My inclinations were drawing me much more towards salt water activities than they were towards treading grapes with my bare feet. As frequently as I dared, I reminded the matron of the house that I was very interested in meeting the fisherman, Peppino. On our first day there, after asking her, she indicated that she would ask him if I could go out fishing with him one day. He looked to be in his late sixties, early seventies, and judging by the lack of fish he was bringing in, I was convinced he could use some company from a fellow hook and line fisherman. There wasn't much else to do around there. That's what I liked about it. It was peaceful and beautiful at the same time. As a rule, there weren't many people around the house and you couldn't get much more than a glimpse of the goats during the day. They left early each morning to spread out across the island in search of food. Besides Edward and myself, there was just the matron of the house and her husband who was usually gone during the day. He spoke No English and when I met him the first day there, he showed a complete lack of interest in wanting anything to do with us American tourists. Even though much of the life and on this island in many ways resembled a lot of English speaking places I've been to, this was strictly Greek territory, where English was more unpopular than German...
Finally, on the third or fourth day there, she said Peppino had agreed to take me out with him and that I needed to be down by his boat at four o'clock sharp the next afternoon. He always went out at four and came back the next day at four. The next day, I walked down to his ancient looking boat and met him for the first time. After hearing each other's introductory words and quickly sensing that neither one of us understood, it was sufficiently evident that trying to verbally articulate our thoughts was never gonna work. It clearly would've just all been "Greek" to both of us. Unfortunately, we didn't have the luxury of having someone translate for us. Nevertheless, with the water all to ourselves, and the boat motor purring like a kitten, we shoved off and taxied out into deep waters to fish Greek style in the Med....
His boat was a typical Greek fishing boat. It was about twenty feet long, give or take a couple feet, and about nine feet wide or so. It was white, pointed on each end and had a square opening in the middle that led down below to a cabin type space. The space below was large enough to accommodate one person and a small inboard diesel motor that ran a propeller shaft coming out of the bottom of the boat. It had a small square canopy over the opening to the space below that kept the rain out, if by any slim chance, it should happen to rain. On each side of the canopy door way was a narrow wooden deck you could walk on.
From one end of the deck to almost the middle of the boat were neatly stacked piles of fish net which I later discerned was just one big, long net, stacked in piles. It was a gill net that was only about seven or eight feet, top to bottom, and at least four hundred yards long. With this kind of net, the main idea is to catch fish by their gills as they become entangled in the net while trying to swim through it. Back in the 50's and 60's, commercial fisherman from around the Mediterranean used large scoop nets, netting out ninety five percent of the fish population of the Mediterranean! Therefore, to keep you from taking too many fish, people are now required to use a gill net. In order to let the net out, Peppino slowly ran the boat while feeding it into the water, off the back of the boat. When it was all out, it was so long that I couldn't see the end of it. It had large styrofoam bobbers every thirty yards or so that were fastened to the top of the net. Along the bottom of the net were small weights that held the bottom of the net down which kept it from getting tangled and enabled it to cover the most amount of space to get the most amount of fish. Peppino laid the net out a little before dark and brought it in the next day. The front of the boat had an electric crank to pull it in with. He was used to doing it all by himself which was a lot of work...
He couldn't speak or understand a word of English, and I couldn't understand or speak a word of Greek other than yes, no and thank you. To further stimulate our cognitive abilities, we were going several miles out into big water to work together for at least twenty four hours, and it was a way of fishing that I was totally unfamiliar with. As far as I was concerned, fishing was fishing and it was just a matter of utilizing an adequate amount of sign language along with copying whatever he was doing... We were both pretty experienced at fishing, and to me that removed ninety-nine percent of the language barrier. After all, most communication is non-verbal anyway...
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