On a fishing boat in the Seto Inland Sea

I went small boat bottom seine fishing on Sunday (小型機船底びき網). Typically, this is a type of commercial fishing in the Seto Inland Sea. Every summer, my boar hunting group charters out a boat and we “help” the crew and divide the haul up between the group.

This is a kind of net trawling, but instead of dragging the 300 meter (984 feet) wide net along the bottom, the boat pays out a 1000 meters (3200 feet) of rope on one side only, drops the net and then drives in a big loop while letting another 1000 meter rope out on the other side. This encloses the fish into the net and then both ropes and the net are hauled in.

We got on the boat on the border between Kojima and Mizushima, only about 45 minutes from my house and basically at the bottom of the hill from Washuzan Highland amusement park with a perfect view of the Seto Ohashi bridge that connects Honshu to Shikoku.

We cruised less than 30 minutes to an area south of the Mizushima industrial port area, dropped the net 3 times to get a full haul and were back in port eating sashimi and freshly boiled fish less than 3 hours later.

We mostly caught two kinds of タイ sea bream, マダイ red sea bream and クロダイ black sea bream or black porgy and some other types, one of which might have been ニベ Japanese croaker. I ended up going home with over 50 fish in my cooler.

Not having that much freezer space, I shared the wealth amongst some friends and descaled, gutted and froze the remainder.

My hunting group usually does this trip while I’m in the States for my summer break, so this was my first time to be able to join in. It was an interesting experience, the three man crew (including a young guy from Indonesia) did most of the work, we just helped haul the net a bit and carry giant baskets of fish to the giant cooler in the back.