I am a Fanti fisherman. My work is fishing. It is an interesting and absorbing occupation, nevertheless, it is hard and dangerous as you will find later on. Two things make me like being a fisherman: one is to provide myself and my family with the daily means of livelihood; the other is to work, so that I may be useful and helpful to the community in which I live, that is, to be a good citizen. Other than these two reasons, I am proud to add that work provides jobs for other people such as lorry drivers who distribute fish inland, fishwomen who dress or cure the fish. for the markets, canoe makers who make my canoe from big trees, and for many other people. I live, generally speaking, on the coast close to the sea, but I can carry on my work also in the interior in big rivers like the Volta, the Pra and the Tano as well as in big lagoons like the Keta Lagoon, or in lakes like Bosomtwe in Ashanti.

My working tools are expensive, the two most expensive being the canoe and the net. I use different sizes of canoes to suit the different kinds of nets and traps, as well as different sizes of meshes to suit the different kinds of fish I catch. Due to the rapidly changing economic conditions, canoes like the Semahen which used to sell for 7s. or 8s. two decades ago now cost anything between £10 and £14. Nets have also grown in size and cost and so has the cost of other fishing tools such as oars, paddles, calabash, sailcloth, and fishing yarns and cords. Correspondingly the price of fish has also gone up.

Fishing is hazardous, all-weather work. I have always to war against one or the other of the elements as winds, weather, waves, currents and time. Sometimes the sea becomes rough, often unexpectedly so, and I am in danger of losing either my tools or my life or both. Unfavourable winds may send my canoe drifting to places far away from my home and make me face death by starvation.