Fuel costs squeeze Costa Mar's small-boat captains

The María Elena, a thirty-two-foot wooden hull painted pale blue, sits in the shallows off Punta Verde at dawn. Captain Elena Ruiz moves through her routines with the economy of long habit: checking the diesel tank, coiling rope, scanning the reef line where the water darkens. At sixty-two, she has fished these waters since 1994, the year Costa Mar joined the Federation. The work has always been lean, but something has shifted in the past eighteen months.

Diesel at the Puerto Azul cooperative dock has risen from 2.8 florins per litre to 4.1 florins. A three-day fishing expedition now costs her 850 florins in fuel alone—roughly forty percent of what she expects to earn if the catch meets quota. The Federal Fisheries Authority cut the local cooperative's monthly allowance last year, citing reef-stress monitoring. Ruiz lands fewer fish, burns more fuel getting to them, and watches her margin compress.

She is not alone. The cooperative counts forty-three active captains in the Punta Verde cluster, down from seventy in 2015. Some have sold their boats; others have moved into dive-guide work or tourism charters. Ruiz has refused both. She speaks of her fishing life not as nostalgia but as an obligation to the reef—a way of knowing it that tourism cannot replicate.