This year I happened to be in my village for personal work when fishing at Pendur lake was announced. I was thrilled to hear that. It was on 11th May. The night before we made two new fish nets in round shape. The slang for that is "aakya". Next day morning we all went to the lake. So many people actually participated in this event. The water was not really clean. It was only muddy. The fishing started after the "Gaokar" gave the green signal i.e. after the "garanha". Hundreds of people jumped into the lake with all the different shapes and sizes of fish nets. Everybody was getting excited after catching the fish. Most of us were getting only small fishes (modaka). Some of them caught small tortoise. The villagers were very excited to catch tortoise. I wonder why? If the tortoise has 21 nails in total it will sell for couple of lakhs!!! Is it not illegal?
The whole experience was superb. First time I realized how difficult it is to catch even a finger length fish. Some of them pass through the net, some jump out of it, some has scary thorns and some are so slippery. Well in the end, we got about a kilo of them and became part of our nice lunch.
