For the longest time I had a request in to ride along with a friend of Kuniko’s dad on one of his octopus fishing trips. Periodically Kuniko’s dad (Niro) will send home a frozen octopus or two with us, and I wanted to see how people went fishing for them. Luckily the time was right, and this morning at 5:30 a.m. we went out to the harbor and jumped on board the little boat to see it first hand.
This was my second time fishing – the first time was for seaweed a while back. That time we stayed close to the shore, but this time it was out onto the open water. The owner of the boat put it on full speed and handed me the wheel so he could crouch in the front of the boat and smoke a cigarette. I really enjoyed piloting the boat. He had a pretty good engine and a clear day, and it was exhilarating to stand in the front with the wind blowing through my hair and the sun rising to my right. After a while he directed me to his favorite spot, and we stopped the boat and rearranged for fishing.
I learned a lot today but the thing that stood out as the most important part of fishing for octopus is having your boat positioned correctly. The octopus float along on a salty current underneath a less salty layer at the top. The boat should be positioned perpendicular to the flow of the current. The water will slowly turn the boat, or the wind, or the flow of water from other boats, so you always have to readjust the boat.
From the boat the fisherman throws out colorful hooks attached to a thick fishing line. You throw them out as far as you can in a fan shape away from the boat, so they are floating along in the salty current layer, and they make colorful and attractive targets for octopi to grab onto. There is no bait – they are attracted to the shape and the color. The fisherman holds onto all the strings in one hand, and if he feels a tug on one of the lines he yanks the line which sticks the hook into the octopus. Then it is just a matter of dragging the line in as quickly as possible before the octopus gets off the hook (which we managed to do about 80% of the time).
Once you pull the line in you’ve got a pissed off little octopus with eight arms flailing around trying to attach themselves to anything (so you can’t bring them alongside the outside of the boat when bringing them in – I learned that the hard way). They’ll squirt water or ink to try to confuse things, but we just slipped them off the hook and throw the hook back out. The boat had a hole in the middle with a wooden lid that led to a net in a bucket of water – you remove the lid and toss the octopus inside the hole and it is stuck in prison until you get back.
It took a while to set up, but soon we were throwing and reeling and I was starting to get a hang of things. I wasn’t used to dealing with the live octopi, they would scramble away from us at a surprisingly high speed and sometimes it was tough to catch them and throw them into prison.
About halfway through the trip I was sitting in the middle of the boat watching the lines intently for any sign of pull, and suddenly I felt somebody touch my leg. I looked down with sudden horror to see an octopus start to wrap itself around my knee – he had pushed off the lid of the prison and there were several of the little guys making a jailbreak. I jumped up startled, and when Niro and his friend saw what happened we all broke out in laughter. And I kept a close eye on the prison lid from then on.
We spent about two hours out on the water, surrounded by other fishing boats pulling in nets with more conventional fish. Another boat was pulling in octopus another way – they had laid a long rope with plastic pots attached at intervals in the water the day before, and now they were reeling it in – the pots make great little hiding places for the octopi until it gets yanked out of the water. The sailors were pulling the octopi out of their temporary homes adeptly in far great numbers than we were able to do with just hooks.
Still, it was a pretty good haul. We caught about twenty octopi, and as we headed back to shore all I could think about was how the hell they were going to go from live imprisoned octopi to dead edible octopi in my refrigerator. When we got back to the harbor, the fisherman started the (rather gross) process of cleaning (and killing) the octopi, which I will describe in the next paragraph – so squeamish readers beware.
The “head” of the octopus is actually more of a hood, so the fisherman would pull the octopus out of prison, and actually pull the head up over itself – turning it inside out. From there it was easy to pull off the two brain-like pieces inside the head, effectively killing the octopus rather quickly. Then he pulled the guts out of the middle and flung them overboard, leaving the still-thrashing legs, the empty “head”, and the eyes and “mouth” of the octopus to be removed later with a knife.
We gathered up our share of catch, thanked the fisherman for a great experience and headed to my place. The guy was really nice to show us the ropes of octopus fishing, and he was really patient with us. It was a nice relaxed pace as well – he did the whole thing barefoot too.
Back at my place Niro took over and showed me how to cut out the eyes and mouth of the dead octopus, then we rubbed them in a huge amount of salt to get rid of any toxins left on the surface of the octopus. After that we rinsed them off and we were done. If I liked raw octopus (I don’t) I could eat it as sashimi at this stage, but I prefer it boiled, so after Niro headed back I boiled them up and then stocked the fridge and freezer. I even had an extra that I gave to the florist downstairs (who was thrilled to get local octopus) so it was a good haul.
I tried as best I could to take some pictures but I was too busy hauling them in to really get many good ones. Take a look at the pictures I did manage to take in the photo gallery.
After I got everything cleaned up and put away I was surprised to find my computer making some evil noises, so I spent most of the day working on getting on that repaired, which culminated in a trip to Nishi Akashi and an hour sitting in a computer shop while technicians cleaned out my notebook. Now things are working fine, and it is running a lot cooler. I think there was a significant cloud of dust inside the poor thing. As soon as I got home from getting the computer fixed I had to clean up and then go over to Kawasaki to teach a class. So I’m pretty tired out now.
Tomorrow Kuniko will be back from her study camp, and things will hopefully run a lot smoother tomorrow. I’m running behind on my studies thanks to the computer problems – tomorrow will have to be a catch-up day.
