Oelaba on the island of Rote, Indonesia is a pretty special little village. The men in general are away for 10-11 months of the year. They have a very long history of fishing the waters around Ashmoore reef and although this area is nowadays part of Australia the men from this village still have the right to fish there so long as they do it in a traditional way. This means no engines, electronic navigation etc. They sail their handmade boats the 300km across the ocean and stay down there fishing for around 6 months, totally isolated. Thier boats are called "widow-makers" with good reason as many never come home again. At the end of the fishing season they sail home then install thier engines and head off on a 1000km trip to Sulawesi to transport timber back to Rote. We had a really interesting day visiting this unique village.
Enjoi.

If you enjoy our videos and appreciate the effort that goes into making them then perhaps you would be interested in supporting their production. A little goes a long way

Our Patron: https://www.patreon.com/SailingLearningByDoing
Our Paypal: https://paypal.me/vernondeck?locale.x...

NEW!!!
Get your Learning By Doing merch here!!!
https://teespring.com/stores/learningbydoing

SUBTECH
https://www.subtechsports.com
Promo code: teamsubtechvernon
Discount: 20% off (Free Shipping World wide)

Indiana Paddlesurf: https://shop.indiana-sup.ch
VERNON10X (10% discount code)

Please visit: http://www.vernondeck.com
INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/Vernondeck/
FACEBOOK: https://goo.gl/WNrSV5

Closed Captions (CC):

Good morning everyone. Today we are invited by our friend Dave and we're
gonna go in a small village. Apparently they are making some little boats over there and
the village i think called Oelaba but i'm not really sure about that
but that's gonna be a new exploration on roti island
okay
okay
go
okay not to mention
thank you
school school school
so our friend dave has invited us on this trip today he's got a car and obviously for
us without any forms of land transportation it's pretty awesome when someone offers us
an adventure in their car anyway dave's an old surfer from way back he's one of the original
guys that came here to roti to nimbrala and he's uh him and his wife janet have built a
pretty amazing resort here called lualemba so if you're in nambrala or thinking to come to roti
this would be a good place to stay for sure there's like eight months here of
dry season it's pretty pretty dry everything's you know there's not a lot of vegetation around
and these guys have a massive well and so their gardens are just incredible and a lot of
indonesian people come here for their photos for weddings and things like
that because it's really well known the garden but i'll show you this look at it
found a tree you like yeah i like this tree it's not often we see this one
beautiful garden so many kind of flowers and colors it's smelling super good it's really
a little edin yeah and it's probably the first time we've seen the lawn they grasp for a long
time it's end of the dry season here but they've still got green grass everywhere pretty amazing
let's go
on the way to oi laba we did a first stop on a beach we walked along the mongrav on a wood ponton
and i was worried a bit about crocs but as soon i saw the many kids playing around i thought they
were probably not in the area here this is our friends and guide for the day dave and janet janet
cooked for all of us the delicious and classic dish of indonesia nazi goreng i am good lunch bud
thank you for making lunch thanks dave for bringing us look at these little dogs
it was not really the more peaceful lunch time ever with all the kids jumping around and curious
about us but it is always a pleasure to have fun with some full of energy kids modernists
the real stars of the kids are the two little dogs in indonesia the only dogs are looking like
dingo the kids are really fascinated by this too little ball of fur than they can touch and caress
after the lunch we did a stop to a inland salty river
where people are cultivating the sea with agaga as many rhotenese people the perfect
occasion to fly the drone and observe the incredible landscapes of roti from the sky
on the road again we finally arrived in oil laba on the west coast of rote behind the mangrove area
oilaba is a tiny fisherman village all muslim contrary to the rest of
rote island who is mostly christian in the middle of the mangroves the oelaba fishermen
are building and working on their sailing boat in the middle of thousands of mini-mud crabs
at low tides it is easy to access the boats while on the dry for the size of the village
the number of boats in this natural harbor is quite impressive each family of this village
is leaving from the ocean and the boat the specificity of this village is that
the men are out to fishing or to bring wood for making new boats more than 10 months per year the
women and kids are staying alone by themselves almost all of the time the widowmakers because
sometimes they never come back because they don't have motors it's all done by traditional sailing
we had the luck to find some of the men in the harbor
we were working on the boat a good opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and their work
so the locals here in oalab yep they have these big boats called i guess they're
called prows are they but these big wooden boats they're handmade everything's handmade
and they sail them and there's this place called ashmore reef about uh well it's australian it's
about a hundred miles from here uh but because the indonesian traditional fishermen well indonesians
have been fishing down there for i guess probably thousands of years but they have an agreement
with the australian government that as long as these boats are still traditional that means no
engines no electronic navigation if they sail down there they're still allowed to go down
their own fish even though it's a it's a marine park and no one else allowed to fish there so
these guys sail down there and spend the whole season down there catching fish drying it and
then sail back and they've just arrived back about a month ago and now they're all putting
the engines back in and then these things turn into motorboats they go up to sulawesi
and get timber and bring it back to here so pretty amazing customs they've got going here
now it is time to leaving the mud and the crabs to do a tour in the village
some men are working on making wood boats
and the kids were both excited and shy to have some visitors in their home
they don't want to be filmed no after a while in our company they started to relax and acting
more naturally with us at the other side of the world kids are playing the same classic games
girls doing figures on elastic boys biking hands games swings and climbing trees
after our little tour all the kids escorted us back to the lighthouse at the entry of the village
vernon did the last drone flight and the kids loved it
so
oh
so
he's not shy he's not shy at all uh what an awesome village these uh super friendly super nice
it's um a special society well yeah a special culture here with their long
range sailing the men all go away for six seven months at a time on these sailing boats and then
come back here for a month and then go again to sulawesi so i guess the kids in in that crowd
you know hearing stories about their father and grandfathers and things like that and
only seeing them a couple of months of the year but pretty cool everyone's really friendly and
uh good to see that the old old traditions are still alive here you know what do you reckon
apollo
it's really cool to see all the kids so friendly and everyone's
interested in us and curious the little dogs they never saw these little animals before here and i'm
pretty sure they didn't even know if they were dogs or not but um it's pretty funny well it's
a muslim town so dogs aren't you know there's not too many dogs here anyway but pretty cool they're
more curious about us actually thank you thank you can you say watch learning by doing listen
like subscribe comment
bye
so we are on our way back to an umbrella and we just stopped here because this tree is just
huge he has more than 20 nest of bees around and super wild ones and big i never saw that
probably full of honey
thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this one as you probably could tell uh this one was edited
by marie you can hear her silky smooth narration going on hope you enjoyed it she's got a different
style than me and now we try and slip one of hers and when she's got time i'll get her to edit every
now and again but um there's cool video hope you guys enjoyed the you know the cultural aspect to
this one and it was fun there the kids were so cool just uh yeah just really innocent and
natural and really nice i love you can probably tell from other videos you know i really love
hanging out with the kids wherever we go um gotta say thanks and big shout out to all the patrons
you guys make this possible uh definitely makes us feel good knowing you guys are contributing
and helping out our hard work it motivates us to keep keep making these videos for you guys
please go ahead and subscribe to the channel it's uh really helps us out with the algorithm and
also now we're definitely in more remote places again we might not be quite so consistently every
tuesday so push the notifications bell as well and that way you can update it if we don't put
something out for a week or we just have a time on a friday we'll put one out that way you'll
get a you'll get a little email saying that we've put a video out yeah look forward to showing you
our adventures as you can see in the background we're not in roti anymore we're actually just
arrived in banda which is about i don't know 4 500 miles north of roti and this place is pretty
freaking awesome we've only been here a day but loving it already and look forward to showing
you some pretty cool videos from here in the uh future anyway thanks again and see you next week