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We met a fisherman in Limnos, and he invited us to go out fishing with him. Our friend Skoularikis, whose name simply means "earring-man" (as he wears a gold earring in one ear), owns a boat with his two brothers. One day he offered to help a friend collect bait, just a short trip in the waters around Limnos. We don't fish aboard much, and we'd never been on a commercial fishing boat, so we were delighted to tag along.

We left Limnos harbor on this fishing boat. The fishing harbor is a tiny portion of the main Limnos harbor, protected by a seawall. Along the quay, there are dozens of fishing boats like this one, and on the land side, the quay is lined with fish restaurants.

After we left the harbor, we motored to a bay north of the main town and the fishermen picked up a float. Attached to the float was a line, and at the end of the line was an empty white cage. Our mission was to fill the cage with small baitfish.
The small fish live close to shore. Skoularikis is a diver, so his job was to go into the water and look for a concentration of fish. He notified his partners that the fish were in a certain area, and that's where they put out the nets.

This fisherman is paying out the net in a large circle around the fish. The edge you can see is sewn with floats; the other edge is weighted, with a line threaded through it. The weighted edge sinks to the bottom and the floats rise, creating a wall around the circle of fish.

Once the fish are surrounded, the fisherman winches in the line threaded through the weighted bottom of the nets. Picture it: he's closing off the bottom of the net into a pouch so that the baitfish can't escape. This is called a purse seine, and it does resemble a large, smelly purse when it's pulled together.

At this point, the top of the net is still in a wide circle. Our diver friend was in the water during this entire process, looking at what's going on underwater, making sure that the net is in the right place and stays in the right shape, and making sure the fish aren't getting out.
After the bottom is tightened, it's time to haul in the nets. Skoularikis is still in the water; he'll get out of the net before they haul him through the hydraulic winches.

By now, the red net is filled with small fish. Those fish will be pulled out of the net one bucketful at a time (Art helped with this part) and dumped into the cage. The fish that get stuck in the net are tossed back into the water.

When all the fish are in the cage, the fishermen dump the cage temporarily near this spot, again marked with a float, awaiting the next day's fishing trip. The small fish will be attached to hooks on a long fishing line, attracting larger fish. They must be alive to be used as bait, even after they're on the long line, so that they'll wiggle around on the hooks.

Of course, there are some unlucky fish that might have been eating their afternoon baitfish snack inside the confines of the net. So they're brought aboard with the little baitfish. The fishermen pulled them out of the net and tossed them into a bucket on deck. The technical name for these fish is dinner, and in fact they were our dinner that evening. The big fish of the bunch is a barracuda, not poisonous in the Med as they are in Florida. One of the psarotavernas (fish tavernas) on shore was a favorite of our fishing friends. On three separate occasions, we joined Skoularikis for dinner there, eating fish he'd just caught, grilled to perfection by Adonis, the restaurant owner.
This peculiar-looking shellfish, shown here cut in half,  is called a fouskes. We'd never seen them in a fish market, and nobody in the fish markets knows what we're talking about when we ask for them. We saw them once before in Croatia, called a violet by our friends who were familiar with them. In the water, or uncut, they look like grungy rocks. The fisherman cuts the rock in half, exposing the animal, a gooey mound of flesh color streaked with purple, the shape of a brain, and the consistency of an oyster. But for the brave who eat them, they taste like the sea, salty and bright, like the best sushi you can imagine. We thought that they were a fisherman's secret until we saw them on the menu at a waterfront restaurant in Volos, on the Pelion peninsula.