Florida Waterways
“Stilt Fishermen”
By Kevin McCarthy

Captions: 
A group of stilt fishermen 
A solitary fisherman 
Balancing on a pole 
What such a fisherman looks like 
Local houses on stilts 
A map showing the island nation 

Whenever I travel abroad or read about exotic places, I try to see what the local fishing and boating scene is like, and then share some ideas and pictures of such places. Although I have never been to Myanmar (formerly called Ceylon and Burma and Sri Lanka), I have come to greatly admire the stilt fishermen there, skilled balancers who have been fishing from unusual perches since World War II.

That country, located off the southeastern coast of India in the Indian Ocean, has experienced some bad tsunamis, which have temporally put a stop to stilt fishing, but the resumption of the practice draws many to the bays and rivers where tourists can see it in practice. I’m sure that such stilt-perching can be very difficult, but those fishermen are quite good at it. In reading about them, I learned that they will stick a tall, vertical pole into the sea floor and then attach a crossbar to the pole, allowing them to sit just a few feet above the water. While they remain there for hours at a time, they do not cause shadows on the water which might disturb the fish below.

The fishermen will drop lines into the shallow water or spear passing mackerel and deposit their catch into a bag tied to their waist or the pole itself. They might even use a throw net to catch herring. They usually fish around sunrise and again at dusk. The safest place for such fishing is close to shore, and even in enclosed lagoons safe from the crashing waves. The fishermen often like to explain to visitors how they catch fish and maybe even let a daring person try it out.

The practice began in World War II, when some of the local men began fishing on the wreckage of shipwrecks and downed aircraft, and for some reason that led to their building stilts on coral reefs. They may have gotten the idea of the stilts by looking at their houses, which are often built on wooden stilts in shallow water. Stilt fishing is not as popular as it used to be, probably because the fish stocks are dwindling, but fishermen will still pose for photographs from visiting tourists, who are expected to tip the men on the poles.

Anyway, it is a tough way to catch fish and probably won’t become popular along our Florida coast, but it is always interesting to see how fishermen adapt to different environments around the world.

Kevin McCarthy, the author of The Black WACs of World War II (2019 – (available at amazon.com), can be reached at ceyhankevin@gmail.com.