One of the thrilling things about cross-cultural work is that one is always learning something new. Here I am a 65 year-old and I am just learned a skill every teenage boy has in the bush has. How to net salmon with a 50 fathom drift net. There is a lot to it!
Fishing with an Eskimo Brother
Let’s assume that everything you need is with you in the boat and you are on the river. Where are the best places to deploy that 300 foot net? How is the net “organized” in the boat? How do you mark the end that will be 300 feet away from you during the drift? From what part of the boat do you deploy the net? At what angle to current to you stretch the net? How do you deploy the net? How do you secure the net to the boat? Why don’t all the other boats on the river run over your net? How do you know if you are catching anything? … This is probably less than a tenth of the list for a nice easy drift. But what do you do if something goes wrong? Like, what do you do if the net catches on a big stump in the bottom of the river?
The point here is not to list of all the questions, much less answer them. I do not even know if some of these questions are valid. Probably all of them have more that one right answer.
The next post in this series deals with what to do with all these questions.
No closely related posts.
