Gabi Sidorenco, a fisherman from Sfântu Gheorghe, Danube Delta, tells how the official name of the fisherman is "operator" and the boat is "fishing vessel"; seemingly harmless terms, but which restrict the fisherman's activity.
In the summer, tourists come. The bad part is that the people from… now you can’t even tell which institution, they don’t allow you to take tourists, with you fishing. Showing people how to fish was also a source of income. Even if they weren’t, those people didn’t come to poach, they came to take a picture. Or to be taken for a ride on that fishing boat, with tools. And we’re not allowed to take them because they’re a person… “It’s forbidden for unauthorized persons to travel on fishing vessels”. So the name “lotca” [traditional boat] is gone, it disappeared and now we’ve become fishing vessels? You can’t compare a fishing vessel like some have trawlers or trawlers or those big boats that people over there have. But here we have a 12-beam boat that’s 4 meters, 3 meters or something, 4 meters. How do you call it, a fishing vessel? And the fishermen, they’re not fishermen, they’re “operators”. Well, give it up! How can it be an operator? That’s a fisherman. So the name fisherman is no longer there.
