Gone Fishin’… Togo Style – Part II

(Continued from yesterday’s post Gone Fishin’… Togo Style)

 

So we walk across the street, through the open doorway of a typically run down two story building, through a short dark corridor, and into an open air concrete courtyard bustling with the sounds and motions of a dozen people going about their early morning business. At this point, my gung-ho attitude towards this little adventure is gaining just a hint of skepticism and apprehensiveness. Theres a young mother giving her baby a bucket shower in one corner, an impressively old woman preparing the day’s meal in a giant, charcoal black, cauldron, little kids in their green and white checkered school uniforms horsing around before they have to leave for class.

I look at the guy next to me like ‘Seriously dude, where the hell are we right now?’. Theres no way this place is a bar. We just walked into someone’s kitchen/bathroom/front yard/living-room. I’m not so much fearful at this point as I am just straight up confused. We are supposed to be going to take shots right now, right? Or did I completely misunderstand the little conversation we just had on the beach?

But sure enough, after a little back and forth bantering between the lead fisherman and one of the women in the courtyard, she guides us over to a back nook of the courtyard, and pulls a white sheet off a table in the corner like some sort of magician, revealing a dozen bottles of Sodabi each with some different sort of ‘flavoring agent’ sitting at the bottom of the bottle. Everything from ginger or papaya, to a root they claim to be an aphrodisiac, to a handful of others that I’m sure at some point in the past had a heartbeat, or were at least attached to something with a heartbeat. I figured it was better to not ask any questions, so I closed my eyes and attempted to take my shot like a champ, using all of my willpower and jaw clenching ability to not let them see the horror and pain that was pulsing through my veins and slowly coating the inside of my empty stomach with fire, but I’m pretty sure that was all to no avail, as right after I took my shot, even the ‘bartender’ was having a tough time holding back a smile. After wiping away the single tear that had rolled down my left cheek, and breathing out the last bit of fire remaining in my lungs, I think I had fully gained the respect of this group of eight very large, extremely muscular Togolese fishermen who were at this point half cheering and half keeled over laughing and patting me on the back. Talk about cultural integration. By now, all remnants of fear and apprehensiveness had been completely washed away. I felt like a freshman at a high school party who’d just proved to the seniors that I could run with the ‘cool kid’ crowd.

A quick 6:00am sodabi break and it’s back to work. Time to pull in the net and see what the day’s catch has to offer. I stroll back across the street trying to recover from the acidic erosion that is currently taking place in my esophagus and stomach lining, and once again pull out my camera to snap a few last pictures before I head out to get ready for my flight. Once we get there the fishermen start pulling in two thick ropes about 50 yards apart, each attached to one end of the long net they’d set out in the ocean before we had gone off for our little ‘early morning pick-me-up’.

The burn of the moonshine that had overtaken the slight nausea of the hangover from the night before was slowly fading into blissful comfort as I strolled over the soft white sand, already getting hot to the touch from the early morning sun.

I managed to get a few decent pictures in before a couple of the fishermen told me to grab hold of the rope and give them a hand pulling it in. And once again, the ‘why the hell not’ mentality kicked in. I shoved the camera back in my pocket, kicked my flip flops off and joined in. I’ve already worked so hard to scrub that TOURIST stamp off of my forehead and prove to them that I’m not just some foreigner with a camera. I mean, I’m not about to throw away my cool kid status at this point by saying that I’m not man enough to get my hands dirty. Besides, how many times in my life am I going to get the opportunity to do something like this? I figure I’ll help out for 20 minutes or so, see what sort of catch they pull in, and be out of there before I know it with an awesome set of pictures to bring home and an even cooler story to go along with them.

Boy was I wrong about that. A solid 3 hours later, we were a good quarter mile down the beach having been pulled by the current grabbing hold of the net as it got closer to shore. The entirety of my palms and most of my fingers had long ago passed the blister stage, scattered with patches of straight raw skin, and small wounds from the abrasive sand covered rope, the skin on my forearms and back of my neck were radiating with heat from the mild case of skin cancer I had just submitted them to, and every muscle in my body was quivering with exhaustion. Now, call it determination to finish the job, straight stubbornness, or just pure stupidity, but I just couldn’t bring myself to quit halfway through. It’s not like I didn’t realize my hands were being torn apart by the rope, my pale white skin was being cooked alive, or my out of shape body was being pushed to limits it hadn’t seen since high school football camp. I guess just kept thinking we were almost at the end. I was like a donkey stubbornly holding onto the optimism that if he keeps running he’ll eventually catch up to that carrot.

‘Alright, fuck this.’ I thought to my self at one point. ‘I’m calling it quits’. And of course, just as I let go and look down the line to where it disappears into the waves I see the blue of the net popping out of the water and I can’t help but grab back onto the rope and start pulling again. We’re in the home stretch now for sure. I’m not about to play the whole damn game and then tell the coach to pull me out at the 2 minute warning. Little did I know that as the catch gets closer to the shore, it gets exponentially harder to pull it in. So what I originally thought was the 2 minute warning was more like the start of the second half. I’m not exaggerating either. What started out as an 8 to 10 man operation two and a half hours earlier, had grown to a gang of 25-30 men from god knows where having to help pull this thing in. Every body at a 45 degree angle, muscles flexed to the max, feet half buried, digging into the sand trying to get some traction.

That last grueling stretch of pulling the actual net in felt like a lifetime, but we finally get the pouch at the end of the net holding all of the fish on shore. Dripping with a mixture of sweat and sea water, sand burrowed into the open blisters on my hands, and about to collapse from exhaustion, I manage to stumble over to the crowd of fishermen surrounding the catch to take a peek at this undoubtedly colossal sized catch we’d just hauled in. I’m expecting to see nothing less than Free fucking Willy flopping around in this net to have put up that big of a fight. I’ve got an image in my head of Forest Gump opening up the bottom of the net, and thousands of pounds of shrimp flooding the deck of the boat. But instead of shrimp its going to be blue fin tuna, and marlin.

So I push through the crowd to get a look, and to my complete and utter underwhelmed lack of astonishment, barring the one 3 foot barracuda, not one of these fish could have even made a satisfying meal by itself, and to my disappointment, Free Willy was not in attendance. Seriously, how is that possible. How were we not just pulling in a great white shark. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m hung over and extremely out of shape? No, that couldn’t be it.

Now, I guess I’m exaggerating a bit, there were a fair amount of fish there, but after building this up in my head to a level I felt to be the equivalent to the effort I’d put in and pain and suffering I had been enduring, I was just a little bit disappointed. Not to mention, now that the adrenalin and anticipation had subsided, all of my senses were slowly being assaulted by the combination of fatigue, sunburn, salted wounds, and that damned hangover inching its way back into my temples.

At this point one of the main guys who’d been there from the beginning reaches over and puts his arm around me as he’s mid conversation with a few of the other men who’d straggled in a bit late to help finish off the job. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying in their local language, but after a few laughs, an empty hand gripping an imaginary shot glass being tossed up to his face as he threw his head back, a quick inspection of my torn up hands, and a couple pats on the back, I could tell I’d officially overcome the fanny pack and hawaiian shirt syndrome I’d been trying to avoid from the beginning.

And as is custom, even though I tried to tell them that I was getting onto an airplane in a couple of hours and had no where to put them, everyone who helps with the haul, gets a share of the bounty.

So with the sun now high in the sky, I painfully, but quite proudly, strolled back towards my hotel room with a camera full of pictures, and a story I’m sure I won’t soon forget.

Oh yeah, and a dozen freshly caught, sand covered fish in my hands that I had absolutely no idea what the hell to do with.