PAITA, PERU
The rain forests are now behind. From here south until the araucaria forests of northern Patagonia the coast of South America is lined by tall, dry desert cliffs.
Despite its aridness, the small town of PAITA is all about fishing. Its motto is literally "Our Lives Depend on the Sea." It is built around a pair of long docks jutting into the blue sea, one for loading crews into the several hundred boats that call the port home, the other for returning boats to unload their catch. The whole operation seems very efficient. Lots of men sit and stand along the worker's dock, as rowboat after rowboat bump up against its end ferrying them to bigger boats. Lots of young men, and only men. Women do not fish, but take care of the books, businesses, homes and families.
The harbor is filled with colorful fishing boats, brightly painted blue, red, yellow and green with names honoring various saints and spouses, occasionally the same in one. The smallest are rowboats, shuttling captains and crew out to thirty and forty foot long wooden boats; these spend eight to ten hours a day on the sea, six days a week. The biggest boats in the harbor, sixty and seventy feet long, carry crews of a half-dozen and are out for one to two weeks. The catch depends on the season - next month it's tuna, in two months, it's Tiburon (shark).
Today, as October turns into November, the boats are returning heavy with calamari gigante - giant squid. I hitch a one-dollar ride along the length of the port town in one of the multitude of colorful TUK-TUKS - more familiar to me from the streets of the Philippines than here in South America - to the main fishing dock. Squeezing through a Peruvian-sized door, just over five feet tall, cut into the metal gate and I'm on the commercial dock. The first sight makes me step back: A heap of squid eyeballs, GIANT squid eyeballs, piled in a corner. A half-dozen men with sharp machetes slice away at the 60 to 70 pound, four-foot-long squids, making separate piles out of bodies, tentacles and big, round eyeballs. In the shade of an overhang another half-dozen men sort anchovies into rectangular red and blue plastic crates.
Small boats pull up to the adjoining dock, non-stop, one after another, and a long line of men snakes down to them returning two at a time lugging boxes filled with a couple hundred pounds of squid. Quickly weighed they are then dumped onto the cement where men in orange waterproof bibs and rubber boots hose them down with fresh water before they are tossed unceremoniously into the back of waiting trucks filled with crushed ice.
Most of Paita's catch goes directly by road to Lima, a couple hundred miles away. There these big squids sell for about 40 cents a pound, or about $25 to $30 for one of the 70-pound creatures splayed on the dock at my feet. It seems awfully cheap and a difficult way for these fishermen to make a few bucks. Crewmates earn a couple dollars a day.
Late in the morning, walking back along the portside, I parallel a wide sandy beach where a variety of boats up on blocks being sanded, repainted and repaired. On the worker's dock I buy a plastic bag of coconut cookies for a dollar. Though living is cheap and pay far down the wage scale, the town is clean, its people well dressed, its two main docks well maintained. Out on the blue sea the sun is bright and hot at midday and Paita's fleet bobs on a wind-blown sea.
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