Battling the black tide

A similar scenario faced the people of Galicia in north west Spain last November, when the Prestige oil tanker broke up 120km off the coast of Muxia, loaded with 70,000 tonnes of oil.

Six months on, a Spanish friend - Inma Nadela Navarro - had been in touch with the organisers of the voluntary clean-up effort through the internet. She had succeeded in persuading me to join the 'voluntarios' in her father's home region.

Unable to fish, the fishermen have been getting paid by the government to rid the famously craggy coastline of its black tides.

With help from the Spanish army and an unpredictable supply of volunteers, they are still trying to regain their former lives.

One of the organisers, Xunta de Galicia (Galicia's council), has been keen to promote the huge logistical mission. Admittedly it wasn't a pure act of altruism that motivated me, as I was also keen to see the famous granite coast feared by sailors and fishermen around the world.

A week later, Inma and I were on a bus bound for Camelle, a small fishing village about 100km from Coruna.

The fact that we were the only volunteers in this small village made us the object of curiosity. It also meant that the fishermen and their families indulged us with their stories and hospitality.

On our first night we were offered the very humble fishermen's lodgings which resembled an empty office warehouse, furnished only with the foam mattresses discarded by the previous volunteers.

Carmen was our first point of contact through Xunta de Galicia.

She was the personification of Spanish charm. She and Dina, another co-ordinator, supplied us with coffee and biscuits and offered us lifts to the only public shower facilities in the village two miles away in a derelict football stadium.

Our first day cleaning the oil or "chapapote" as it was called, was memorable. Fifteen fishermen, a Madrileno and a Geordie decked out in regulation gloves, overalls, Wellington boots and breathing masks, we suddenly assumed the same identity, armed only with a trowel for scraping the chapapote from the rocks.

The resulting tarballs would be taken away in the evening and incinerated.

Every day they took it in turns to be 'clean hands' who did not have to work, but had the task of feeding the workers with apples and water and wiping faces.

Everybody's favourite 'clean hands', was known as El Rubio. Whilst we worked, he poured us Cognac with a small measure of coffee and brought us edible offerings from the beach. In his presence the morning's work passed quickly and by lunchtime it was surprising that no one was inebriated.

El Rubio was a well respected diver who regularly risked his life retrieving cargo from sunken vessels, and in some cases colleagues who had been grabbed by the sea whilst fishing for percebes, or goose barnacles, an expensive delicacy in Spain, fetching up to 100 euros per kilo. Most of the fishermen in Camelle volunteer to fish for percebes because they are a regular source of income, but since the disaster percebes have been off the menu. El Rubio said he loved his job and the simplicity of his life and that he could not imagine doing anything else.

His attitude towards the oil was straightforward: "This problem has to have a solution. When you have to retrieve the body of a fisherman who has been your colleague, from the sea, then you know you cannot resolve anything."

The Galiciam coastline is not known as the Costa Del Muerte (coast of death) for nothing. Every year, one family in Camelle loses a loved one at sea.

Carmen and her husband Jesus, also personified this simplicity: "We do not need to go out of Camelle even to eat, because we have everything we need or want here."

Carmen had recorded the arrival of the oil on November 19, by camcorder.

"The oil was waist high. You could walk across it. You could even throw a stone and it wouldn't sink," she said.

One evening, Jesus took us out on the craggy coast between Santa Marina and Muxia where he would scavenge for seafood as a child.

"We knew every rock and every jetty by name according to which shipwreck had happened there. One of them was called Infierno, another one The Serpent is named after the English ship which sank here. There is a cemetery near here called the English Cemetery where 172 sailors on board The Serpent are buried."

Carmen said: "The fishermen don't know any other life. Before the accident, they were mainly worried about the commercialisation of fishing, the encroachment of the bigger boats and losing their fishing stocks.

"The bigger boats, which go to France, are trying to attract a crew but no one from Camelle has joined them because they know what will happen to the smaller boats if they do."

Midway through the week, I was beginning to feel like a local. The widows dressed in black waved at us from their windows as we trooped off in our yellow overalls to work. It was hard for us to imagine that 3,000 volunteers had turned up on the first bank holiday after the accident. Apparently the organisers had been overwhelmed.

Fernando, a forest engineer from Galicia who was in charge of the volunteer effort in Camelle, told us: "People were arriving and cleaning the beaches by themselves, but now we have to control around 15 volunteers a day. We have to organise everything for cleaning the beaches and the rocks. Sometimes we get a fax saying there will be 22 volunteers the next day, but we rarely know until the last minute."

A small chart in Fernando's office highlighted 21 affected beaches in his zone of responsibility, from Camelle in the north, to Camerinas in the south.

Luckily the EU has donated at least £270 million Euros towards the cleanup.

Spain, France and Portugal have recently passed a law preventing ships which carry oil from travelling within 200 miles of their shore, although this is unlikely to stop the heavy traffic en route to Gibraltar.

Before catching our bus from Puente del Porto we had to see the Manfred Museum which had belonged to a German artist who had lived like a hermit next to Camelle's harbour mouth.

He had fashioned his own Garden of Eden out of rocks, a monumental labour of love. But 24 hours after the disaster the garden was drowned in thick layers of oil.

A photograph in a small stationery shop in Camelle high street shows a near naked man dressed like Tarzan.

He is clasping his temples. The picture has an Edvard Munch quality, depicting the man's grief. In December Manfred died. Locals say he couldn't come to terms with the disaster.

Perhaps he was determined to preserve his own world. Perhaps he was disillusioned with the intrusion of the outside world, which had finally caught up with him.

HELPING THE CLEAN-UP

For UK residents who want to volunteer, you can contact supportercare@wwwf.org.uk or check wwf.org.uk. Or telephone 01483426333.

Those who can speak a little Spanish can contact the organisers, Xuntia de Galicia on 34 900 400 800. More information about the oil spill and the latest on the volunteering effort can be found on www.abelard.org/news.