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In the gray predawn in this tourist town, foreigners jog along the seafront avenue, passing dark surfing schools and souvenir stands, under the mercury vapor glow of street lamps.
But just out to sea, fishermen tend their nets in small reed boats with pointy, upswept prows, very much like the ones that have been in use here for thousands of years.
Centuries before the Spanish arrived and long before the Incas extended their empire from the mountaintops to the coast, fishermen here were building boats from the totora reed that grows along the shore. Today, a handful of fishermen keep up that tradition, growing and harvesting the reeds and forming them into the boats that are known as caballitos de totora, or little reed horses.
All that is changing. The marshy beds where fishermen grow the reeds are being destroyed as the shoreline erodes. And the small reserve set aside for the plants is itself under threat, increasingly hemmed in by houses and real estate speculators as seaside land values rise.
On Peru’s northern coastline, the long history of reedboats is threatened as a new generation looks beyond fishing for careers and opportunities like surfing.
Video Credit By Jimmy Chalk on Publish Date August 7, 2014.
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But perhaps most important, going to sea in small reed boats has become almost entirely an old man’s occupation. The sons and grandsons of the local fishermen are becoming surfing instructors, construction workers and policemen, taking jobs on larger fishing boats or going abroad in search of better pay.
“It seems like we’re the last generation,” said Luis Urcia, who at 30 is one of the youngest of the fishermen to go out regularly on the caballitos. Bare chested with green board shorts, he leaned against his reed boat, more than twice his height, and scuffed at the damp sand with bare feet.
“A fisherman’s life is tough,” he said. “That’s why the young people don’t want to do it. They’d rather have a profession and health insurance and a bank account.”
Huanchaco (pronounced wan-CHAC-oh), on Peru’s north coast with a population of about 15,000, has become a surf haven, known for having good waves year-round. But its identity is wrapped up in the tradition of the caballitos, whose image appears on buses, hotel signs and the town seal. The mayor has a three-foot-high model of a caballito propped up behind his desk.
The boats are about 15 feet long, with a flat stern and a pointed bow that curves upward like a fancy slipper or an elephant’s tusk. A few tufts of reed that stick out the pointed end give them the look of some whimsical, Seussian creature with a topknot.
Pre-Colombian ceramics, as old as 2,000 years, show boats very much like the ones still used in Huanchaco. Some pots show painted scenes with caballito-like boats; other pieces are shaped in the form of three-dimensional boats with paddlers on top.
Gabriel Prieto, an archaeologist who grew up here, believes he has found the oldest evidence yet of the boats, at an excavation in town: a tiny reed bundle that he thinks is the fragment of a miniature boat made 3,500 years ago. It is tied with double loops of twine in virtually the same way that fishermen tie together their reed boats today.
The boats were once used all along the coast. Today they are found in only a few towns, although those in Huanchaco, where locals say there are about 30 fishermen still working regularly, are considered by many to be the most traditional.
Yet some things are new. Fishermen put a Styrofoam-like plastic inside their boats to make them float better. They tie them together with nylon rope. And they check weather reports on the Internet before heading out to sea.
The fishermen also get a big part of their income from tourism. Some give rides on their boats to tourists, for about $3.60. A few younger fishermen double as surf instructors.
On a recent day, Carlos Ucañan, 41, carried bundles of totora reed down to the beach and quickly tied them together to create a new boat, which he sold to a tourist, Joe Mullray, 51, of Avalon, N.J., for about $125. Mr. Mullray said that he planned to ship it home and ride it like a stand-up paddle board.
“It’s the origins of surfing from Peru,” Mr. Mullray said.
The idea that the caballito is a precursor to the surf board is a common perception here, where surfers often wait for waves side by side with the caballito fishermen tending their nets.
But many historians and archaeologists say the connection is merely casual.
The fishermen ride the caballitos kneeling or sitting down, not standing up, although some will do so for show.
Mr. Prieto, the archaeologist, said that the upswept prow represents a significant achievement of pre-Hispanic boat makers: a design element that helped them cut through the surf and reach deeper water where bigger fish could be caught.
“The caballito is not designed to ride the waves but to get past them,” he said.
Each fisherman typically has two boats. The reeds soak up water and after one or two days out in the waves the caballitos need to stay on shore to dry, resting against wooden crossbars near the town’s sea wall.
Fishermen often venture a mile or more out to sea. But their catches tend to be small and the species of fish they bring back often have little commercial value. Most are sold on the beach or in a small local market.
“It’s just not profitable to go to sea in a boat that can carry no more than 220 pounds to bring back fish that no one wants to buy,” Mr. Prieto said. “That’s what’s going to make this end up in a museum. The living culture that we talk about so much is going to end.”
The fishermen grow the totora reeds in deep pits that they dig by hand near the beach, in an area declared a reserve for producing the plant.
But the beaches along this section of coast have been badly eroded as the ocean eats further into the land. Many Huanchaqueros, as local residents are called, blame a long breakwater built south of here at a port, which they say has changed the currents. The beach at Huanchaco, they said, used to be much wider but has been eroded to a narrow strip.
A local environmental group, the Huanchaquero Movement in Defense of the Environment, has begun to track the damage, counting and mapping the reed beds. It says that in 2010, a survey by the fishermen counted about 300 reed beds, while today there are only 162.
On a recent day, two men stood knee deep in a reed bed near the shore. One cut the reeds with a small sickle and the other gathered them in bundles so they could be lifted out and spread out to dry.
José Mercedes Huamanchumo, 69, said the bed was about 30 years old. Just a few feet away other totora beds were full of brackish water and trash, where the sea had rushed in, making the water too saline for the reeds to grow well.
He gestured to one that he had planted decades ago, now full of dying reeds. “This was a good bed,” he said. “Now look at it. It’s worthless.”
Mr. Huamanchumo and other fishermen want the local government to pay for a backhoe to dig new beds. Some fishermen have taken the matter in hand and dug new reed beds further from shore, where the reeds appear to be thriving.
The mayor, José Ruiz, said that he had no money to dig reed beds but that he had requested money to do so next year.
Back on the town beach, a fisherman, Cosme Arzola, 64, landed his reed boat with about 10 mullet, each about a foot long, lying in a cavity in the stern. He kept two for himself and sold the rest to a woman on the beach for about $7.
Mr. Arzola said that none of his three sons had become fishermen, although one works in the anchovy industry as a fisheries biologist.
“The kids don’t like fishing,” Mr. Arzola said. “There aren’t many of us left.”