Pangasinan - Fishing for Bangus Part 1

I excitedly hopped around the sturdy workboat as it steadily made its way out of the cove just off Pangasinan towards the collection of fish cages about twenty minutes from the coast. Anton, my guide and host for the next couple of days, was explaining to me the ins and outs of bangus (Chanos chanos) farming. The fish farm we would be seeing grew ocean-bred bangus, as opposed to the freshwater bangus industry in other locales. This, plus other practices that they had incorporated, translated into fatter fish with a superior taste (a claim which I made sure I verified that night at dinner). I could barely contain my excitement as I imagined thousands of fish thrashing around in chaos as a sturdy net slowly pulled them in for harvest.

Our first stop was the nursery, where the bangus fingerlings were kept before being transferred to a more permanent cage in the open water. This apparently is the more complicated stage in the growing of the fish as apart from the fact that they are younger and therefore more delicate, the operations are a lot more complex as the water in the different ponds needs constant changing so as to keep the oxygen levels high. The fish are constantly shuffled as well as they grow, and need to be sorted from time to time, which is not an easy task at all when you're dealing with numbers well into the hundreds of thousands. That small dark school of fish below the man in the above photo was estimated to be at around 200 thousand.

The nursery was quite a cozy place, with a constant breeze and white seabirds flying about everywhere. These are a nuisance, however, from a fish grower's perspective. The feisty creatures constantly hang around the sides of the pens and eat the fingerlings, which in turn eats your profits. The place had a pretty genius system of scaring them away with nylon ropes strung up around the perimeter and through each pen, allowing one person to simply pull at the string from any point in the setup to generate noise.

Once large enough to be in the open ocean, the fingerlings are transferred via the workboats to the fish cages in the next bay. From this point on, it will be another six months or so before they reach a marketable size, which is roughly 600 grams - a figure which I believe has something to do with how much fish one can eat in one sitting. After they've reached the target weight, the time comes for the harvest - where the real fun begins.