The life of a fisherman

Toni Darder Caballero is one of Puerto de Sóller´s local fishermen. He choose his job bound by tradition. In 1996, Toni took over a ship that his father had restored and has, since then, continued his fathers lifetime dream. Nevertheless, to him, his life as fisherman is a hard job, mainly because times have changed.

By now, the fisheries in the Mediterranean undergo strict controls by the EU in order to preserve the fish populations and the whole ecological system. There are, for example, fixed time slots and depths of sea that Toni Darder Caballero has to comply with. Therefore, he has installed a monitoring system on his ship, which controls precisely these parameters and sends an alarm whenever they are in danger of being violated. Moreover, Toni Darder Caballero is allowed to only fish certain kinds of fish as well as to a limited size of his fishing net - regulations imposed by the Spanish government and the EU. In 2009, a new project was tried out: One day a week, the fishers were not allowed to fish, while their financial loss was being covered by the EU. However, the EU subsidies will not suffice for the year 2010. Toni Darder Caballero will probably still keep the one day without fishing, because he thinks that the fish market is still saturated.