BOLINAO, Pangasinan – Jose Rolly Bagor, 38, was gloomy when he reached his home in Bolinao town in Pangasinan. He had been fishing for 15 hours at sea in his small boat but caught only two small tuna.

“I had to pull another fisherman’s boat whose engine broke down,” he says. An unwritten law of the sea is for fishermen to always help fellow fishermen in distress.

Bagor lost about P2,000 in gasoline expenses for the fishing venture, but he considers it a “minor inconvenience” and part of the trade. “It’s the ever rising cost of gasoline that is hounding us,” he says.

The high cost of fuel has shaken Pangasinan’s fishing industry – from boat owners to fishermen and their helpers. Unlike rice farmers who get subsidies, they lament that they have been overlooked by the government.

In Alaminos City, Dionisio Rimando, 44, says his small boat eats up much of the earnings from his catch. He goes fishing twice a day using four liters of gasoline worth P240. If he catches eight kilograms of fish a day and sells it for P50 a kg, he would gross P400 and net P160.

Rimando says that while gasoline prices go up weekly, the prices of fish are stuck at P40 to P50 a kg. “If I catch only two kilograms of fish, I don’t earn anything,” he says.

Buyers usually provide the money for the boat owners’ expenses and dictate the price of fish, he says.

Saving on gasoline

But Rimando has found a way to save on gasoline. After fishing, he turns off the motor of his small banca (outrigger) and simply paddles to shore.

At times, he thinks that fishermen using rafts are luckier because they don’t spend for gasoline. Although rafts cannot go farther out to open sea, the fishermen can catch enough fish for their families, he says.

Myrna Loh, owner of two motorized boats in Bolinao, says a vessel that can carry four men used to consume gasoline worth P4,000 to P5,000 whenever it sets out for a four-day fishing trip.

Gasoline expenses have now doubled, reaching more than P8,000 for a trip.

Fish scare

Compounding the problem is the fish scare brought about by the sinking of the Sulpicio Lines-owned MV Princess of the Stars off Romblon.

While the tragedy happened in another part of the country, it affected local fishermen. They were not able to bring their catch to the Navotas market in Metro Manila where poor sales were reported, especially after a pesticide shipment inside the sunken ship was discovered.

“Even if we sold our catch for only P25 a kilogram, nobody bought our fish. So we had to look for markets in northern Luzon,” says Jeany Villamonte, an owner of two fishing boats.

Loh and Villamonte rue the fact that while tuna fishing is at its peak between July and December, the industry is down because of high fuel cost and nonmarketability of fish.

Carmelo Cañedo, 35, a boat helper, says he has no work most of the time because owners rarely send their boats to the sea.

A native of Surigao, Cañedo says he settled in Bolinao in 1992 because income from fishing in the town was good. “We were always at sea, always had boats to work in. It was really good until this year,” he says.

Despite the risk of losing money, some boat owners are forced to send their vessels to sea because their workers have nothing to depend on except fishing.

“If they have no money, they go to us for their every need like food, medicines and others. So even if we lose money, we let them go,” Loh says.

Bigger boats

Loh and Villamonte plan to acquire bigger boats equipped with diesel engines because diesel costs less than gasoline. They say they could not use liquefied petroleum gas in their boats because the tanks are heavy.

Bigger boats mean more helpers, too, or up to 10 people. More helpers mean more catch as fishermen use hook and line in the payaw (artificial reef) put up by commercial boats.
Owners allow hook-and-line fishing in their payaw because it catches the big fish that could destroy their nets, says Carolina Ramirez, chief of the Bolinao agriculture office.

Bolinao has 4,209 fishermen, 2,802 motorized boats, 804 nonmotorized boats, and 13 commercial boats. All depend on the sea’s resources for their living. When the Inquirer visited the town recently, most of the boats were idle.

In Alaminos, the city government helps fishermen by giving them nets and a fishery structure they call nasa. The nasa. are strategically placed fish traps, and fishermen collect the trapped fish daily.

Abundant

Rimando is thankful that fish is already abundant in Alaminos because of a 34-hectare marine protected area established by the city government with the help of the University of the Philippines’ Marine Science Institute.

Fishermen need not go far into the sea because the fish sanctuary has been serving as spawning ground of various species, says Manuel Credo, technical consultant on the city’s coastal resource management office.

Gilbert Rabadon of the city fishery office says a local fisherman catches five to seven kg of fish daily, compared to almost nothing before the fish sanctuary was established and illegal fishing was rampant.

“If only gasoline is not too expensive, fishing could be a very lucrative means of living,” says Rimando.

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