A way of life

At daybreak, surrounded by the customary solitude of the sea, Gori Mayol stops the little llaüt (traditional Lateen sail vessel) next to a boy with a red flag on it. Over the next 10 minutes, a 50-metre-long net currently sunk under the blue waters of the Mediterranean will emerge, pulled by a motorised roller onto the deck of the vessel. In it are throngs of live lobsters, headless lobsters, crabs, seahorses, the odd red scorpionfish, fish flapping their tails, earth, stone and seaweed.

“Don’t you feel sorry for the fish?”

“I do feel sorry for them, yes… I hope someone will eat them, that they will at least be used... We fish sustainably and artisanally, we don’t do trawl fishing or sports fishing, which is something I will never understand… This is a job, a philosophy, a way of life...”

Every day at half past six in the morning, Gori boards the Passador, his llaüt measuring 8 metres in length, with the hope of finding the fishes he left hanging in the depths of the sea the previous afternoon loaded with fish.

The constant humming of the engine, leaving a short trail of white foam in its wake, accompanies the start of the trip. 

Gori always fishes with Pep, his father, a lifelong seaman. Stocky and silent, his dense white beard reminds one of the writer Ernest Hemingway, the author of “The Old Man and the Sea,” that wonderful allegorical noval about the world of fishermen and their struggle for survival.

Gori is thin, with a dark beard, a little more expressive than his father but not exactly talkative. They work together exchanging barely a word, enveloped in their yellow overalls. As soon as the net appears, Pep pulls it with both hands, with some effort. “There’s one… another one…a crab… a scorpionfish...” he announces from time to time.

Standing behind his father all the time, Gori takes care of separating the different specimens. Delicately, without rushing, calm and focussed. Patience is fundamental here: they will only be able to sell fish that are whole.

“I like working with my father,” says Gori, who has just returned a headless dentex to the depths of the sea. “He taught me everything. We have a similar character. We are more about gestures than words...” 

The fisherman’s trade is a hard one, calling for strength and constant attention in order to see the signs of nature: knowing how to read whether the whistle of the wind is announcing a calm or a rough sea, or how to deal with a three-metre wave that suddenly appears out of nowhere. 

Between the cuttlefish and dentex season, and the careful hand-fishing of the transparent goby, they say that they sometimes sail amongst dolphins. And that once, they felt the net was much heavier than usual. 

“We couldn’t believe it when we saw it. It was a nine-metre shark,” said Gori. “We don’t know how much it weighed because we let it go. We could have towed it in, but it doesn’t have any economic value.”

“It was sick,” declares Pep, without taking his eyes from the net.

They carry on working in silence. Now Gori untangles a scorpionfish; he says he liks this fish a lot, and red mullets too. He looks at the horizon, using his hand as a visor to protect himself from the sun.

“I was scared once, in the middle of a storm. We were near the coast, but in an area without any cover and the engine stopped. A fellow fisherman had to come and rescue us.” Winter and storms are the big enemies of fishermen, but also “weird” summers, with bad weather and “black luck.”

Back in port, the day’s catch is weighed and sold at the going price in the fish market. Some of the fish is frozen and sent to Palma early next morning. 

“In summer, you can get an envelope with 1,000 Euros in it every week. But it might not be the same the next week,” explains Gori. “We fishermen have to administrate our money well. You have to pay your expenses in winter too.” 

For some time now Pep and Gori have been taking tourists out on their llaüt through the intermediation of Pescaturismo, a sustainable initiative that is respectful of the sea and its culture which gives foreign visitors the chance to have a first-hand experience of this very Mediterranean way of earning a living, which is in danger of extinction. “This job doesn’t pay off for young people; it’s hard and requires sacrifices they aren’t willing to make.”

“How much fish do you eat at home?”

“Not much,” says Pep. “And I don’t know how to cook it either. The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot, as they say.”