Fishing expeditions at Yan Oya

by Junglewalla

(continued from last week)

My fishing experiences at Yan Oya (the village is called Kallarawa, but it is a collection of fishing wadiyas or huts) were in the company of William Nanayakkara, whom I have referred to earlier. My frequent angling companions at Yan Oya were Lionel Gooneratne, and two other close friends. We used to camp on a beautiful tract of land that belongs to me at the mouth of the Yan Oya.

On an earlier trip, William Nanayakkara while laying a net inside the Yan Oya caught and landed a huge female sawfish (Pristis microdon; dhathi mora S) about 10 feet in length. According to William, substantiated by subsequent information gathered by me, the sawfish come from the ocean’s deep into fresh water to breed.

This is also mentioned by Munro (1955); where he gives the length attained by the sawfish as being up to 15 feet. The specimen netted by William was a female, as proved by the baby sawfish that were visible when the fish was opened up. It would appear that the sawfish, like all sharks and rays, is viviparous. On a subsequent trip up the Kumbukkan Oya in Kumuna, about five miles upstream from the mouth, I observed in a deep and clear pool of absolutely fresh water, a couple of baby sawfish each about a foot long. They were miniature replicas in every way of the adult and complete with saw beak. This would appear to confirm that the sawfish also breed in fresh water, and the juveniles spend at least some part of their life there, somewhat like the salmon of western waters.

On my trips I have seen two large sawfish, eight to 10 feet in length, which had been hooked and landed by a hand- line (yotha) using a dead fish as bait. One was high up the Mahaweli river near the ferry (as it then was) on the Kantalai – Allai road approximately 20 miles from the estuary mouth. The other was about four miles up the Walawe Ganga at Ambalantota. Both anglers who had landed these fish stated that when the trace got entangled in the saw teeth of the fish’s beak, it became virtually paralysed and was drawn in without much of a fight.

My friend, Lionel Goonaratne on a trip with me caught an interesting fish at Yan Oya on an artificial bait (a red and white lipped Abu Hi Lo plug). It was a black-tipped reef shark (Eulamia spallanzani) abut 60 pounds in weight. It is generally thought that sharks are predators who hunt by scent and that their eye-sight is extremely poor. Here, however, was a case where the shark attacked an artificial bait that had no scent. I too have had a similar experience, elsewhere on the east coast, of hooking and landing a same sized black- tipped reef shark on an artificial plug bait.

I had one more interesting experience at Yan Oya worth recounting. On one of my trips a huge whale shark, (Rhincodon typus; mini muthu mora S) beached itself on the shore. The whale shark which is perhaps the largest known fish and a plankton feeder, had been encircled accidentally by the fishermen in one of their nets out at sea, but had subsequently been freed from the net (as I found out later); however the disoriented fish had swum straight to shore and beached itself.

I remember the fish was close to 20 feet in length (estimated according to the size of a mechanized fishing boat nearby), about five feet high and must have weighed an enormous amount.

Despite valiant efforts by the entire fishing village, the fish could not be pushed out to deep water, and the next day it died. The efforts of the villagers to try and save the fish did strike me then as strange, as the normal reaction of a professional fisherman is to treat any such fresh fish as bounty from heaven, and use it for food and for sale either in fresh or dried form. However, on the death of the fish I was told by William that the flesh could not be eaten or used even as dry fish as it would “dissolve like water”; and the entire village spent the whole day cutting it into sections and carting it off into the neighbouring scrub jungles for burial, so that the beach would not be polluted by the putrifying fish. This is the only occasion on which I found fisher folk not eating a fish that was non-toxic, and the reason given by William and the professional fisherfolk was unusual and perhaps merits further investigation. It certainly seemed an absolute waste of a stupendous quantity of protein to bury the fish!

Dealing with my camping days at Yan Oya, a bit of local history of interest would be worth relating. Upstream from the estuary mouth of the Yan Oya, about two miles up, near the village of Tiriyai, were the ruins of perhaps the most ancient Buddhist dagoba in the whole of Sri Lanka, and perhaps in the entire world. I came across it on one of my early camping trips to Yan Oya, in the early 1960s, when I chanced upon a Buddhist priest and his acolyte trudging on a jungle track, returning to the shrine. They were given a lift in the jeep to the temple, where in the midst of the wilderness the priest was trying to restore some semblance of a shrine at the ruined dagoba.

The priest related to me that this was an ancient shrine named Giri Handu Saya, where a hair relic of the Buddha obtained during his lifetime was enshrined. There was a massive stone tablet with some ancient inscriptions on it near the dagoba which had the remains of an almost completely preserved wata dage around it – almost as well preserved as the more famous one at Medirigiriya.

The story related by the priest, which he claimed was borne out by the inscriptions, was that immediately after the Buddha attained enlightenment he was going through a period of fasting, when there chanced upon him in the forests in India two merchant traders named Thapassu and Bhalluka. The Buddha preached to them and they were so impressed by his discourse that they had asked for a memento of their meeting with him. The Buddha is supposed to have cut off a lock of his hair and given it to these merchants who were on their way to Lanka for trade. The merchants had apparently landed at the harbour at Kallarawa, at the mouth of the Yan Oya (also called Gal Waraya). The local king had also been so impressed by the account related by them of their meeting with the Buddha that the hair relic (khesha dhatu) was enshrined in the dagoba that the king constructed.

The entire dagoba was restored and even electric power was drawn to it during the premiership of Mr. Dudley Senanayake, after which the author again paid a visit to the shrine with some friends. Today, however, since the Tiriyai area is riddled with terrorist activity, it is unlikely that any priest is living there and the shrine would probably be in a state of neglect and decay.

I am indebted to Dr. R Ratnapala for having drawn my attention to the fact that the ancient shrine of Thiriyai has been fully researched and the ancient inscription translated (Paranavitarna, 1936). This account substantially tallies with that given by the custodian priest of the shrine, except for minor details, particularly in relation to how the dagoba came to be constructed.

I was also informed by Dr. Ratnapala that there is reference to the inscription at Thiriyai by Rahula (1956), where reference is made to Thapassu and Bhalluka as being those who offered the first meal to the Buddha after his period of fasting immediately after attaining enlightenment.

Ilangathurai Mohathuvaram

At the mouth of the Ullakelle lagoon on the banks of which the ancient Buddhist temple of Seruwila is situated, is a place of considerable interest. It was accessible by a cart or jeep track over soft dune sand north of the Verugal estuary. The access was very difficult in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The villagers of the hamlet at the estuary mouth were fishermen, coast Veddhas by descent, speaking a peculiar patois of Tamil according to William of Yan Oya and Raju of Komari, friends of mine who accompanied me there. The fishing at the estuary was magnificent as it was a remote and unspoilt place.

Another interesting feature is that on the northern bank of the estuary there is a desolate stretch of scrub that leads to a cluster of fishermen’s huts at a place called Uppural. Close to this area and slightly inland from the seashore are the signs of ancient iron ore smelting, with piles of slag emerging from the sand dunes. The richness of this area in iron ore was confirmed by the Ministry of Industries under Mr. T B Subasinghe. He had a study done to assess the mineral resources in that area, according to reports in the newspapers of that time.

Verugal and crocodiles

The estuary just south of Ilangathurai is Verugal, which is one of the two main mouths of the Mahaweli Ganga, the other and so-called chief mouth being Genge. The Verugal mouth or rather mouths, as there are two openings, are both scenic and prolific in fish, but unfortunately are also densely populated by some of the biggest and most dangerous man-eating crocodiles in the whole of Sri Lanka.. These are the estuarine or salt water crocodiles , namely the hali kimbula (Crocodilus porosus). I have on occasions seen large specimens estimated at well over 15 feet in length, silhouetted in the rising waves out at sea near the estuary mouth. Length apart, the girth of these reptiles is massive. The Verugal villagers speak of numerous victims being taken by these crocodiles both at the mouth and up the river, at the ferry and elsewhere.

I was told by the fishermen camped in their wadiyes at the small mouth of the Verugal river (situated near Kathaveli on the East coast) of a particularly horrifying fatal attack by a crocodile that had taken place a short while before my first visit there in the early 1960’s. The Verugal estuary was a beautiful yet sinister place. On one bank there was beautiful green grass, while the other bank was overgrown with dense mangroves. At the mouth itself was a deep pool.

One evening after the day’s fishing the young son of the owner of a madal or large fishing net, with some fishermen who were friends, went for his customary bath at the river mouth, when a huge crocodile grabbed him, and according to the account, tossed the shrieking victim out of the water in order to secure a better grip, and dived into the river, never to be seen again. The fishermen of the wadiya combed the entire area for several days, but never came across the victim. When I went to the Verugal on that occasion, the fishermen had still not recovered from their shock. They only bathed with buckets of water drawn from the river, and they warned me to be careful about getting into the water to cast the artificial bait.

On one occasion when I visited Verugal on a fishing trip my boatman, a villager named Muthucumaru, flatly refused to put his canoe into the river as he had still not recovered from a frightening experience the previous evening. An outsize crocodile had taken the outrigger of his slightly built canoe (kalapu oruwa) in its jaws and tried to topple it and dislodge Muthucumaru into the water. Fortunately, the crocodile’s attempt at attacking his canoe had driven it to the shore. Muthucumaru had then leapt out and fled to the fishing wadiyas (huts) on the shore to escape the monster.

On a subsequent occasion when I went up to Verugal, there was consternation amongst the people at the ferry and the boutique on the river bank. It would appear that the previous day a bus, which had to cross the river, had been put on to the ferry. Until the ferryman came down, the bus conductor had sat on the ramp and placed his legs in the water to wash off some mud. He had, according to the eyewitnesses, been gripping the chain of the ferry ramp to keep his balance, when a huge crocodile had grabbed him by the legs and despite the man’s frenzied efforts to keep his grip on the chain, had carried him off, never to be seen again.

Most of the east coast crocodiles swim out to the open sea and travel from estuary mouth to estuary mouth, hugging the shoreline a few hundred yards beyond the waves.

One huge estuarine crocodile was reputed to travel from the mouth of the Heda Oya to the estuary at Kumana visiting intermediate estuaries on the way, a distance of about 25 miles. I spotted this crocodile once at the mouth of the Heda Oya, south of Arugam Bay when in the company of Peter Jayawardena, then Game Ranger at Lahugala. He told me that it was one of the largest crocodiles he had ever seen – and Peter having been in the Wildlife Department since its inception must have seen a good many. -,

This particular crocodile, which was known for its outstanding size, had been spotted by the Panama villagers on one of its periodic visits up the Wila Oya. It was credited by them with having then taken a fisherman who had been sleeping on a whaleback rock which was sloping into a deep pool some distance upstream from the estuary mouth. This fisherman who had been one of my angling companions, was in the habit of fishing for estuary perch (L calcarifer; modha S; koduwa T) at this particular pool throughout the night and sleeping on this sloping rock.

One morning the villagers had found his scanty belongings on the rock, but the man was missing. The villagers believed that this huge crocodile had clambered up the rock and taken its victim whilst he was asleep. According to accounts read by me about the Indonesian species of estuarine crocodile (the same Crocodilus porosus), they attain an enormous size and travel across the high seas from island to island in Indonesia and even attack fishing canoes they encounter.

It is of interest that in recent times attacks on humans by crocodiles have become more widespread with repeated newspaper accounts of fatalities being reported from Bundala, Walawe Ganga, Nilwala Ganga, Polathu Modera (all in the South) and even from rivulets that empty into the Bolgoda lake on the outskirts of Colombo. While all the southern rivers and lagoons had substantial populations of crocodiles in the 1960’s, inquiries from local villagers from the area did not reveal such frequent attacks taking place then as compared to more recent times. Different theories have been advanced to explain attacks. These range from scarcity of food for crocodiles as a result of over-fishing by man to expansion of human population bringing it into pressing contact with crocodile habitats. The truth is probably a combination of the two plus more aggressive newspaper reporting which is a feature of life today.