Deleted Scenes - Life on the Colony - Why Are We Doing This?

This is an old blog post from last summer that I never got around to publishing. I publish posts like these with the tag 'Deleted Scenes' [don't ask me why...I don't know]. Point is that it helps you understand what my home is like and why it is so hard to be where we are right now.

Commercial fishing had been in a slow decline over the past 50 years. Over fishing, pollution and other factors contributed to the smaller and smaller catches that your basic fisherman in a yellow rain slicker and boots brought home to the dinner table. Not that this affected people around the world much – they went right on demanding and buying and selling more and more fish every single day.

It was around this point that someone came up with the idea (more like pulled it off of a dusty shelf and looked at it again) of creating fish farms. Not the farms that have existed for decades on land, but large ones, ones that allowed people to harvest larger and larger catches without having to put to sea every two or three weeks. They created large dock and pen areas that could float in the sea and allow the fish to take advantage of just being in their natural habitat without worrying about a random shark coming along. When you get enough fish, a ship comes out and hauls them back to shore, giving you a new net system to replace it and then you start all over again.

Fishing companies outfitted old ferries, big old yachts or even in one or two cases, bought some old Navy boats and created their own company stores. They also started selling old yachts that were outfitted with the docking and fish net rigs. The boats had to be able to be lived on – we weren’t into sharecropping, yet. You also needed enough power to tow your rig system with you – just in case you found yourself in the position of being able to (and wanting) to leave your particular colony.