The first time I went spearfishing with men from a village in Fiji, I was embarrassing. I had been diving since I was eight years old and I thought I knew how to move in the water. I did not know how to move in the water the way these men moved in the water. They were silent and efficient and entirely at home in a way that years of recreational diving had not produced in me. I watched more than I fished and I came back from that morning understanding something about competence that I had not understood before.
We have gone out fishing and diving with local communities across the Pacific on multiple occasions now, and it has never been anything other than one of the best experiences each leg has produced. This article is about what those mornings look like and what they teach.
Spearfishing in Fiji
The fishermen from the village near our anchorage in the Lau archipelago went out before dawn on a falling tide, which is when the fish move along the reef edges toward the deeper water. They used simple wooden spearguns: no weights, no elaborate dive gear, no wetsuit. They free-dove to seven or eight metres, moved horizontally along the reef in a way that produced almost no water disturbance, and speared fish with an accuracy that made the whole process look quiet and inevitable rather than effortful.
What I learned watching them, and slowly beginning to replicate even a fraction of, was breath control. Not the breath-holding capacity of a competitive freediver, which these men did not have either, but the mental stillness that makes the available breath last longer. You cannot be anxious and hold your breath efficiently. The reef requires a quality of calm attention that is not about technique. It is about the relationship between the body and the environment. These men had it completely. I had it in pieces.
Net Fishing in the Marquesas
The Marquesas produce some of the most extraordinary fish I have eaten anywhere. The water is deep and cold and clean, and the yellowfin tuna that run along the island shorelines are larger and better-tasting than anything you catch in the trade wind belt between islands. The local fishermen work with nets from small open boats, a cooperative technique that requires knowing the reef topography well enough to predict where the fish will run when the net is deployed.
We were invited to join a net fishing morning in Nuku Hiva on our second day in the Marquesas. My father went. I went. Two members who had joined in Panama went. We were the least useful people in the water by a large margin, but the fishermen were patient and specific about what they needed from us, which was mostly to stand in particular places and not move until told to. The catch came up in a way that felt almost magical: fifty fish in a net that had been in the water for twenty minutes. We were given a portion of the catch. The rest went to the village.
What These Mornings Give You
The practical outcome of a morning fishing with local communities is fish for dinner, which is excellent. The actual outcome is harder to describe. It is an understanding of a specific place that you cannot acquire by observing it from the boat or from the beach. When you have been in the water on the same reef as the people whose families have been fishing it for generations, you understand that reef differently. The fish are not decorative. The water is not a swimming pool. The place is not a destination. It is a food system that has sustained a community across centuries, and the morning you spent in it is a small and genuine participation in that.
My father has always said that the best thing a visiting sailor can bring to a Pacific community is genuine curiosity and genuine respect. The fishing mornings are one of the places that is most obviously true. You are in their classroom. You know almost nothing. And if you are honest about that, the morning is one of the best ones available anywhere on the route.
