cortez marine":3hmti2bf said:
' How is an untrained, unequipped diver supposed to work if cyanide is all he has....."
Answer; How did he get the expensive cyanide?
If his buyer supplied the real tools and nets, all would be fine. But the buyer has often been the agent of corruption in his finance and provision of the juice. He in turn often gets it or financing for it from the very exporters speaking English to US importers every day.
{snip}
Never was needed but it was pushed on the divers and thought efficient by non divers. It fooled a lot of people for a long time.
Steve
Steve,
Not that I am disagreeing.
Cyanide is a great leveler. Any person who can hold their breath and swim underwater can capture fish using a squirtbottle. It requires literally no skill. Let me take that back slightly- The only skill required is learning how to have a light touch, as in how much to use. Other than that, any one of us white-skinned city folk could master 'the skill' easily.
Capturing fish with nets is really a learned skill. It requires time, patience and a lot of effort. Wet water time, in other words. Do you think you could train me to catch blueface in just a couple of dives? I doubt it, even though I am a relatively quick learner. It would take me dozens of dives to learn the fish and their behaviors - to know what the fish will do before the fish know it. Once I get to that point, I would already be skilled.
It isn't that net fishing can't be done, nor that it can't be more efficient than cyanide. But it will all depend upon the skill of the person using the nets. Some people will never get the hang of it. Others may get really good at catching some species, but fail utterly in learning how to catch others. They learn one technique, but no others. Ferdie told me about one fisherman who was great at catching a single species- he could clean off an entire reef. But that was about the only thing he could catch as he could never master any other technique.
I would posit that if you took ten guys and trained them equally, not all ten would be more efficient than a modestly skilled cyanide user. Some number would consistently catch less, just because they didn't get it. I can't juggle for crap even when I tried to learn in my youth. I understood what I was supposed to do, but just never could get the hang of it. I imagine that net fishing could be similar in that way. There will be people that could vacuum a reef with nets, while others couldn't catch a fish if it were the sole object in an small aquarium.
Anyway, my point is pretty simple here - I believe you are mostly correct, but I also think that some people will never be able to master nets and will go back to cyanide (if it were an option) because it is more efficient
for them. Not that that makes it right.
Regards.
Mike Kirda
