Fishing In Iokea
Fishing in Iokea (3 Min Read)
The oceans of Papua New Guinea are teeming with wildlife; from reefs to rivers I have seen many extraordinary aquatic creatures, and while I was in Iokea, I tried to catch some! Iokea is located on the coast of Gulf Province, just near the border of Central Province. I was spending a few weeks in the village and trying to be involved in the daily lives of the locals. One day I decided to try my luck at “pull net”, a fishing technique where two people are pulling a net, one on the shore and one in the water. Each person holds one end as they walk up the beach until they feel something get caught in the net. The person in the water quickly walks to shore, and together they pull in the net.
The sand in Iokea is black and the water was quite murky, which are not the most ideal conditions for pull netting, but we went for it anyway! I was in the water pulling and on my first pull we got a catfish! I was stoked. I went to untangle it from the net, making sure to watch out for the barbs of the fish, but I was quickly stopped by a group of village kids. One looked around the beach until he found some porous soft coral which he used to remove the barbs of the catfish. I was grateful, as I knew about the barbs, but now I’d learned a method to minimize the risk of getting stung.
We went for it a few more times and pulled in an assortment of small fish, but the tide was starting to go out and the pickings were getting slim. On my last pull, we caught something we didn't want in our net. I was still in the water and didn’t feel much in the net, but my friend did and told me to pull it in. As we did I couldn’t see much in there at first, but once we got it up on the shore we were shocked to find 6 jellyfish in the net! They were bluebottle (Pacific Man-O-War) jellyfish which can be quite harmful, and we felt very blessed that we didn’t get stung and promptly called it a day on fishing.
We had made it to the mouth of a river while fishing down the beach, and as we were walking back we saw what the river fishermen had accomplished; I felt like it made my little catfish look quite sad. The two men were carrying a barramundi that had to have been at least 5 feet, if not more. They had a large stick going through the gills and shared its weight on their shoulders. We followed them back to the village, and later they brought us the cooked head of the fish (some of the best meat of the fish!), and it fed the whole team!
Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the Barramundi or Sharks from Iokea. Here is a smaller Barramundi caught in Australia!
On our last day, when we were leaving Iokea, a villager had cut four sharks varying from 4-6 feet and was butchering them on the beach. He had caught a hammerhead, two saw nose sharks and a tiger shark. It was pretty amazing to see that he could do all this with his dugout canoe.
Just another day in the Land of the Unexpected.