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Extreme Sport Fishing — in Timor-Leste?

By Silas Everett

Note: The Ultimate Sports Guide neither endorses nor advises readers to imitate or replicate any of the following situitations delinated herein.

It's hard to imagine that fishing with rod and reel can ever be considered an extreme sport. Like playing golf on the Mongolian steppe, can fishing ever be perceived as an adrenaline pumping, high-octane sport with a high level of inherent danger? Will fishing ever stand beside hang gliding, big-wave surfing, ice climbing or motorbike jumping for bone chilling, heart-racing excitement?

From my perspective, ocean fishing in a country like Timor-Leste, under most conditions, is an extreme sport. In this article, and from personal experience, I will examine the core "x-factors" required for Timor-Leste extreme sport fishing. They are loosely structured into four categories: the guide, the boat, the fish and the rescue.

The Guide

Your guide will likely be someone who has a deep passion for the ocean and fish. In my case it was guide Peter Cloutier, a 32-year-old North Carolina native and avid waterman, now an expat working in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste. His life out of water appears to be merely a means to get back in the water, whether he's fishing, diving or surfing.

Why is passion in an extreme fishing guide important? Consider there might be an emergency or crisis. The guide will not necessarily know what to do while leading you further into danger but he will divert your attention. Extreme sports fishing guides refocus on the essence of fishing, the ecosystems in which the fish survive, their behaviors and habits in the open ocean, the privilege it is to enter into their food chain, etc. Take Peter. He is able to sprinkle aquatic musings in between telltale signs of peril, like a wave splashing over the side of the boat, or while searching the floor for a boat plug to stop flooding water, or even while bailing with a cut-off top from a plastic water bottle.

The guide should be able to provide a sense of purpose but leave the overall plan for the fishing trip open to uncertainty. For example, the night before our trip, with Australian government nautical charts, Peter suggested we plug into a little hand-held GPS (Garmin Geko) the waypoints for an underwater rock formation he had dubbed the "pinnacle." (I went to sleep that night imagining this atoll-like stub, like a hitchhiker's thumb, sticking up from the ocean floor, just waiting for our lines and bait to tantalizingly pass over the swarms of motorbike-sized fish. In the end the pinnacles did not bear fruit but Peter's hint of their existence motivated me to risk my life.)

Timor-Leste is perfect in this sense. There are few fishing guides, a promising sign that fishing is inherently to be an extreme activity. Despite the fact that fishing accounts for $133 million a year or 31 percent of the nominal GDP, few Timorese are equipped to fish the ocean. The scene is largely net fishermen using single-person dugout canoes with bamboo outriggers around reefs. Despite the abundance of fish in the territorial waters, half the fishermen live below the poverty line. There are only two charter operations, run by foreigners, that offer sport fishing tours, yet there are too few customers to make it a steady business.

The Boat

The boat should be small enough that it immediately makes you question its seaworthiness.

I met Peter at his house at 7 a.m. the morning of our fishing trip. Parked in his driveway was a 9-foot aluminum rowboat. It had a Mariner 15-horsepower motor Peter had borrowed from a friend. The boat was the perfect x-factor. The "Jon boat" as Peter called it, requires elaboration, a la Wikipedia:

"A Jon boat (or johnboat) is a flat-bottomed boat constructed of aluminum or wood with one to three bench seats. Their most useful purpose is for hunting, due to the greater level of stability, as compared with a V-hull aluminum boat; however they are quite suitable for fishing as well. Because the hull of a Jon boat is nearly flat, it tends to ride over the waves rather than cut through them as a V-hull might, thus limiting the use of the boat to calmer waters. Jon boats typically have a transom onto which an outboard motor can be mounted."

Seeing the boat, I voiced my concern loud enough that Peter's wife heard. She quietly assured me that he had caught fish using the boat. Later, when the skiff started filling up with water, I remembered his wife's words and the eerie omission of concern regarding her husband's safety. Perhaps she had reached a level of comfort with his ability to cope with the elements, like his trick of sticking a T-shirt in the drain hole after losing the makeshift boat plug he had crafted earlier.

In fact, finding a boat in Timor-Leste without the x-factor is in itself extremely challenging. On the upside, this makes an extreme sport fishing experience almost inevitable.

On the downside, there are troubling implications for Timor's fisheries. While Timor would like to open its fisheries to commercial fishing, illegal fishing costs this small country over $40 million a year. One problem is that Timor-Leste lacks patrol boats to protect its waters. While this may be rectified soon with a controversial plan to purchase two patrol boats from China, at a price of $28 million, the problem still remains as to how the development of fisheries will benefit the local economy. How can individual fishermen benefit in a sustainable way alongside larger-scale commercial fishing activity? This fact clouds the developing fishing industry.

The Fish

Extreme sport fishing requires the possibility of catching something big. It is also important to have no information on the fish stock. Timor-Leste, for example, is a perfect model. X-factor Peter had eyed fish in the local markets — marlin, sunfish, mackerel, yellow fin and skipjack tuna — and deduced their local availability. But besides visual observation, there have been scant studies to determine quantities, types and even locations of the fish stock.

The "what lies beneath" factor is critical. In our case a couple of hours of no fish only heightened the tension as Peter swore at his bait, which kept rising up and skidding along on the surface. Did we have the right bait? Were the rods correctly rigged? For marlin? For tuna? Who knew? However, the thought of landing just one of Timor's many sport fish was enough to justify, at least by cost, the entire trip.

Fish are surprisingly expensive in the local markets. A 30-pound yellowfin tuna costs between $30 and $50. That cost may seem high considering such a fish could cost as little as $10 in neighboring Indonesia. However, the wave of development workers that landed in Dili as a result of a 2006 civil crisis increased demand considerably. In fact, Timorese fishmongers are so certain they'll eventually get their asking price that they are known to throw away their fish rather than bring their prices down.

Besides the fish, add in the possibility of seeing large sea creatures. In my case it got me over my sea sicknesses and subsequent heaves. The possibility of getting up close and personal with something like a pilot whale, spinner dolphin, dugong, manta ray or whale shark heightened the sense of mystery beneath. At the very least it helped bide time while waiting for the fish to bite.

The Rescue

Is there any possibility of being rescued in an emergency? Extreme sport fishing requires a high degree of uncertainty, primarily in the case of boat failure. In my case, our motor failed while at the same time we had a 25-pound yellowfin tuna on the line. Fortunately we had cell phone coverage.

Peter and I both called our wives. Peter also called an Australian mechanic who had a boat but was only able to commiserate with us, as he wasn't out on the water that day.

The boat failure should then be followed by some form of self-rescue. In our case, I suggested we try to row to land and spent the next two hours rowing while Peter bailed the ankle-deep water in the boat, discolored from the bleeding tuna underneath my seat. The dolphin that surfaced abruptly moments before our catch seemed to reinforce this mixed sense of danger and hope.

Fishing: An Extreme Sport?

After our Sunday outing, the possibilities of fishing have changed forever for me, from a purely meditative experience to one quite possibly of heart-racing proportions.

In the end, everything worked out. We safely rowed to shore, along the way encountering a manta ray with an 8-foot wingspan that jumped in front of the boat. Our land destination was downwind and with no current we were able to skirt the reef surrounding the port. We landed the boat from where we had started, surrounded by a half-dozen local kids pointing to our catch and calling others to come have a look.

Try it for yourself. Fish in an undiscovered fishery so pristine that fish studies are unavailable. Hire a local guide and support the local economy. Then bob up and down in the bow of a 9-foot rowboat with a dead 15-horsepower outboard motor in the open ocean, several miles from land, where there's no coast guard and only a handful of boats with motors in a 100-mile radius. The wind is picking up and the crest of the rolling swell is spraying into your skiff. A T-shirt serves as the boat plug and water is coming in. Ask yourself, can fishing be considered an extreme sport? In Timor-Leste I got the answer.