By eight AM the Qantab fishermen are already pulling their
green boats ashore, faces wrapped in sea crusted checkered scarves. I watched two men leap from the bow and
run a rope up the beach to a large empty spool operated by a crank. A few
villagers wondered over, as if summoned, and begin to turn the spool. The boat slowly crept further onto the
beach to be cleaned and stowed until tomorrow.
From a distance I’d been watching two young boys drop a fishing line rolled around a pack of cigarettes into the
ocean below their rocky outcrop for almost an hour. As the masked men pulled
their boat out of the sea the two boys, Jaffer and Hamza, appeared down on the
beach to clean one sizable catch alongside the proper fishermen. Under the
guise of getting a better angle from which to draw the emerging boat I started
a conversation about the fish they’d caught that morning.
The two fishermen pulled their catch from a cooler and
slapped them on the deck for me to see whole before being gutted.
The younger of the two smiled up at me and through the tightly wrapped scarf,
protecting him from relentless sun and ocean wind, I saw deep green eyes.
Oman continues to surprise me.
