Forty Men, One Net, One Hour

Most people who stay in Kovalam never see it, because it happens on the one beach they walk past. Hawa Beach is the middle of the bay's three crescents — no promenade, no line of cafés, and a wide flat expanse of sand that is used, most mornings, as a workshop.

What is being worked is the shore seine: a single enormous net, set from a boat and recovered entirely by hand from the beach. In Malayalam it is the kambavala, the rope net, and the rope is the point.

How it actually works

A crew rows out from the sand carrying the net folded into the boat, paying it out as they go in a long arc that curves away from the shore and back to it. What lands on the beach at either end of that arc is not the net but two very long ropes attached to it.

Then the walking starts. Two lines of men take up one rope each, lean back against it, and walk backwards up the sand. As they reach the top of the beach they let go, walk down to the water again, take a fresh grip at the front of the line and lean back once more. The rope is fed continuously through a moving human machine, and the arc in the water slowly closes and shrinks.

It takes an hour and often longer, and for most of that hour nothing appears to be happening. There is no visible net, no fish, nothing but two lines of men going backwards up a beach in a rhythm set by a called chant that one of them keeps up so the pull stays even. Then, in the last few minutes, the bag of the net comes up through the shallows and everything happens at once.

The auction is faster than the haul

The catch goes onto the sand, and within minutes it is sorted into heaps, weighed and sold at the top of the beach. Buyers with motorbikes and ice boxes are already there — they have watched the last twenty minutes of the haul, which tells them roughly what is coming.

It is a compressed, shouted trade, and it is over long before the beach is tidy. By mid-morning the net is spread across the sand to dry and the crew has gone.

What it earns

It is worth resisting the urge to read this as picturesque. A shore seine needs a large crew for a long time, and the return is split among all of them. A poor haul is not a smaller wage; on a bad morning there is very little to divide at all, and the morning still cost everyone an hour of hard physical work.

The technique is also losing ground. Most of the fish landed along this coast now comes off outboard-powered plywood boats that go further out and work faster, and the crews still running rope seines at Kovalam are getting older rather than younger. The beach itself has less room than it had two generations ago. What you are watching is a practice in decline, not one being preserved.

How to watch it without getting in the way

Stand above the working line, not inside it. The ropes sweep a wide corridor of sand and the men walking them are not going to stop or divert; if somebody waves you back, move immediately and move well clear.

Ask before photographing, and accept a no without negotiating. This is a workplace during its only productive hour of the day. Most crews are relaxed about a camera at a distance and nobody is relaxed about one in their face during the last minutes of a haul.

And come early. The seine, when it is run at all, is a morning job — weather-dependent, unscheduled, and entirely a matter of luck on any given day. Being on the sand at first light is the only way to improve your odds.