The fishermen of St. Thomas can’t seem to catch anything but problems lately.  In early November, they complained to both The Observer and the Fisheries Minister that hookah boats were destroying their livelihood.

Hookah fishing is both destructive and very dangerous.  A compressor in a boat feeds air through a tube to a man in the water who is spearing or netting fish.  (See illustration) The air supply lets the man in the water stay there for a long time, and according to the fishermen who made the complaint, “use him net to scrape up even the baby fish.”

The hookah system was developed for the conch fishery.  It let the men in the water clean their catch on the bottom, bringing only the meat to the surface.  This meant that a lot more conch were caught, and it was much harder for inspectors to make sure they were all legal size.  Using hookah boats to fish isn’t new.  In the 1980’s a fleet of hookah boats regularly set out at sunset to strip most of the large parrotfish off Montego Bay’s reefs.

This style of fishing is very dangerous because most of the people involved don’t know what’s involved in breathing under water for a long time.  Because of the difference in pressure under water, some of the nitrogen in the air the diver is breathing dissolves in his blood.  The longer he’s down, and the deeper he goes, the more this happens.  The diver must come back to the surface very slowly, to let his lungs get rid of the extra nitrogen a bit at a time.  If he doesn’t, he’s in trouble.

There is less pressure as he rises, so the dissolved gas in his blood forms bubbles – like taking the cap off a bottle of soft drink.  These bubbles can cause anything from crippling joint pain (“the bends”) to blindness (ruptures and broken veins in the eyes) to death (bleeding or blocked blood supply in the brain).  So far, several St. Thomas fishermen have been crippled by hookah fishing, at least two killed and at least one blinded.

As if this wasn’t enough trouble, last week the fishermen in Leith Hall, St. Thomas, complained to The Gleaner that they could no longer supply their local area because dolphins were following their boats and ripping their nets apart.  Apparently, this has been going on for some time.  According to one fisherman, “Them dolphins, you can never go out to sea and come back without your net damaged.  You know how much time them laugh after we?”

Dolphins are very smart, but it likely gives them too much credit to think they’re laughing at the men of Leith Hall, or taking revenge for the thousands of dolphins killed by fishing nets every year.  This bunch has just found a fairly easy way to get a free meal, and there’s not much can be done about it because they’re protected under Jamaican law.  To get ahead of them, the people will have to change their way of fishing.

The hookah boats are another matter.  It’s been suggested that compressors should be banned.  This is just silly.  As Dr. Tufton pointed out, Jamaica still has some SCUBA diving tourism for which these machines are absolutely necessary.  Stopping the hookah fishery means prying some enforcement money loose from a very tight budget.  It needs to be done before the last fish is gone, and before the people that are being harmed decide to solve the problem on their own.