I Only Caught Five

Remember how back in September I posted a blog about how well fishing was going, about how we’d had a record-breaking month and made a truckload of loot for Namumu? Well, I totally jinxed us again. During the following months we saw a slow, steady decline in catches and a slow, steady incline in repair and maintenance costs. It was a disaster.

A combination of issues came into play.

We went through a period where the kapenta seemed to be hiding from us. Actually, all local fishing camps experienced extremely poor catches. A good friend of mine who runs one of the bigger companies in town and has been fishing for 29 years told me that January was very close to the worst month she’d seen in all her years in the business, and that October, November and December had not been much better. So, we were not the only ones catching poorly. The kapenta apparently decided to hide from everyone.

Around the end of October, Pierson, the captain of one of the boats and the outspoken leader of the group, resigned for unstated reasons. Pierson was my rock. He was the most experienced of the group and, more importantly, was always a happy, talkative, positive person who worked hard and whose attitude always seemed to rub off on everyone else around him. It hurt us when Pierson left. It hurt us badly.

Then, to top it all off, the generator on one of the boats kicked it in early January. It had fallen in the water some months ago and, despite a number of semi-successful efforts by a few local mechanics to bring it back to life it finally bit the big one, forcing us to buy a new one. And those things ain’t cheap around here.

To make it all worse, Mubita, the guys and I received quite a bit of criticism from certain members of the Namumu management team for the overall poor performance. I’ve made many mistakes here and am always willing to admit when I do, but in this case I felt then as I do now that we were being criticized for circumstances beyond our control, that we had worked as hard as we could work and had done as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Apparently others didn’t. It was tough to deal with.

Words cannot express the anger and frustration I experienced at numerous points during this period. All I really needed was someone to hug me and tell me everything was going to be alright. Unfortunately, Zambians aren’t particularly big on hugging, so I was out of luck. Oh, how I longed for the days of Nolan Doyle’s free hugs. I was really down. I tried expressing my inner anguish through the majesty of song, singing “Afternoon Delight” and making fart noises with my mouth, but even that didn’t help.

Fortunately, things have been looking up lately. Both boats have, despite experiencing a few intermittent problems, been up and running all February. Catches are good and we’re making some dough again. The overall mood of the group seems to be shifting towards the positive.
Let’s hope this continues. I’ll keep you posted.