Authors: Robson Green
I say, ‘But I don’t want to use it as bait, I want to eat it.’
He says, ‘We will catch many with that one.’
I do as I am told and I slowly pull up the hand line.
‘Oh, my God, I have got another one!’ I cry.
‘It’s the same bloody one!’ everyone replies in unison.
All in all, I catch two. Fishing for swordfish has been a complete disaster. It’s the wrong conditions and by 3 a.m. we’ve all had enough. We’ve been twenty-two hours without a
proper meal and Craig is beginning to gnaw the edge of the boat, like a pony on its stable door. He’s started to kick the side of the boat as well; he is not a happy pony. He is even
unhappier when, after finally reaching land, he hops out of the boat and promptly breaks his ankle. Cameramen with broken ankles are not good news, but luckily, unlike ponies, he can be mended and
not shot.
The doctor back at the hotel bandages it up and tells Craig not to walk on it. We could have saved him a job and the production company a call-out fee. The fixer, Enrico, steps in:
‘It’s OK, guys. I know how to operate a camera.’
Thank God for that – we can sleep easy now.
‘Ooh, looks sore. You OK, mate?’ I say sympathetically to Craig.
‘Yeah, it’s just bloody annoying.’
‘Get some rest. [pause] Oh, and Craig, by the way, your broken ankle – it’s all about karma. That was for the second bag of crisps. The first bag of crisps was fine. We were
even. Level playing field. But not sharing the second, you Kiwi bum pirate? The universe knows, Craig. The universe knows.’
And the universe does indeed know because, back in my room, as I deliver my final piece to camera about how exhausted I am, a bug starts flying around my head, dive-bombing me
like a kamikaze pilot. Argh! It’s a beetle the size of a blackbird.
‘Go away!’
I get a wet hand towel and start to flick at the air, incandescent with fury. Neeeoooooowwww! It goes into flat spin like a World War II bomber at my head, pulling out just before crashing into
my ear. I fight back for another ten minutes, waving what I later realised was basically a white flag around my head, before passing out fully clothed and face down on my bed. God knows what it did
to me that night. I don’t want to think about it.
I’m feeling like shit the next day but if I’m slightly off colour it’s nothing to the pain poor old Craig is in. However, he carries on like a true champion
cameraman. We’re going out by boat to a small island called Kasulian with a guy called Charlito. This area has been declared fishing-free, to encourage fish stocks to recover, and the
initiative is going so well we’ve been given special clearance to fish here – just enough for our supper.
I’m on a banca again and this time we’re using hermit crabs as bait. The crabs live in beautiful shells that are shaped like the ice-cream part of a Mr Whippy. Cruelly we have to
tease them out and then use them as live bait on our hand lines, but this is what the locals do and I’m not here to judge, I’m here to learn.
‘Charlito, I’ve seen some hermit crabs in my time but these are enormous.’
I look into the turquoise waters at the reef below where I can see there is an abundance of coral reef fish but none is more than three inches in size. We throw out the hand lines while Craig
films everything from a special chair. If you watch the sequence you’ll see everything is shot from chest height!
Looking into the sea below, it’s like a tropical aquarium. We can’t be eating these, surely?
‘Charlito, they’re a bit small, don’t you think?’
‘Then we need many,’ he says.
The hand lining is not going according to plan, mainly because the crabs are four inches bigger than the fish and our bait is actually scaring the fish away! Charlito is becoming restless.
Suddenly he produces an enormous spear gun out of nowhere.
‘Let’s go snorkelling!’ he commands.
What is so impressive is that he’s made his entire diving kit himself, including his goggles from discarded rubber and plastic for the lenses, and his flippers, which are wooden panels
attached to his feet. I decide to be a spectator today. What I’m about to witness is akin to blasting a sparrow with a twelve-bore shotgun. The head of the spear gun is bigger than some of
the fish! It doesn’t feel right to me but it’s completely normal to Charlito, and, more importantly, it works. It’s a crude method but it gets results – and the fish he
needs to feed his sizeable family.
We eat five of these pretty fish-tank fish each with casaba, a type of muskmelon that is grown on the island and looks like a honeydew but tastes more like a potato. The fish taste nice enough
but it truly is like eating Nemo.
*
Back at the hotel, I decide to do some research on why the fish are so small in this area and stocks so depleted. I find my answer swiftly: it’s all down to dynamite
fishing, a method whereby desperate people can kill whole shoals in one go with a lump of dynamite and an accurate throw. But it’s disastrous long-term as whole reefs are disappearing and
thus ecosystems are wiped out. And reefs take a very long time to recover. Dynamite fishing is illegal but sadly it’s going on all over the Philippines.
This afternoon the production team has arranged for me to meet an ex-dynamite fisherman who is now helping to educate other fishermen about the importance of protecting the reefs. We travel to a
very different part of the island from where our hotel is located. It’s a poor, dusty village with a collection of sparse shanty huts. We are greeted by Tootya Alvarez, who did six months
inside for dynamite fishing, and his judge, Bimbi, who translates for me. As we walk towards a lagoon that Tootya and others destroyed, he tells me, ‘I did it because it’s very easy to
catch fish. We can catch a large amount and it will be big money for us.’ And do you know what? If I were in the same position as Tootya I’d probably do it, too. It’s a means of
escape from poverty.
‘How much of the reef has disappeared because of dynamite fishing?’ I ask.
‘Outside the lagoon, the reefs are not good anymore because they are already annihilated, but inside the corals are starting to grow already,’ says Tootya.
Thankfully, with the help of local investment and efforts to conserve the reefs by former dynamite fishermen like Tootya, attempts are now being made to help the damaged reefs to recover. It is
now illegal to fish in certain areas, such as the one I went to with Charlito after permissions were granted. This work needs to continue or a bad situation could, further down the line, turn into
an environmental and humanitarian crisis, where the local people literally have
no
fish to live on.
Desert Island
Late next morning we leave Siargao. It’s castaway time and I will be living on a desert island completely on my own for twenty-four hours. I’m apprehensive but
also really looking forward to getting away from this smelly crisp-munching rabble. Craig’s ankle is still buggered so we’ve left him behind and brought our back-up cameraman, fixer
Enrico, with us.
We are heading south to the uninhabited island of Tabili. Two hours into the boat trip and I’m beginning to think this is a really stupid idea.
‘How far away is it?’ I ask.
‘About another half an hour,’ says Jamie.
‘What? You mean I’m two and half hours away from civilisation and, more importantly, help? I thought I’d be just across the way like Lindisfarne to Seahouses and if, for
whatever reason, I needed to swim back I could! I’m going to be miles out, in the middle of the Pacific all on my own. What the hell have I signed up to? This isn’t funny.’
We arrive at Tabili. It’s basically a mound of sand with a few palm trees. I beat my chest in an attempt try to knock down my growing anxiety.
Don’t worry
, I tell myself,
you’re the Ray Mears of the North.
You
are Ray Mears!
Are you out of your fucking mind?
comes the reply.
That’s like saying Dame Judi’s bloody Bruce Parry.
We start shooting some footage of me preparing for the next twenty-four hours and it quickly becomes apparent that, although Enrico is a lovely guy, he’s perhaps not a natural behind the
camera. Jamie is getting increasingly agitated but we muddle on as best we can. In the end, Jamie decides that the best solution is to shoot the whole of the island sequence on my diary camera, and
with that said everyone buggers off on the boat, heading straight to the hotel bar, where it’s trebles all round. I watch the boat become a speck in the distance. I am alone with only my
camera and my thoughts. It’s a weird feeling but the sun is setting so I need to be practical and make a fire. I gather together fire-wood that I collected earlier and, using coconut husks as
kindling, create a small fire. Well, it’s easy when you know how and you have a Bic lighter.
My next task is to make some kind of shelter. Ray Mears made a bivouac on his show so I’m going to do the same, but the light is fading. I um and ah before deciding it might be better to
catch some food first. So what’s on tonight’s menu at the Castaway Café? I could catch a few crabs, or I could cast a line for some small reef fish similar to the ones I caught
with Charlito. I walk along the water’s edge, half-heartedly looking for crabs. What am I doing here? This is crackers. I think about casting a line out and then I have a much better idea.
Hidden among the few supplies I’ve been allowed to bring is a bottle of white wine and a corkscrew.
I find a coconut and draw a face on it in homage to Tom Hanks in
Castaway
, set up the camera and open the bottle of Chablis. As the last of the light fades, I raise a toast to my new
date, Julia (after Julia Roberts, because of her massive mouth). I take a sip of the wine and then drain the contents of the glass. I pour another and another.
‘That’s better,’ I say to Julia. ‘It’s all a bit more fun now I’m getting pissed.’
As I finish the bottle, and open the Sauvignon Blanc, I start talking nonsense to the coconut and the camera.
‘Have you heard of the notion that many dog-owners look like their pets, Julia? Well, they tried an experiment to see how true it was. They took an architect and his dog, an engineer and
his dog and an actor and his dog, and under laboratory conditions tested to see how each reacted to a pile of bones in the middle of the room. The engineer’s dog goes first and makes a
complex cog system with gears, reflecting the behaviour of the owner. The architect’s dog constructs a bridge. Next up is the actor’s dog. He eats all the bones, fucks the other two
dogs and asks for the rest of the day off.’
I roll around laughing but Julia is po-faced.
‘You need to lighten up, Jules, have some fun.’
I reel off my CV, and she tells me hers. I feel inadequate but quite horny. I think I’m in with a chance with Jules when suddenly there is a loud clatter of thunder. Boom! As if
someone’s lifted a grand piano and dropped it. Immediately the heavens open. It’s not a light shower but rain of biblical proportions, like someone has a hose over my head and I
haven’t made a fucking shelter and – shit! The cameras! I manage to get the Z-camera, batteries and the diary cam wrapped up in my waterproof coat. The fire is well and truly out, one
torch has died and the other is on life support. I take a swig from the bottle of wine, grab Julia and stumble over to shelter under one of the coconut palms. What the fuck am I doing here?
It pours and it pours and it pours down for over four long and lonely hours and then that’s when the REALLY BIG storm hits, and with it there is thunder, sheet lightning and, of course,
more rain. The water takes out all the batteries and the Z-camera so all I have is my diary cam. I am soaked to the skin and sozzled and I want to go home – this isn’t funny anymore.
The only connection I have with the outside world is a satellite phone so I ring Jamie. No reply. I ring again. No reply. I can’t get hold of him because he’s at the bar with Craig and
Peter and they are all off their tits. Bastards. They’re lording it up in opulence and I’m sitting here on my own on an island in the middle of the Pacific, under a fucking waterfall,
talking shit to a coconut I quite fancy.
I scramble around in the undergrowth, trying to make a last-minute bivouac with palm leaves. The rain has washed away a pile of coconuts under a tree and I can see a polythene bag. I shine my
torch on it. It’s a plastic carrier bag.
That’s odd
, I think. I look inside and my heart stops beating. It’s full of money. Oh. My. God. I’m going to be kidnapped by
terrorists or drug runners and murdered in a scene out of
Scarface
with a chainsaw. I don’t fucking want to be on Treasure Island anymore. I’m in grave danger and I need to get
off this fucking island.
I calm down and decide to count the money. It’s torrential rain but at least counting gives me something to do. My heart beats rapidly against my chest. There’s 68,000 pesos! Jesus
Christ, 68,000! It’s a big stash. (Which I later discover is only £1,000, but it is still a great deal of money in these parts.) As I put the notes back in the bag I suddenly see lights
coming towards me across the water. I shut my eyes and open them; I must be mistaken . . . but I am not. Lights are coming this way and I stop breathing. Very slowly I hide the money back under the
pile of coconuts and move back under the tree. This is now not only inconvenient, it’s fucking terrifying.
I dial Jamie. There’s no reply so I phone the series producer, Helen Nightingale, in Glasgow, and wake her up.
‘Hello?’ she says sleepily.
‘Helen? Get me off this fucking island!’
‘Robson, are you OK? Have you spoken to Jamie?’
‘I’ve tried; he’s not answering, none of them are. They’re all pissing it up.’
She says, ‘OK, I’ll phone him now. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it.’
‘Send a boat, a fucking pigeon, do whatever. I am going to die!’
I get on the satellite phone again and ring my business partner, Sandra, who has got me out of many scrapes in my life.
‘Sandra, whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, get me off this fucking island.’