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FISHING boats lie idle at Sitio Quinabuangan in Masinloc, Zambales, after a cargo ship plowed through a payao that provided better catch for local fishers.
‘RAMMED’! Zambales fishermen face another formidable adversary in open sea
M
By Henry Empeño
ASINLOC, Zambales—It’s another David versus Goliath situation that Zambales fishermen now find themselves in.
On January 17, Tuesday, at high noon, local fishermen were busy baiting their fishing lines and hauling in their catch when disaster struck. A ship, which seemed to come from nowhere, headed directly for their payao, a floating fish aggregating device (FAD) that was anchored some 16 kilometers off the coast of this town. “I tried to get the attention of two crewmen I saw on deck, but it seemed they couldn’t understand me,” recalled Ronald Balognapo, who was the first to see the impending crash. Slamming his fists together, he tried to gesture that the ship was going to hit something—the payao floaters that also served as a buoy. “The crewmen went to the other side of the ship, and saw there were a lot of fishing boats there, but at that angle, the payao ahead wasn’t quite visible to them,” Balognapo recalled. Jojo Pimentel, who joined other fishermen in making frantic gestures to the ship crew, said their signals apparently did not register. “We were using the covers of Styrofoam boxes to get noticed. We signaled them to go back. But the crewmen were just laughing and waving to us. Maybe they thought we were trying to sell them fish,” Pimentel said in frustration. Meanwhile, the fishermen were already in a state of panic, Balognapo remembered. That payao, then heavily populated by fish of all kinds, has been scheduled for harvest just days away by a commercial fishing trawler equipped with a boom. Now all these could
“We will definitely back up our people in their quest for justice.” — Zambales Governor Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. BERNARD TESTA
be lost in a matter of minutes. There were about 30 small boats fishing in the vicinity that day, most of them tied to the payao. These the ship’s crew could see. But only a small portion of the fish aggregating device—the floaters—showed on the surface of the water. The cluster of coconut leaves that attracted pelagic fishes like tuna, bonito and round scad (galunggong) was submerged, kept underwater by a sinker. And so was the rope that anchored the device to three concrete counterweights. The fishers said they kept on signaling for the ship to turn back, but these went unheeded. Finally, the ship sounded its horn with two blasts and sped forward. The weight of the ship then snapped the rope that kept the payao in place, the fishers said.
Danger zone
THE waters west of Zambales has always been a rich fishing ground
MASINLOC fishermen recall the ramming: “We signaled them to turn back, but they didn’t. Instead, they speeded up more.”
THE bulk carrier HC Glory was in Masinloc port to deliver a load of coal.
for local fishers. Fishing, which is traditionally a major occupation of residents here, has brought Masinloc menfolk as far as 120 nautical miles away to the disputed Scarborough Shoal, which this municipality had formally claimed. According to the town’s agriculture office, about 4,000 of the town’s roughly 48,000 residents are involved in fishing, with up to 800 fishing boats registered in the municipality each year. However, tension at the Scarborough Shoal, also known locally as Bajo de Masinloc, had been high since the April 2012 standoff, making fishing in the disputed area dangerous. Fishers reported being barred and sometimes attacked by Chinese militia boats that blockaded the shoal. This curtailed fishing in the open sea among local fisherfolk, thus adversely affecting their livelihood. In March 2013, a year after the Scarborough situation escalated, the Philippine government announced the nationwide deployment of payao devices to provide “more stable livelihood opportunities” for small fishermen operating within the country’s municipal waters. Since fishes are known to con-
operated by the Hong Kong Haichang Holdings Group Ltd. The Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship was delivering coal to the Masinloc Coal-Fired Power Plant, and, as fishermen learned later on, it was just biding its time out in the
gregate naturally around floating objects that may serve as feeding place or refuge from predators, the use of payao improved fishing efficiency with increased catch and reduced time and cost—mainly fuel—in searching for fish. The January 17 incident that destroyed a payao owned by Masinloc fishers, however, revealed another danger zone—dramatically defining another threat to the life and livelihood of small fishermen who fish in open waters. And the ramming appeared to be intentional, the fishermen concluded in an interview with the BusinessMirror. “We signaled them to turn back, but they didn’t. Instead, they speeded up more,” they said.
open sea, awaiting its schedule to unload its cargo, when the disaster happened. “This was not the first time that our payao was cut loose or destroyed,” Cuaresma lamented. Of Continued on A2
Damage done
LEONARDO CUARESMA, president of the New Masinloc Fishermen’s Association (NMFA), the group that owned the destroyed payao, said he immediately filed an incident report with authorities as soon as some fishers arrived from sea to tell him about the disaster. The culprit, he said in an incident report dated January 18 and addressed to the officer in charge of the Coast Guard Substation in Masinloc, was HC Glory, a bulk carrier
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 54.7440 n JAPAN 0.4161 n UK 66.3662 n HK 6.9740 n CHINA 8.0684 n SINGAPORE 41.3037 n AUSTRALIA 37.9650 n EU 58.7951 n KOREA 0.0433 n SAUDI ARABIA 14.5883 Source: BSP (February 10, 2023)