I would go out with the fishermen and get in the mud to fish with them at least once every other tide. I found it fun and it demonstrated to everyone that I would never ask them to do something that I was not willing to do myself. If there were 20 fishermen going out to work one of the large nets (eventually we constructed a second bayao) they would go to the net placements in pairs, each fisherman in his own personal small dugout canoe. They would sit by one of the marked poles as the tide went down, until they were both sitting on top of the mud. We had ten groups of two who were all arranged in this manner. Once the water was gone you would get out of the dugout into the almost thigh deep mud. In each group each fisherman would head off in opposite directions, pushing the small dugout on top of the mud and collecting the shrimp that was up against the net as they went along. Each fisherman would eventually be met by someone coming in opposite direction. A typical span that required collection was about the length of a football field, and it took a couple of hours to cover each assigned segment of the mud flat after the tide receded, and before the new tide rolled back in.
On one particular night I could tell that it was a good night because of the large number of shrimp that had been caught behind the nets. I was standing in thigh deep mud and had with me a small dugout canoe that I would use to toss the shrimp into. I pushed as the canoe glided along the top of the mud as I worked my way down the line of nets. The quantity of bugs is unimaginable, as there is a constant din buzzing around, the kind of noise that is not made by a few bugs but by zillions of them. Fortunately, the diesel does keep the flying insects off of your body. I had an old Seco bottle filled with kerosene and an old rag stuffed in the open end of the bottle, and lit on fire, for light. The nets, which were still up and couldn’t be put back down until the tide returned, formed a solid black wall in the darkness about ten feet high and almost a mile long.
As I progressed, suddenly the entire span of the net shook as if it had been hit by a bus. I was shocked, and a little frightened, as I had never encountered anything like this before. I continued to collect the shrimp and pushed my small boat forward in the direction of the light that approached in the distance. I knew the light was Felipe's and on this night I was looking forward to meeting up with him. Suddenly the entire net shook again. This shaking of the net continued to occur periodically during the entire time I was moving along my segment of the net line.
As a fisherman works his way along the net he encounters a couple of areas on each segment that never quite dry completely. The water flows to the lowest point and these pools are constantly fed, as the tide retreats, by small inland streams. I finally came upon one of these pools and there I discovered the cause of the net's movements.
We had caught a 700 pound hammerhead shark that was swimming around in a three-foot deep, twelve foot wide pool of water. Every once in a while it would ram into the net. The force from this huge shark shook the entire line of nets.
I screamed out, in the still clear night air, in the direction of the light in the distance, "Felipe, we have caught a giant shark here in this pool."
Felipe screamed back at me, "Leave it alone, Gringo."
Every time the shark swam to the side of the pool where I stood in the mud just a few feet from the edge of the pool, several shrimp would jump out of the pool trying to get away from the shark. I would collect up these fugitive shrimp and toss them into the canoe. I calculated that there had to be a lot of shrimp in the pool, and to retrieve the shrimp I had to somehow either make friends with the shark, or kill it.
The next time the shark came back over to my side of the pool, I took my very large hard wood mahogany paddle, waved it over my head, and brought it down squarely on top of the shark's head, wham!
Bad idea!
It was like hitting solid cement. It cracked my “unbreakable” paddle and hurt my hand.
And, I think I heard the shark laughing at me!
It was then that I remembered that a shark has to keep moving or it dies. It’s funny when you are in these situations what you are able to remember from your years of schooling. This shark was moving constantly and still occasionally ramming itself into the nets. So I slowly made my way through the mud around the pool and up the side of the stream that was keeping the pool filled. There I started to stack the mud trying to dam up the small stream. The idea worked as the stream water was diverted and started to run out along the sides of the mud flats and away from the shark’s pool. The rest of the water ran out of the pool, the pool dried up, and the shark died.
I then took my small canoe over to this monster dead shark and tied him and the canoe together. The shark was at least half again bigger than the canoe. I will never forget the looks on the guy's faces when I paddled back up to the main rancho as the tide came back in, with this giant hammerhead tied to the side of my little dugout canoe. I was exhausted and my body was completely caked in mud, but I had earned a new level of respect from the fishermen. The guys cut out the jaws and gave them to me, and I still have those jaws to this day. Those shark jaws are one of my most treasured possessions.
