AGUINO - Desperate Spanish shellfishers took their boats to sea yesterday loaded with home-made tools to scoop up floating lumps of sticky fuel oil threatening one of Europe's richest shellfish areas.
Weatherbeaten fishermen, frustrated at what they see as inadequate Government efforts to clean up the spill from the sunken tankerPrestige, took matters into their own hands, sailing out in small fishing boats to do battle with the enemy endangering their livelihoods.
They used metal sieves attached to long poles, cranes normally used to scoop up mussels, and even their hands to gather up fibrous lumps of oil.
Two weeks after the Prestige sank off the western coast of Spain, leaking 11,000 tonnes of fuel oil into the ocean, patches have reached the mouth of southern Galician bays known as the Rias Baixas.
Some of Europe's richest shellfish areas, famous for goose barnacles that fishermen often harvest hanging perilously from rocks at the point where the waves break.
The fishermen sailed out to areas where tiny splotches and 5m carpets of oil floated, dipped their sieves into the sea and hauled them in laden with about 30kg of oil, which they put in containers.
"There's nothing else we can do," said Jose Manuel Fernandez.
"If we don't do this we'll be left with nothing. We're just trying to reduce the number of years we won't be able to fish for."
"We'll keep going until it stops coming," said colleague Juan Carlos Millares. "It's the only thing we can do."
Even as the boats pulled away laden with oil, parts of the sea were left with a marbled sheen and traces of oil floating like seaweed.
"The slick is breaking up," Millares said. "It's hard to keep following them. They're all over the place."
Frustration with lack of tools and organisation boiled over when fishermen jostled the mayor of Aguino and another local official who visited the port and hurled a handful of oil at them.
Said fisherman Carlos Boo: "They wanted to toss them into the sea."
