Plutarch wrote in Roman times that “there are loves so beautiful that they justify all the follies they commit”. The Greek philosopher would have liked to sing the epic story of this 39-year-old Emporda woman, MÃriam Artacho, a fishing boat skipper based in Arenys de Mar (Maresme), who committed the folly of obtaining the title of skipper and enlisting in a fishing boat so that her husband could carry on the family tradition, despite having a serious eye condition.
During these six years at sea, MÃriam has become aware of the poor state in which the Mediterranean is and actively collaborates with entities such as Ecoembes and Ecoalf, non-profit companies that recycle the refuse collected by fishermen. “Those who make the decisions in fishing should get on a boat” and they could know “what it feels like when you clean a monkfish and remove plastics from its guts”. If they did, they would also repudiate the stigmas about fishermen, he suggests, while pointing to a banner with the slogan “We are not thieves” that hangs from the Fishermen’s Guild building, in protest of the restrictions to which the administrations subject the professionals . “We are the first interested in protecting the sea” and that is why they comply with the impositions and cuts to fishing gear or to make biological bans. “But I recognize that they are drowning us more and more”.
Artacho signed up as a fishing patron with her husband and guarantees that she ended up “falling in love with the seaâ€. Miriam’s story is a story of courage and overcoming to save her family. With her husband, Isaac, whom she married at the age of 20 and has two daughters, they formed the typical well-to-do marriage. He was the skipper of a fishing boat, and followed the family tradition in the port of Roses, and she was a forestry technician at the Town Council of Torroella de Montgrà (Empordà ).
Her placid life was cut short when her husband was diagnosed with glaucoma which prevented him from renewing his skipper title, and he was on the verge of never being able to sail again. It was then that MÃriam, in order to prevent her loved one from falling into a deep depression, away from the sea in which he had been raised with his whole family, decided to remove the title. “Isaac didn’t sleep for a week when they told him he couldn’t renew his patron title.”
She had always heard that “women don’t go to sea”, but the “courageous fisherman” ignored the old sea wolves and took the title of fishing skipper, which has also won her the admiration of his colleagues But it wasn’t easy, he remembers, “on the first day of class I started to cry when the teacher started talking about engine pistons”. But after three months “he was already dismantling a boat engine”.
MÃriam and Isaac acquired a trawler, the Mariano, which they renamed Mini One because it was a small fishing vessel, about twelve meters long. “I have to admit that I’m from the mountains and I didn’t know if I’d get seasick, but it’s clear that what I needed was to keep in touch with nature, which ends up putting you in your place.” Every day they travel from the Empordà to the Maresme, once they have overcome the drastic change of life. “We went from seeing each other after finishing work to being together all day”, sometimes in situations of maximum tension.
In the port of Arenys, everyone knows her. “I thought that because I was a woman I would be marginalized”, but it was the opposite. At first they helped me with the boxes and the cart, but when they saw that I could do it alone, they considered me one more and stopped doing it”, she recalls with a laugh.
The Mini One arrives at the port of Arenys de Mar shortly after 3:30 p.m., with a good catch. While her husband stays on board cleaning and tidying the equipment after unloading the fish boxes, MÃriam exudes optimism and does not lose her wide smile as she loads the heavy cart to the crowded auction house. Once the catch has been billed, he takes a large bucket full of refuse to the Ecoembes container. “In three months we collect about eighty kilos of rubbish – he explains -. We can find everything: tires, pipes, tables, mattresses…”. However, he clarifies that it is not the people who throw the waste into the sea, but that “most of it comes from the land, washed away by the floods”, so he calls for more awareness “when it comes to cleaning the streams and mouths”.
