The fishermen of Géhé village (隔禾村)

Last weekend we went for a short visit to Fuxian lake in the Hunan province. The primary plan was to photograph landscapes, but the weather was not conducive for landscape photography. On Sunday morning, when we wake up, it was drizzling with no promise of a sun appearing.

We decided to take the local bus for a trip around the lake. The bus route is 108km long and it takes 3 hours to get back to our starting point. Although there are marked bus stops, I quickly realised that one can get on or off the bus basically anywhere one wants. There is a bus every 30 minutes and it costs 10 RMB every time one gets onto a bus.

Xiaoyi asked the bus driver to tell us when we get to a beautiful place so that we can get off to take some photographs, but I decided not to trust a non-photographer to tell us where will be a good place to take photographs. It was in any case still drizzling, so landscapes was not really an option.

About 40 minutes into our ride we pass through the small village called Géhé village on the shore of the lake, and as we cross a water canal I noticed a fisherman coming towards us with fishing nets on his boat. I took a photo through the window and made the quick decision that this will be a good place to get off. We asked the bus driver to stop and got off.

It was the right choice.

We walked into the village towards the lake and found a very busy scene.

The previous night was an exceptionally good night for the fishermen and the whole village was busy processing the catch.

At first glance, I did not recognise the catch as fish, but on closer inspection, I saw that it is millions of small white fish. We asked the locals what it is called - Bái fán yú (白凡鱼) which can be translated as ordinary white fish.

The fish is caught with fishing nets at night, and because of there size, they actually are "strangled" in the nets. The women use special wands made from bamboo and bent in a loop to remove the fish from the net. They placed another (much finer) net on the floor and as they sweep their wands over the net, the fish falls onto the net on the floor.

Once they finished cleaning a net, it is taken to a place to be washed and packaged, ready for the next fishing attempt.

Another group of ladies remove the net from the floor and taking it to the "next station" for the next step in the fish processing. In the meantime, the net on the floor is replaced with a clean net and the wand ladies fetch the next fishing net to be cleaned, repeating the whole process.

The people washing the nets also inspect them for tears, and if a tear is found, it is placed on a pile for later fixing.

The fish that was collected on the floor gets put into plastic containers and in some way distributed amongst the villagers. (I think my understand here is a bit sketchy - it is most likely only taken to the actual fishermen who caught it in the first place.)

When we asked, we were told that some of the fish is sold as fresh fish in the containers and will most likely end up in restaurants in a couple of hours time, while others are taken away to be dried in the sun (when the sun is shining...).

Later we saw several fishermen (and ladies) fixing the torn nets.

(This post was earlier today posted on my Weku Blog)