“Watch the starboard side!”- so began our sea adventure. Fishing as a livelihood of Balchik residents was the theme of the event related to the museum project “The Museum as an Educational Environment”. Thanks to Radostina Encheva – Director of the Balchik Museum, the children from the summer academy boarded a boat to feel the adrenaline of the sea waves. The one-hour boat trip, the visit to the ethnographic house at the museum and the open lesson with a real fisherman on a boat, united under the banner of fishing as a livelihood in Balchik.
The kids learned firsthand that fishing is grassroots and local. Mackerel, bonito, horse mackerel, anchovy, chub, halibut, saffron, leffer, mullet, and barbel, turbot, flounder, and crayfish are mostly caught in the grassland fishery. The fisherman Georgi showed us how to stretch the nets, how to prepare the rod for fishing, when the sea is suitable to go in. The captain of the boat – Rosen Dimov, who took us on a tour with “Ivallena” boat and told us about fishing on the Northern Black Sea coast, is the chairman of the Balchik Fishermen’s Association and a member of the board of the Shabla-Kavarna-Balchik Group. From him the children learned a lot about the species of fish in our region and the modern ways of fishing. “But how come we can see on the screen that there is fish below us, and even at what depth it is?”, “And what is a trawl?”, “How are these stakes stuck on the talyan?” – the questions to Captain Rosen Dimov were raining one after the other.
They also learned why turbot and mackerel have disappeared from our sea, and in the ethnographic house they could not believe their ears that there was a time when record 4 tons of turbot were caught on a fishing line in one day. Inside they saw fishing nets and needles for entangling them and learned how the dolphin population has declined alarmingly in just 20 years that dolphin fishing has been allowed in the past.
Of course, at sea as at sea. The children had a delicious lunch and cooled off in the sea. Fifty kids were happy and satisfied!
The outings by the museum specialists will continue, on certain days, throughout the month of August.
