The Philippine Banca

With over 7,000 islands, the Philippines has an incredible amount of shore line. I don’t know the statistics, but I would conservatively estimate that half the population lives on or very near a beach.

The waters are warm, and full of fish. Deep trenches lie just off the eastern coast, and virtually every island has a coral reef that supports a huge variety of marine tropical fishes. Filipino fishermen in Mindanao regularly catch yellow fin tuna and blue marlin weighing 60-150 pounds – on a hand line. Other beach dwellers spend a lot of time in their bancas (outrigger canoes), catching fish for the family diet. With the fish, some rice and fruit and vegetables from the garden, one can manage to get along pretty well.

What is needed to support the fishing effort is a suitable boat. Over hundreds of years, the banca has developed into the primary mode of water transport for fishing, hauling water in drums, people, and a little cargo.

It is interesting to speculate on the evolution of the banca. Some kind of vessel was needed that could be hauled out of the water onto the beach. The 2-meter diurnal tides often exposed large expanses of reef top. In some cases at low tide, the water is hundreds of feet from shore. It was impractical to build a pier under such conditions. So the boats had to be light enough to man handle out of the water.

The early banca, done by the original native islander was no doubt just a dugout canoe. There were plenty of trees, and lots of time to whittle away at a log to make something that could be handled in the water. They were relatively heavy, although over time the art became highly developed, and some dugouts were surprisingly light, even delicate, yet strong.

But the canoe was unstable, and would easily tip, spilling every thing into the water. The cure for that was an outrigger. Two cross members, and a bamboo float made a big difference. It didn’t take long to discover that two outriggers were needed – one on each side of the canoe hull. I am assuming that this dual-outrigger dugout canoe remained a standard item for generations. Until it became feasible to obtain wooden planks that were not too heavy.

The obvious next step in the development process was to increase the displacement of the canoe by extending the sides of it to provide a deeper hull that was still relatively light in weight. It was discovered that the length of the canoe could be increased as part of this process, by adding stems on the bow and stern, keeping the double-ended geometry, but extending the usable length of the hull by significant amount.

This went on for quite a while, until it became apparent that it was no longer important to build on a dugout. Rather, the dugout hull evolved into a keel, and the sides of the hull provided the displacement needed for the vessel. This was an important step in the evolutionary process. It was a lot easier to find a long relatively small diameter log that could be used for a keel, than it was to find a large diameter log for the traditional dugout. Still, if one examines the interior of the large motorized banca, one will find the remnant of a dugout canoe. A wide, heavy log, with the obligatory portion dug out of it, forms the keep of most large motorized bancas.

Obviously, the size of a banca is limited by the size of the keel log that can be dragged in out of the forest. Trees are, after all, in scarce supply these days. The next evolutionary step is to build up a keel from lumber pieces, carefully keyed together, glued and screwed, in a composite keel structure that mimics the original dugout log keel. Chances are, this is already being done.

One still sees the small banca, made of a sheet of plywood, and a keel log. Bamboo outriggers, all nailed together with copper boat nails, and tied up with heavy nylon monofilament. Hundreds of these 1 or 2-man boats are used every day by artisanal fishermen here.

Some are fitted with sails. Most are paddled, but increasing use of small engines is seen, with some structural modifications needed to accommodate the engine. It is no longer peacefully quiet on many beaches these days. Is this the snow mobile or jet ski syndrome in effect?

The outrigger concept is surprisingly tenacious, in spite of it’s clumsiness in docking at commercial facilities. The outriggers get in the way, and boats jostling for space near a pier are forced into tangled contortions. Cargo and passengers often have to walk on the outrigger struts, across gangplanks, and hulls, to reach the pier. Not an easy thing for the landlubber.

The outrigger as a feature is probably retained because it is easy to beach a banca, even a large one. (A displacement hull vessel without outriggers is clumsy out of the water.) If it has to be put on dry land, the village turns out en masse, and the whole banca is hoisted up by the outrigger struts, and walked ashore. It is an impressive sight, indeed.

The larger motorized bancas have up to what I’d estimate as a 30+ ton displacement. Fitted with marinized diesel truck engines, and ice storage modules fitting into the hull, fuel stored in dozens of plastic drums on deck, the boats and their crew of half a dozen men stay at sea for as long as a month, hunting for fish, mainly large yellow fin tuna and marlin. Some of them fail to return – victims of piracy, or storms at sea.

There are differences in hull geometry, depending on the region the banca is from. E.g. a Batangas banca has a high vertical bow and stern stem. The Visayan banca has a sharp pointed bow and stearn. Large bancas often have a squared-off stearn, high above the water, to safely handle following seas.

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