About five miles south of our village is a town called Barrouallie (pronounced “bara-lee”). Of course, if you try to catch a bus to Barrouallie you will never get there because you instead need to go to Bagga, which is the local nickname for Barrouallie. Almost every person (Habla, Starry, Big Cheese), every store (Saca, Marvis, Liquor), and every town (Bagga, Peto, G-Town) has a nickname here.
Barrouallie is locally famous for food. Well, not food in general, as we quickly discovered:
Barrouallie is famous for a very specific food: blackfish. Blackfish is not, in fact, fish but rather the local term for pilot whale. To my knowledge, pilot whales aren’t hunted anywhere else on our island, nor in any of the neighboring countries, but the meat is apparently distributed and eaten by people all over the region. Although it is not technically fishing, I thought that the blackfish industry of Bagga was a unique, fishing-adjacent topic that deserved a mention.
(WARNING: this post contains several graphic images of whales being butchered!)
The hunters use small boats, often built from wood on the nearby island of Bequia (pronounced “beck-way”). I believe they use both hand-thrown and pneumatic/mechanical harpoons, but little else in the way of technology.
Sometimes the boats return with just one or two blackfish, but I once saw them bring in about 15 in a single day. Pilot whales are social swimmers that travel in groups, which makes them vulnerable when a pod is located. The dead whales are towed back and butchered on the beach. Most of the meat is dried, although there is a new processing building being built (subsidized by the Japanese government) that will flash freeze and vacuum package the meat. I have not eaten many different whale species, but I imagine they all taste fairly similar, like fishy beef. It is certainly an acquired taste. The smell is pungent and unique, and it leaves an indelible mark in your brain. A scent that one would immediately recognize 50 years later. Just riding through town on the bus, one can smell whether any blackfish have been caught recently.
One morning, while we were staying near Barrouallie, I went fishing at a beach just south of the area where the whales are processed and discovered that two of the discarded heads had drifted about three quarters of a mile and washed up on the black sand.
While in general I don’t support killing whales, which are clearly very intelligent and social animals, I do recognize that whaling can be an important cultural practice for some people. What did shock me was when I asked local people about the rules and regulations regarding hunting pilot whales. According to them, there is no limit, no season, and no permit required!
The Fishing Dojo 