The Weight of Water: Sumba's Last Spearos

Eco Beach City · 2026-06-02 · 17 min read

The dawn arrives here not as a gentle negotiation but as a verdict. One moment, the sky is a bruised purple, the next it is slit open by a blade of incandescent light, spilling gold across the water. On the sand at Kerewe beach, Pak Yulius squints into the glare, an act he has performed for more of his seventy-two years than not. The light catches the network of silvery scars on his forearms, a lifetime’s cartography of coral cuts and fish spines. His thumb, gnarled as a ginger root, rubs the worn teak stock of his pana, the speargun he carved himself three decades ago from a fallen tree. The power bands, cut from a truck’s inner tube, are cracked and tired. Like him, he sometimes jokes.

A few meters away, his grandson, Dio, is bathed in a different sort of light, the cold blue glow of a phone screen. His head is down, thumbs flying across a cracked display, the tinny beat of a TikTok dance track a faint, ridiculous counterpoint to the roar of the surf. Yulius watches him for a moment, his face impassive. He has already noted the subtle change in the current, the way the water pulls slightly more to the east today, a sign that the larger trevally might be hunting closer to the reef’s edge. He knows this not from an app, but from the accumulated wisdom of some twenty-thousand mornings spent looking at this very same stretch of water. He tastes the salt in the air. It tastes of fish.

I’ve been living in Southeast Asia for eight years now, long enough to think I’ve shed my Western impatience, long enough to know I never fully will. I came here chasing a story about property development, about the spreadsheets and legal frameworks of the ‘next frontier’. Instead, I found myself captivated by the ledgers that can’t be quantified—the ones kept in memory, in ritual, in the calloused hands of men like Yulius. I asked him once what he was looking for in the pre-dawn light. He didn’t look at me, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “The invitation,” he said simply. For him, the ocean does not simply exist; it must grant permission.

The Saltwater Calligrapher

To watch Yulius prepare for a hunt is to witness a silent ceremony. There is no grand pronouncement, no wasted motion. It is a slow, methodical tuning of man and equipment to the frequency of the sea. He inspects the hand-sharpened steel tip of his spear, running a whetstone along its edges until it glints with menace. He checks the trigger mechanism, a simple lever of salvaged stainless steel he scavenged from a shipwrecked fishing boat twenty years ago. He spits on his antiquated dive mask, a single pane of glass held in a brittle rubber frame, and rubs the saliva into a clear film with his thumb. There are no fins. He has never used them. “Your legs are your fins,” he told me once, pointing to his taut, wiry calves. “You just have to learn their language.”

That language is spoken in the currency of breath. Traditional spearfishing here is a discipline of profound physical control. With a lungful of air, Yulius will slip beneath the surface and descend, pulling himself down along the reef wall, a silent, slow-motion predator. He moves with an unhurried grace that belies the screaming torment in his lungs. Expert divers of his generation can achieve breath-holds of over three minutes while actively hunting at depths of fifteen to twenty meters. It’s an athletic feat that would humble most trained freedivers, yet for Yulius, it is simply the price of entry, the cost of a meal.

But the physical mastery is only half of it. The true art lies in the knowledge. He is a marine biologist without a degree, an ecologist by intuition. One afternoon, sheltering from a sudden squall in his small wooden hut, he tried to explain it to me. “Everything has a voice,” he said, tapping his ear. “The reef speaks. The fish, they speak.” He described how he can identify five different types of parrotfish, which look almost identical to my untrained eye, not by sight, but by the distinct sound they make chewing on coral. “The kakatua hijau,” he explained, referring to a green-hued species, “it sounds like grinding stone. The kakatua biru is softer, like sand falling through your fingers.” He smiled, a rare, gap-toothed flash. “The sea whispers these things to you, but only after fifty years of listening.” It’s a knowledge so deep it has become instinct, a saltwater calligraphy written on his soul.

“The sea whispers these things to you, but only after fifty years of listening.”

I asked him if he had taught this to his son, or his grandson. He looked away, his gaze falling on the pana resting against the wall. “They hear other things now,” he said, the whisper of his own voice nearly lost in the sound of the rain on the thatched roof. The silence that followed was heavier than any storm.

The Teak-and-Tire Arsenal

The pana, the traditional speargun, is more than a tool; it is a biography carved in wood. Each one is a testament to the patience, skill, and resourcefulness of its creator. To build one is a rite of passage. Yulius’s gun, the one he has used for thirty years, is a masterpiece of functional art. The stock is teak, dark and dense, its grain telling the story of a hundred monsoons. He chose the tree himself, deep in the inland forest, making offerings to the spirits before the first axe fell. A single, handmade teak speargun takes approximately 40-50 hours of labor to carve, assemble, and, most importantly, balance in the water. With proper care—a coating of coconut oil after each use to repel the corrosive salt—it is expected to last for over two decades.

Every component has a story. The trigger mechanism is pieced together from stainless steel salvaged from a boat that ran aground in a storm during the musim barat, the harsh west monsoon of 1998. The shaft is a length of rebar, painstakingly straightened and sharpened. The power bands are, as ever, cut from the inner tubes of truck tires, their elasticity a thing of constant trial and error. Near the handle, almost invisible unless you know where to look, is a small, stylized face carved into the wood. It is a Marapu face, an animist symbol believed to guide the hunter's aim and offer protection from the spirits of the deep. It is an analogue failsafe in a world of digital everything.

This heirloom arsenal stands in stark contrast to the gear wielded by the growing number of foreign tourists who come here to spearfish. They arrive with padded cases containing carbon fiber spearguns that cost upwards of $1,000, sleek and black, with aerospace-grade trigger mechs and kevlar lines. They wear wetsuits, use powerful carbon fins, and strap dive computers to their wrists that beep and flash, tracking their depth and bottom time with cold precision. Yulius watches them sometimes, a bemused curiosity in his eyes.

He told me about the first gun he ever made, when he was fourteen. “It was terrible,” he laughed, the memory still fresh after nearly sixty years. “The wood was too light. When I fired, the whole thing kicked like a donkey and the spear flew sideways. My father watched me, he didn't say a word.” Instead of fixing it for him, his father handed him a piece of sharkskin, a natural sandpaper, and made him sand the stock for a week. “He said, ‘It is not a tool until it is part of your arm. It must feel your thoughts.’ So I sanded. Morning until night. I sanded until I hated the wood. And then, sanding more, I started to understand it. Its weight, its balance. On the eighth day, I took it in the water. And it flew straight.”

The Reef's Unseen Ledger

To understand a man like Yulius, you have to understand that for him, the ocean is not a venue. It's not a resource to be extracted or a playground to be conquered. It is a spiritual realm, an extension of the land, governed by the same ancestral laws that dictate life above the water. The local belief system, Marapu, is a complex animist faith that sees the world as inhabited by the spirits of ancestors, who reside in the sky, the earth, and, crucially, the sea. This worldview imbues the entire practice of fishing with a deep sense of moral gravity. The reef is not just a geological structure; it is Tana Wai, 'land and water,' an underwater extension of their ancestral domain.

This belief system functions as a highly effective, if unwritten, form of conservation, enforced by a series of pamali, or taboos. There are certain days of the moon cycle when fishing is forbidden, allowing stocks to replenish. There are specific coves and channels that are considered portals to the spirit world, where no spear may be fired. Certain species, like the manta ray or the sea turtle, are seen as messengers or embodiments of powerful spirits and are never to be hunted. This isn't ecology in the Western, scientific sense; it's a profound, lived relationship built on respect and fear.

Along the rugged southern coast, at least three major reef systems are considered tanah marapu, or sacred ground. Here, all fishing is strictly forbidden by the local rato, or priest. The only exception is for one or two days a year, when the community gathers to fish collectively for ceremonial feasts, like the Pasola, the island’s famous ritual spear-fighting festival. These restricted zones act as de facto marine protected areas, teeming with life, their bounty spilling over into the adjacent, non-sacred waters. It is a system that has sustained this coastline for centuries.

“The fish is a gift from the ancestors. If you take with greed, the reef becomes a mirror of your soul—empty. You must ask, and you must thank.”

I spoke with a Marapu elder in the Kodi region, a man whose face seemed to be carved from the same ironwood as his house posts. He struggled to explain the concept to me, an outsider whose language lacked the proper vocabulary for the sacred. “When you go to the sea,” he said, his voice raspy, “you are a guest in the house of your grandfather’s grandfather. You do not just take things from his house.” He leaned forward, his eyes intense. “The fish is a gift from the ancestors. If you take with greed, the reef becomes a mirror of your soul—empty. You must ask, and you must thank.” This unseen ledger, where gratitude and respect are the currency, is the moral foundation of Yulius’s world. It’s also the foundation that feels the most threatened, cracking under the weight of the cash economy.

The Fork in the Current

The tension is embodied in Bima, Yulius’s twenty-two-year-old nephew. Bima has the gift. You can see it in the way he moves in the water, a natural, fluid power that reminds the elders of Yulius in his youth. He can hold his breath for two minutes with ease and has an uncanny knack for spotting the camouflaged flash of a coral trout hiding in a crevice. He learned at his grand-uncle's side, spearing his first small reef fish when he was ten. But Bima’s heart is divided. His talent for reading the water is now competing with his desire to read the room—the room being the breezy, open-air restaurant of a nearby surf camp.

He works there three days a week, guiding beginners through their first clumsy attempts to stand on a surfboard. He’s charming, quick to laugh, and his English is improving daily. The work is less dangerous, it comes with a steady paycheck, and it offers a social status that hunting for parrotfish cannot. He is surrounded by friendly foreigners, by music, by the promise of a world much larger than his village. The official youth unemployment rate in the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur is a misleadingly low 3.8%. The real story is in the underemployment figures, estimated to be over 30%, which pushes bright, ambitious young men like Bima away from the variable income of traditional livelihoods and towards the gig work of the tourism sector.

One evening, the conflict boiled over. Yulius sat mending a net under the dim light of a single bulb, his hands moving with practiced economy. Bima was getting ready to go out, putting on a clean Rip Curl t-shirt he’d been given by a tourist. “You smell of sweet soap, not of the sea,” Yulius said, not looking up. Bima stopped. “The sea doesn’t pay for my phone’s data plan,” he retorted, his voice sharp. Yulius finally looked at him, his eyes weary. “You spend your days hunting for Instagram likes instead of fish. Your ancestors gave you a gift, and you trade it for… for what? For pictures.” Bima’s face hardened. “The ancestors don’t pay for motorbike fuel, Pak. The ancestors don’t help my mother when she is sick. The money from the camp does.”

It’s a brutal, pragmatic calculation, one being made in coastal villages all over the world. The freedom and cultural pride of an ancestral skill versus the tangible security of a monthly salary. For Bima, the choice is a daily torment.

The Tourist's Trophy

Into this delicate ecosystem of tradition and transition comes the tourist—specifically, the spearfishing tourist. They are a particular breed, often affluent, overwhelmingly male, and driven by a potent cocktail of adventure-seeking and primal conquest. They come from Europe, Australia, and the Americas, hauling their expensive gear 10,000 kilometers in pursuit of an 'authentic' experience and, more importantly, a trophy. Their targets aren't the humble parrotfish and snapper that feed Yulius’s family, but the apex predators of the reef: the formidable Dogtooth Tuna, the brutish Giant Trevally.

This has created a new, complicated role for men from the local fishing community: the 'guide'. Their unparalleled knowledge of the reefs, once a sacred inheritance, is now a marketable commodity. A private, full-day spearfishing charter can cost a tourist between $350 and $500 USD. The local guide, the man who actually finds the fish, who reads the currents, who often puts himself in harm's way to ensure the client's safety, might see only 15-20% of that fee. Yet, it’s still more money than he could ever hope to make selling his catch at the local market.

The role is a double-edged sword. It validates their skill on a global stage, earning them a grudging respect from the high-tech foreigners. But it also subordinates their tradition, turning a sacred practice into a service. I spoke with a South African who runs a charter operation from a nearby harbor. “We’re promoting sustainable adventure tourism,” he told me, suntanned and confident. “We give these guys good money, and we teach them about catch limits and conservation. We’re empowering them, really.” He seems to believe it.

Later, I shared a cigarette with one of his local guides, a man named Agustinus, away from the ears of his employer. He was quieter, more circumspect. He stared out at the water, at a luxury catamaran bobbing at its mooring. “It is good work,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “The money is good.” He took a long drag from his clove cigarette. Then he looked at me, a flicker of something—resignation, maybe—in his eyes. “But sometimes,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, “I feel like a zookeeper. I show them the animals, they take their picture, and then they go home. The story of the fish ends with them. It doesn’t continue here.” It’s a profound distinction. The tourist takes a trophy; Yulius brings home a meal that is woven back into the life of his family, his village, his culture.

From Sustenance to Supply Chain

It’s not just tourism that’s changing the hunt; it’s who they’re hunting for. The economics of the catch itself have been fundamentally rewired. For centuries, the model was simple: you fish to feed your family. Whatever was left over, the surplus, was taken to the local market by your wife at dawn. There, it was sold or bartered for rice, vegetables, and other necessities. The system was circular, immediate, and scaled to the needs of the community.

That model is now being disrupted by a far more powerful force: the global supply chain, albeit a very localized, luxury version of it. The new five-star resorts and high-end restaurants popping up along the coast have an insatiable demand for premium fish. But they don't want the small, bony reef fish of the local diet. They want specific species, of specific sizes, delivered fresh and on time. They want the deep-red flesh of the coral trout, the firm white meat of the grouper, the sashimi-grade loin of the tuna.

This demand creates a powerful incentive to alter hunting patterns. A fisherman can now bypass the local market entirely. A middleman, often equipped with a mobile phone and a motorcycle with an icebox, will pay a premium for these targeted species. A coral trout that might fetch IDR 60,000 per kilogram at the chaotic Waikabubak market can be sold directly to the middleman, destined for a resort kitchen, for up to IDR 150,000 per kilogram.

This transformation from sustenance to supply chain is visible every morning. At 5 AM, Yulius’s wife, frail but fiercely energetic, balances a shallow basket of his modest catch on her head and begins the hour-long walk to the market. She will haggle over a few thousand rupiah for a string of small snapper.

Twenty kilometers down the coast, a different scene unfolds. A young fisherman, one who has embraced the new economy, meets a refrigerated truck at a pre-arranged spot. He hands over a vacuum-sealed plastic box containing three perfect, identically-sized groupers, caught to order. A transaction is completed via a smartphone app. There is no haggling, no community, no story. Just a cold, efficient transfer from the reef to the restaurant, a link in a chain that begins in the deep and ends on the plate of a tourist paying $40 for a main course, oblivious to the revolution that brought it there.

The Silence of the Reef

The combined weight of these pressures—a growing local population, the demands of the tourism industry, and the shift to a cash-based economy—is leaving its mark below the surface. The reef, once a kaleidoscope of life, is growing quieter. The most immediate impact is the increased fishing pressure. It’s a simple equation: more hunters in the water, chasing more valuable fish, means fewer fish overall. The introduction of modern gear, even when used by locals, accelerates this. A cheap, Chinese-made speargun with a powerful band allows a less-skilled hunter to take fish from a greater distance, while fins allow them to cover more ground, more quickly.

Even I, a relative newcomer, can see the ghosts of what once was. The elders like Yulius, they don't see ghosts; they see a boneyard. Local fishermen in the Wanokaka region, just west of Yulius’s home ground, report that the average size of the groupers they catch has decreased by an estimated 40% in the last fifteen years. Fish that once averaged five to seven kilograms are now consistently two to three. They are, in effect, harvesting the young before they have a chance to grow and reproduce, a classic sign of an ecosystem under stress.

One afternoon, Yulius took me to a spot he called ‘the old city.’ He wanted to show me something. We descended to about ten meters. He pointed with his spear. Below us was a massive coral bommie, a structure that must have been centuries old. But it was completely white, skeletal, covered in a film of brown algae. There were no small, colourful fish darting in and out of its crevices. There was only a profound and unsettling silence. We surfaced, bobbing in the swell. Yulius pulled his mask off, his face etched with a sadness that went beyond simple nostalgia. “When I was a boy, this was a city of colors,” he said, his voice flat. “Reds, yellows, blues. It was loud. Full of life.” He looked back at the dead coral. “Now, it is a boneyard. The sea is tired.”

This sense of loss, of a core cultural practice becoming untethered from its ecological and spiritual roots, is not unique to this island. It reminds me of the crisis facing the traditional ‘Ikariotikos’ dancers on the Greek island of Ikaria. In both places, a physically demanding, deeply symbolic local tradition that defines community identity is at risk of being hollowed out, its forms simplified and sold as a performance for tourists while the true substance withers away. The sea is tired, and the culture it supports is exhausted.

An Inheritance of Water

So what is the inheritance? If the pana is destined to become a wall decoration and the knowledge of the tides is replaced by a surf forecast app, what is left to pass on? According to an informal survey by a local NGO, only one in five sons of traditional fishermen in the Kodi district are now choosing to take up their fathers' profession full-time. The tide is pulling the young away, and it's an undertow of economics and aspiration that is almost impossible to fight.

The future will likely be a hybrid, a messy compromise. Perhaps a few, like Agustinus, will find a precarious balance as guides, their skills preserved in a commercialized form. Projects like the community-managed reef restoration at Eco Beach City show a glimmer of another path, where traditional ecological knowledge is integrated into modern conservation frameworks. But these are small islands of hope in a vast ocean of change. For most, the connection will likely be severed, the line cut.

For a week after their argument, Bima and Yulius barely spoke. A heavy silence filled the small family compound. Yulius went to the sea alone each morning, his catch seemingly smaller than usual. Bima spent more time at the surf camp, his laughter there sounding a little too loud, a little forced. Then one afternoon, I saw something unexpected. Bima walked to the hut where his grand-uncle stores his gear. He didn’t take the main pana, the one carved from teak. He took the spare, a simpler, lighter gun Yulius made for him years ago. He didn’t walk towards the main reef where the tourists go, the one with the trophy fish. He walked the other way, down the beach to a small, shallow cove protected by black volcanic rocks, a place where he and the other village kids learned to swim.

He was gone for an hour. When he came back, he had two small, unremarkable fish on his spear. Not enough to sell, barely enough for a family meal. He didn't show them off. He quietly took them to the kitchen area, cleaned them, and laid them on the grill. He hadn't gone hunting for money, or for glory, or even for sustenance. He had gone for himself. The knowledge, it seems, hasn’t been entirely lost. Perhaps it has just gone quiet, seeking refuge in the shallow, forgotten places, waiting for the tide to turn.

The true inheritance, I realized, isn't the speargun hanging on the wall or the secret spots on the reef. It's the moment of silence in the water—that weightless, breathless suspension between the world above and the world below, between the past and the future. Whether the next generation will choose to hold its breath long enough to feel it remains the island’s most profound and unanswered question.

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