Scotland

I can think of almost nothing more pleasurable to me than painting a landscape on a Greek island and being on a kaiki -a Greek fishing boat- in the Aegean sea. As painting a landscape does require some brain activity from my part, sat on the prow of a small kaiki with the wind blowing and the sea splashing around me, returning from a fishing trip, would probably come first. This is perhaps the only time my mind is completely at peace and there is nothing else but the sea, the wind and the movement of the boat.

I used to work in small fishing boats in the summer holidays when my mother, my grandmother and I went to an island for a few weeks. My mother worked very hard all year long, non-stop and saved so that every summer we went to a different island for two weeks. It might sound strange, but this was unusual in the eighties and nineties in Greece. Greek people used to go to the villages or islands they originally came from and very rarely went travelling to new places, even within their own country. Its not really till the last decade to fifteen years that travelling in Greece by Greeks has become popular. So we only ever met the locals and a lot of foreign tourists. I have never worked in a fishing boat for money, but more for my pleasure and we also got free fish and got to eat almost for free at the tavernas of the fishermen's families. Although I have been involved in two boating accidents, one almost cost my younger cousin's life and the other injured badly my back, I still cannot imagine spending more than a year without being on a boat at least a couple of times.

When I was a student in Newcastle, after I had settled there for a bit, I felt very much like seeing what fishing was like in the UK. My experience was of small kaiki boats only, with no more than five to six men including the captain and myself and only in the summer and early autumn. I have only been aboard a large trawler once and that had a crew of twenty Egyptian men fishing for industrial purposes and was very different than a Greek kaiki. I found very quickly that going on a British fishing boat, let alone work on one, was not going to be as easy as it was on the Greek islands. The health and safety regulations are very strict and so I cannot divulge too much specifics here. I wanted to experience something quite different and I had an old friend in Greece who had worked on large fishing boats in Norway and in Scotland. And he said the sea was as if it was a different sea altogether and he could not describe it but you had to live it to see what he meant. I only made it to a fishing boat near Berwick-upon-Tweed and not to the North Eastern Scottish fishing villages I was hoping to. Anyway, the sea was for sure very different, but what was really different was all the clothes and gear I had to wear. By the time I had the boots, the clothes, fishing overalls and life jacket I think I weighted another five kilos at least. And the sea was so rough and the net pulling machines so noisy that I could not hear anyone shouting at all. You definitely cannot talk while you work there. But I have to say that the people were very friendly and as hard and exhausting as their work is they know very well how to have a good time and relax afterwards, just like the Greek fishermen do.

Some of the Greek boys I used to work with on a kaiki on Symi island wanted to return fast after a night session of fishing to go and see their girls at the one and only discotheque at the time on the island. We used to really rush the final cleaning of the kaiki (you need to thoroughly rinse it with several buckets of fresh water as the salt will eventually "eat up the wood") and then go straight to the discotheque. But the girls were not too impressed as the boys smelled fishy. So out they went to go and wash and by the time they returned to the club all Old Spiced up it was now closed and all that was left to do was lay on the beach and watch falling stars and probably a bit more.

There is no gear really to wear on a kaiki boat of a small size like the ones I was on and we often did not even wear shoes. Our feet were "burnt up" by the heat and salt on the wood of the boat that not even an urchin spike went through. We talked a lot too and sometimes we had to do a lot of waiting between throwing the nets and collecting them (if it was on the same day). It was so different from the Berwick-upon-Tweed boat. Three of us once had to jump off the boat and then take hold of the net and swim around a bay to lead a school of sea breams toward the beach and trap them there. This is fishing at its most primal version. It took us a whole hour but it was a huge catch and we were exhausted with fatigue and with exhilaration. Fishing in Greece is more about the connection with the sea than it is about fish. Which is not in every way a good thing of course, as fish numbers are dramatically declined and not much thought was wasted around it, but that is an other subject all together.

The closer I made it to Scottish fishing is when I arranged to visit a small fishing community on Arran island, on the West coast this time. I was based in Irvine for a few days and was meant to go to Arran for two nights and go on a fishing boat that caught scampi and lobsters. But I never made it there. Every time I went to Saltcoats the ferry never left as the winds were too high for the whole of my stay in Irvine. I think now that it was just not meant to be that I was to fish in Scotland. So second best thing to do was to paint a bit and below are the results of the high winds keeping me in Irvine.