Page - 212 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

212 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe Because of the abuses suffered at the hands of the trafficking networks, some refugees have more recently started to organize the trip by themselves. They just buy a boat with others, paying much less for it than the agents’ price, and guide themselves through the sea with a GPS. for the fishermen, both on the Turkish and the Greek sides, work and life at sea have radi- cally changed. They say that for them it has become common to see boats overcrowded with migrants at night or at dawn, sometimes lost and asking in what direction is Greece. Turkish fishermen say that they stopped using the deserted islands of the Ayvalik area to rest by a fire after they lay their nets, as they used to do, out of fear that traffickers or coast guards would abandon groups of refugees there, as they have themselves witnessed. They became accustomed to seeing the refugees on the boats or running desperate on those islands, and to finding or even fishing up their decomposed bodies or body parts. There is no frequency pattern, they say. They might not see anything for years and then hear of several incidents in one month. But their profession, they complain, and the maritime environment in which it is based have radi- cally changed. Their lament seems to confirm the extent to which the open sea is far from being only about “nature.” The fishermen’s daily landscape is being shaped by migration and border regimes, by asylum laws passed kilometers away and by the social, political and economic con- ditions that put pressure on and transformed the North Aegean into a complex, multi-layered scenario of disputes about bare life. Fig. 3. Confiscated boat in the harbour of Mitilini, Lesvos Island. Photo taken on September 24, 2014 by Estela Schindel