The Rope Maker

 I took a walk on the main road away from the beach.  The asphalt surface served as a communal drying place for the nets from morning fishing.  A lot of rope was laid out to dry too.  Ropes which, I guess, are used to pull the nets and to tie off the fish traps and so on.  Fishermen use a lot of rope.

 A little farther up the road was the rope-maker's hut.  It should have come as no surprise.  All the rope in the village had to come from somewhere.  But it was a surprise to me, since my subconscious assumes that such basics come from a nearby Wal-Mart.       

Once before, I'd seen some women making rope by twisting and braiding it with their hands.  The rope making here was done by machine...made of wood and powered by hand...but a machine nonetheless.  This machine was set up to make four lengths of rope at the same time,  twisting together three strands for each rope.  It took three people to operate - two at the ends of the machine to operate the cranks and one to walk in between with the spreader jig.  The top photo shows one of the crankers and the walker.  The photo above shows the cranker at the other end.  The photo below is a section from the top photo, enlarged to show the three strands entering to the left of the spreader and emerging to the right as a single piece of rope.

The photo below shows a fourth worker, the lady in the background working with the pitchfork.  She is preparing the plant fibers to be used to spin the next set of strands.  I don't know what kind of fiber they were using....whatever is in the big brown pile behind her.

I'd guess that this is a family operation, run by two married couples.  Maybe brothers and sisters.  I don't know.  They were nice folks and were kind enough to let me take pictures of them.  They giggled as I did, with the kind of giggle that people give when they are dealing with idiots or crazy people.