The Chang Lo No. 18 (
One very hazy and listless mid-afternoon in early August, I found myself at Gueihung Harbor (
With nothing to do but wait, I looked around for some shade. Meanwhile, the other passengers for the Chang Lo gathered, looking aimless and bushy-haired. Their skin was sunburned and wind-whipped to the point that the weather couldn't do much more to them. I was glad I'd decided go with slippers and ripped shorts, but even in a clean T-shirt I felt overdressed. Most of the other guys wore shirts for which sweat stains were the least of the problem. Threadbare nylon, squid ink marks and other organic discolorations were normal here.
PHOTO: CHEN CHANG-CHENG, TAIPEI TIMES
The man who had brought me here was Wu Wen-che (
Besides running a store and fishing a lot, Wu arranges fishing trips like this one. In the current late summer season, he says that most trips are for squid, bandfish or a small red grouper-looking fish that I later found out was bulleye. The big fish, he said, come in the fall and winter. Pictures of many of them have been pasted and taped to the walls of the 128 Bait and Tackle Shop in a ramshackle collage of newspaper clippings and trophy catch photos. One shows a couple of 1.8m spearfish that were caught far offshore of Ilan County while Wu was fishing for the hung gan in an adjascent photo. The hung gan were whoppers, weighing around 90kg each. For most fish of that size, however, he sets out from Kaohsiung Harbor and heads down into the Philippine Sea on long trips of five days or more. By comparison, this night's excursion would only last about 16 hours.
Just before shoving off at 3:30 in the afternoon, the men registered their IDs with a harbor official and drew spots from a deck of playing cards.Then we were underway, skirting the yellow and orange sandstone cliffs of Yehliu (
PHOTO: CHEN CHANG-CHENG, TAIPEI TIMES
The chop that day was pretty rough. Typhoon Jelawat had just passed north of Taiwan 60 hours before, and another tropical storm, Erwinar, was churning the seas a 170km to the north where it was getting ready to skirt the southern coast of Honshu. This was the Pacific Ocean's late summer unrest, and it left us with seas nearly 2m high. We plowed through them at around 20 knots.
It was a bumpy ride. The spray coming off the bow had long since forced everyone to come inside. Most slept below, though a couple of guys sat in the upper cabin, watching a fading signal on the TV while drinking cocktails of Lung Feng Wine, a cheap brown 35.5 percent alcohol variety of bathwash, and Mr Brown coffee.
It was three hours later and near dark when the boat dropped anchor and everyone went out and began rigging their gear. The men first fastened their rod racks. These were heavy stainless steel contraptions that clamped onto wooden additions on the gunwale. They would hold the 4m plus carbon fiber rods and provide a lever to angle them up. The reels, which held 900m of line and looked like scaled-down winches from off-road trucks, were plugged into car batteries at the men's feet. The power source allowed for push button reeling in and letting out of line and a digital readout of how much line was out. One of the fishermen told me that each man on the boat had spent a minimum of NT$10,000 to NT$15,000 on gear.
PHOTO: CHEN CHANG-CHENG, TAIPEI TIMES
As the sky darkened. The 2m rollers continued to rock the boat, making it difficult to walk without holding on to something. The men were ready to fish. That's when they turned on the big lights.
Strung up over the cabin and about 4m above the deck were several bulbs the size of small watermelons. Though Wu only referred to them as ji-yu-deng (
Under the glare, the water around the boat seemed to phosphoresce in trails and puffs of liquid blue. Beyond it, there was just black, except for the similarly blazing lights of seven or eight other boats in the distance. Soon, most of the men had their rods in the water and one or two had already started to pull up squid.
The men spoke little as they fished. Maybe there wasn't much to say. On the night, the average catch would be about 30 to 40 squid per man, and they pulled them in on lures with treble hooks. Five lures, each a meter apart, were strung on each line, and the whole rig was carried to the bottom by heavy lead sinkers about three fingers wide. The squid, called chiang yu (
Most of the men went to sleep below, though in the cabin, the same guys who'd been drinking cocktails of Lung Feng Wine and Mr Brown went back to it. It was one helluva way to pass the time until our landing at around seven or eight in the morning. Better was the sunrise -- ruby red even on this overcast day. And then sometime near 6am, we passed another school of dolphins. They were headed back the other way.
For your information:
Excursions like this one cost between NT$1,000 and NT$1,500, and you have to bring your own gear. Vessels go out almost every day weather permitting and trips can be arranged by the folks at the 128 Bait and Tackle Shop, tel: 2811-6753 or 2813-3498. They can also be arranged through Tseng Ching-hsian (曾清賢), the skipper of the Chang Lo No. 18, tel: 2805-3637 or 0920-513-569.
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