Fish for a living - 11/07-19
In a small village you get to meet and know people if you spend some time there. Many tourists drop by one day in Oqaatsut and travel back to Ilulissat the same day, which looks weird when you actually live here. They are not a part of your life, but they just look at it from the outside.
On the dock, I met a fisherman and hunter, Steen, and asked him if I could spend some time with him. He was preparing for long line fishing and baited the hooks with capelin. His father was a fisherman, too, and Steen shot his first seal when he was nine years old and caught his first Beluga whale when he was fourteen. He said he tried to work on land for a while, but it did not work out for him - he belonged to the sea.
Long line fishing takes patience since there are so many hooks to bate, and while I watched, another hunter arrived at the dock by boat. He pointed at the back end of the boat, and to my surprise, I could see a dead seal lying there - I believe it was a ringed seal. He had recently shot it and was about to skin and butcher it.
I gave Steen a break from all my Norwegian-Danish questions, and watched and recorded the sounds of the butchering of the seal. I was fascinated by how fast he did it, but he had probably done it his whole life. He skinned it, and there was literally a bath of blood and fat right in front of me, but all I could think of was to record the sounds the best I could. Suddenly it was all over, and meanwhile a local man had come to buy some of the meat. What was left was a pile of blood and some flies flying over it.
I went back to Steen who was still bating the hooks, but he was soon finished and I joined him when he put out the line.
We had to wait for five hours before we could pick it up again, but I had to come along to see if “we” got any fish, and at 8 p.m. we went out to bring the fish home. In the beginning there was not much to see, and Steen wondered if he was wrong about the currents, but soon enough the big fish was dragged into the boat. There were huge wolffish, Atlantic redfish, cod, halibut and also a bunch of sea rays which were thrown into the sea again. He used a winch to drag them up, pulled out the hooks and threw the fish in either the “dog-bucket” or the “human-bucket”. If the fish were too small, they became dog food, but too small for Steen was big in my eyes.
Four hours later and past midnight, we were finished and got back. I was not aware of the time as the sun here never sets, but I must admit I had begun to feel a bit cold in the Arctic night. To me it looked like a good catch, but to him it was mediocre. He does this for a living and would have wanted more of the most expensive fish: halibut. I asked him if I could buy a small cod from the “dog-bucket” to have for dinner, but that was unacceptable, and he gave me a huge cod from the “human-bucket” for free. Qujanaq, Steen! I had cod for dinner the rest of the stay.
The most memorable sounds from this experience was the significant winch, the communication radio with other boats nearby, the air which came out of the redfish and a picture stuck in my head of Steen hitting his knife twice on the side of the boat, followed up by an ocean of seabirds’ escape in a second. Pictures worth keeping.













