Abstrack:
This paper aims to deeper quarry the life of fishermen who use sopek boat at the city of Tegal – Central Java. Sopek is the smallest type of traditional wooden boats with a day head seaward. As it has been known that the amount of fish in Java Sea has begun to diminish especially in closest areas to the mainland, this situation requires larger ships such as purseine and over 30 GT ships with big engine. However, there are many fishermen who still use sopek boat for fishing and this lead any problems arise. Sopek boat characteristics and the sea conditions do not allow them to be able to get the fish catches in large numbers. It can not be denied that sopek fishermen increasingly squeezed by the economic pressures for families. Sopek fishermen generally consist of native old fishermen who had ever been the vessel crew at young. The focus of this research is to know the reason of using sopek boat in the thick of technology progress and the condition of the sea with minimum fishing gear at this time. The findings obtained are that the indigenous sopek fishermen had hereditary traditional culture with unchanged boat design from ancient times. Sopek fishermen decided to use the boat as the implication of their acceptance of risk preference. They are also facing economic constraints by lack of capital. From the findings above we can conclude that the culture of fishing communities suffered of declining in technology and risks preference. However, the above conditions are not instantaneous occured but caused by systemic change of marine and fisheries policy by the government.
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