A conversation about night dives, guns, drugs and police bribes. Neels Loff was born in Hawston near Hermanus in 1976, raised in a fishing family that lived from the sea. His father worked on the big trawlers – catching fish, making fishmeal on board, gone for weeks at a time.
Neels and his brothers were brought up to fish. Fishing was their way of life, until the quota system changed everything. Neels qualified as a skipper but was never granted a quota.
Shut out of the official system, he turned to what the authorities call poaching. “I must live,” he says. “I am sitting with a skipper’s licence, but no quota.
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What else must I do?” Now in his late forties, Neels describes himself not as a poacher, but as an indigenous fisherman criminalised by a broken system. His story is one of danger – night dives, sharks, guns, drugs, police bribes – and of deep injustice. I began at six years old.
On weekends, when we were not at school, we went to sea. I can still remember that – 44 years back. I earned my own pair of North Stars with my weekend money.
My father’s whole life was fishing, gardening, making our own livestock. We had nothing else. My father always told us stories from the trawlers.
He said the ships were so big. They would haul in the catch, process it right there at sea, bag it and offload only the fishmeal when they returned to port. That was the life he knew – long weeks on the ocean, hard work and the pride of making something out of nothing.
Those stories gave me the idea of life at sea long before I ever set foot on a boat. I left school in Grade 7. At first I hand-lined with my father on his own boat.
Then he had to sell the boat, because he worked on the big trawlers. They told our fathers they couldn’t have a fishing boat if they worked on a trawler. So he sold it, and I went to work on other boats.
I worked in Port Elizabeth on sardine trawlers. I travelled the coast many times – Hawston, Struisbaai, right up to Port Nolloth. But the government put restrictions everywhere.
At Alexander Bay there was no harbour for our fishermen. The nearest harbour was Port Nolloth, far away. We were forced to serve other harbours, other bosses, while our own communities were left with nothing.
That was the system: we could not fish freely on our own coastline, but had to work for others, often for very little return. After the black market came in. In 2002, I already had my skipper’s licence.
They told us if we didn’t do the skipper’s course, we couldn’t get numbers. But it was empty promises. I got my licence but never got a quota.
They said we didn’t have enough points in this or that section. Fishermen are not skilled in paperwork, and this made it very difficult. So how else must I survive?
In the beginning, it was a wetsuit, flippers, goggles. Then came the cylinders, underwater lights. You dive at night.
You make sure you’ve got your phone sealed up in a condom so it can go in your wetsuit. That’s how we worked. It is heavy work.
You drop into the water and the sea is completely black. Your torch makes a narrow path through the kelp. You must work quickly, always listening for the sound of a boat above you, always aware of the risk of sharks.
It is silence and fear mixed together. But it’s work. That’s what people don’t see.
For us it is the way to live, the only way left. There are great whites. There are boats riding over you.
Many things can happen. But nobody cares. All they say is we are destroying. If they left us to do what our fathers taught us, nothing would be harmed.
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