It's been a long time since I updated, and I'm not exactly sure why. I'm busy, but I'm always busy. Who knows. In the time since I wrote about the end of my family's visit, spring has finally arrived, the cherry blossoms have come and gone, I had spring vacation, the new school year started, and I got a new boss. It's been busy and I've got a good three more blog updates worth of photos from the past 23 days. This may be a very busy week of updates.

The morning after my parents left I was invited to the ceremony that officially declared Mori's family's new boat ready for fishing. It was pretty early on Saturday morning, and I biked over to the dock bleary eyed and half asleep. I got there and found the Nakamura family (Mori's family), a bunch of fishermen, and a few friends by the boat. Some plates of food were spread out on the new benches, a bottle of sake was being poured into paper cups, and everyone was bustling to make sure the boat was ready to go.



On the bow was a big fish that had been caught the day before and a yellow flag whose meaning I have forgotten. Someone said some words, everyone toasted to the new boat, and then Mori poured the Sake over the bow.





Then, it was time for pictures.


From left: Mori, Mori's father, the four fishing customers for the day, a man whose face I can't see, Mori's mother, Akira - who went on the old farmhouse adventure and ate sour kiwis, and Mori's girlfriend.

We drank some more sake, and then it was time to go fishing. Mori invited me along as a sort of Captain's guest, and so off we went. Everyone was after Mebaru, a little brown fish that is delicious and (I think) exclusive to the inland sea.


That's not a lot of folks with fish, a Mebaru rod is incredibly thin and light so you can feel the tiny bites of a Mebaru.




The fish started coming up, and soon everyone was hauling (no, maybe not hauling - lifting) Mebaru into the boat.


Doesn't it look like he's staring enviously at my awesome fish? He's not.


Even me!

After a while Mori's father came out with a late-arriving customer. The guy jumped onto our boat, and got right to fishing. Mori's father stuck around though, chatting and seeing what we were catching. It looked like he was happy to see his new boat out for business, filled with customers and catching a good amount of fish.


It's also a nice picture of the old boat in its natural environment.



Three hours later, we headed back. There was to be a big feast to celebrate the new boat, and I was invited along for that too. The women had been busy while we were out fishing, and there was a ridiculously huge feast awaiting when we got back. It's in the background of this picture, but the giant fish had been made into (delicious) sashimi, with the head sticking up out of the center of the plate. Yum!


Apologies to Mori's mother, who is cut off on the left of this picture. She can thank her son, who took this picture.

With any luck at all, on Wednesday I'll be back with the island bursting into flower, skateboarding, and maybe some more adventures.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 at 6:47 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.