all the hardship Shan still holds an upbeat attitude, “yea I enjoy it still, it’s all I know”, but even he can’t help but echo the sentiment “Kalk Bay is a dying harbour”, before hopping off the boat to go and speak to the hawkers.