Back from the sea with tales of ordeal
When we meet K Raja Kusum, he is trying to salvage what is left of his outboard motor. Not much is left of his boat. The 53-year-old has been a fisherman for 26 years. Before that, he was a soldier. He has cheated death three times already - once in the war, but twice as a fisherman after his boat capsised.
In June 2013, more than 50 fishermen died at sea in a storm. Raja and a fellow fisherman were in a that capsized. He swam to safety. His friend drowned.
This week, he set out from Dodanduwa in his around 5 p.m. with another fisherman. They were 5-6 kms out around 7.30pm when it started raining heavily with strong winds. About six other boats were nearby. He does not know what happened to them. He saw their lights for a while, before they disappeared in the waves.
“We did not have time to worry about them as we were struggling to stay alive,” he said. The winds were too strong even for their outboard motor. So they couldn’t turn back.
“We saw the lights of one boat behind us, trying to make it to shore,” Raja recounted. “Then, its lights also disappeared. Our boat started to spin around. Then it overturned and we climbed atop. For a while, we saw the lights from the shore. Suddenly, they all went out. We clung onto the overturned boat and let the current carry us as far as it would go.” A fisherman of a capsized boat is in great danger of getting entangled in his own net. Raja and his partner also knew if they went too close to shore with the boat, they could smash into rocks. So they let go of the and swam to shore.
Raja doesn’t know how far he went but believes he was in the water for one-anda-half hours before the waves carried him onto the rocks. “We had released the boat because we thought we were close to shore, but the current was so strong we had to struggle a lot longer to make it back,” he said.
On land - 16.5km away from where they had set out - the police dropped them home. Raja says he would be lying if he said he hadn’t known the weather might take a turn for the worse. “I heard on the radio that wind speeds may reach 50-70kmph,” he admitted. “We had decided not to go but towards evening the sky became clearer, although it was still cloudy and overcast. We expected rain but we didn’t anticipate the wind to be that severe. We need winds of 40-50kmph to go to sea. The seas here are calm in November and December. What happened was unusual.”
The warnings in the media had been to “be vigilant”. “For fishermen, there is a clear difference between telling someone to be vigilant and telling them not to go out to sea,” Raja said, adding that he will return to fishing. “I’m not done with the sea yet,” he smiled. “It let me escape twice. I don’t think it will let me go a third time.”
Rupasinghe Jayaratne emerged from the sea naked, the lone survivor of a threeman dinghy wrecked by severe weather. The 49-year-old had also set out around 5pm. The boat-owner had cautioned them not to go owing to possible bad weather. But the leader of the team - who had been a fisherman for 35 years - assured them it would be safe. He paid with his life.
Besides, the harbour notice board had no weather warning. When the winds hit, the team leader telephoned the boat-owner who told them to return immediately. Five minutes after they headed back, the lights on the shore went out. “There was no way for us to go back so we stayed at sea hoping the weather will clear,” Rupasinghe said. A huge wave caused the boat to capsize. He went under and surfaced some distance away. This stopped him being caught in the nets.
He struck out in the direction of lights from vehicles on the road. He shrugged off his clothes. When he hit land, he had no idea where he was. He asked people at a bus- stop for help. He was in Kahawa. The navy took him home. His friends’ bodies were found later.
Rupasinghe, too, said he will go out to sea again - not on a dinghy but on a multi-day fishing trawler. (Additional reporting by Janath De Silva)