MEANING OF FISHING IN KALI AND OUR FAMILY
The main economic activity in Kali is fishing. There is no house where at least one member of the family is not a fisherman. Most of the fishermen work on fishing vessels that catch small blue fish - sardines, anchovies, flounder and mackerel. As a rule, blue fish are caught during those nights when there is little moonlight, so the only period when fishermen will not go fishing is five days before and after the night of the full moon. In Kali, people live the most during the full moon: that's when all family celebrations and local events take place.
We want to emphasize how important fishing is in Kali and how much we value fish and all our hard-working fishermen. Fishing built our village, enabled progress, education, independence and democracy.
One example of this is the strong preserved "kualjski" dialect (which linguists say is the closest to the old Croatian language), while other places on the island have lost their dialects. People of "Kuali" are so proud of their dialect that they even created an online dictionary called Kalipedija.
The head and heart of our family, dad Boženo has been a fisherman since he could remember. When he was 13 years old, he went fishing for the first time as a "professional" during the summer school holidays. After graduating from high school, he continued to work as a professional fisherman until he went to work in the Pacific, again as a fisherman. In the 80s, a large part of the male population of Kali went to the Pacific to work on fishing boats, because American businessmen recognized them as professional and dedicated fishermen (of course, what were low fees to them, were a fortune to our fishermen). Boženo worked there for 6 years, until he had a terrible accident, his ship sank, and the crew floated in the ocean for almost 48 hours, until miraculously they were found by an ocean liner that had accidentally deviated from its route due to an emergency. After that event, he returned home and bought his own fishing boat. He was the captain of his fishing boat for more than 25 years and thus got to know the Croatian part of the Adriatic like the back of his own hand. Boženo's son first went fishing with him at the age of 6, so even today, even though he works on ocean liners, when he is home, he goes fishing with his friends every time he has the chance. Fishing is part of their identity and it is what they truly enjoy.