Gone Fishing in Port Maria

Ahh you’re gonna love this one! And I’m glad I lived to tell about it! A few weeks ago I was in Port Maria and a friend of mine who’s nephew is a fisherman there offered to take us fishing. Sounded great until we woke up that day and it was windy and stormy! But we had faith it was going to clear up and we headed out anyways. Well it turned out to be one of those events where the whole time you’re planning how you’ll save your own life if you have to!

I was with my mother for this fishing trip, this was her first time in Jamaica and I was trying to give her the most local experiences I could. She seemed pretty excited about going fishing because the guys said that whatever we caught that day, they’d cook it up for us as soon as we got out of the boat. Can’t get much fresher than that! So off we went in one of these little wooden boats with a motor strapped to the back of it, and the most primitive form of fishing line set up I’ve ever seen. They don’t use rods, they just have lines hanging off those long sticks, some how rigged up with a clothes pin to tell when a fish bites. I still don’t get it but that’s how they do it and it works!

There was only one life jacket available and I let my mom have it. We started heading out to sea and the further out we got the worse the waves became! I had no idea that we’d be soaked from head to toe in mere minutes of leaving the shoreline. In one sense I started to regret bringing my camera with me because I thought it would be ruined from the water, but on the other hand once we made it back alive I didn’t regret having the pictures and video as proof we survived! For a split second I was planning how I’d keep my camera safe if we capsized LOL!

As we headed out we were driving directly against the waves, which were at least 10 feet high….no joke! So our boat would rise on the swells and then come slapping down HARD on the other side of the wave. Hard enough that it almost knocked us off our seats every time it crashed down. It only took my mom about five minutes to start saying she wished we could head back because she was scared, but we pushed on. The further out we went the larger the swells were. I would venture to guess some of them were about 20 feet high and occasionally they would just come over the boat and the guys had to bail water out. I’m laughing as I type because I still can’t believe we did this but I figured this is what these guys do for a living and trusted that if it wasn’t safe they wouldn’t have brought two white ladies out here!

At one point about 25 km from the shoreline, I managed to pull out my camera and shoot this video. Believe me this doesn’t do it justice, you can’t really tell how big those waves are and how tiny I felt in the HUGE open sea in this dinky little boat!

Once we reached a point WAAAY out there were some markers in the water where fish traps were dropped. They stopped the boat at each marker and it took three of them to pull the traps to see if there were any fish. All were empty, disappointing. But we still had hope for catching something on the lines we were dragging from the boat. And we still had hope for survival too! There was a point when our boat was parallel with the flow of the waves so we wobbled fiercely with every swell. I kept laughing out loud at the whole adventure and my mom actually asked me if I was just too stupid to be scared LOL!

Overall the whole excursion was about two hours and we never caught one single fish. Highly disappointing considering what we endured. The other disappointing part for me was the water was too rough to have my camera out for most of the trip and we saw some spectacular shoreline around Annotto Bay. It’s all really high and rough rock with HUGE waves crashing against it. I’m so sad I couldn’t capture any of that but hey, this isn’t CNN and I’m not willing to die for this blog.

The water seemed to calm a bit as we were heading back to shore so they took us around the little island you see in the first picture above. They told us they actually swim from shore out to this island sometimes and chill out. My mom and I called it “Muffin Top” island because of some rocks around it that looked like muffin tops sticking out of the water.

We finally reached back to shore, drenched and freezing cold and I’d ingested enough salt water to preserve myself for at least a hundred years! Here’s the final picture of this day. Normally when clothing is wet you can see the wet spots….but in this picture I’m FULLY wet, you can’t see a dry spot! I have no regrets about going and even my mom, after living to tell about it, laughs that we actually did this!

I’ve never wished for a long, HOT shower in Jamaica until this day!

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