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AUSTRALIA | Sunday, 23 November 2014 | Views [620] | View Smaller Image

Life on board the trawler doesn’t suit many. The auxiliary motors for the freezers are loud and the boat vibrates all day and all night, the prawns eventually irritate even the toughest hands and the Pilbara heat is relentless. Competing against the opportunities offered in mining Eoin has difficulty finding staff, yet whenever his young deckhands show potential he urges them not to come back the next season; to stop wasting their talent with him and get decent jobs. Despite his modest income his wages are notoriously generous.

Since he first started working as a deckhand the prawn season has been shortened from all year to just 3 months in attempt to protect the area from over fishing. Eoin has always caught enough prawns to support his family but most family businesses have closed from the pressure of corporate owned commercial boats that only come for the short season.
He laments how regulations have pushed the smaller fishermen to find mining jobs.
“It doesn’t make sense, they make the season shorter but don't put a size limit on the boats. Each time the season gets shorter, the boats get bigger.”

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Eoin rolls another cigarette as we steam towards Point Samson harbour “A friend told me she’d given up twenty years ago but could still pick one up again at any second… sounds like twenty years of torture… and besides, everything I do is timed in cigarettes. It takes 2 to get the anchor down.”

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