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The 37th Paraw Regatta Festival

Painting the Iloilo Strait

By John Iremil E. Teodoro, Contributor

03/16/2009

Taraw is the local sailboat of the island of Panay. It is a smaller version of the balangay that brought the Malayan race to this island in the 1200s. If the Panay folk history, the Maragtas, is to be believed, 10 Bornean leaders called datu, together with their family and slaves, left Borneo to escape the cruelty of an evil sultan. They sailed the seas for days to look for a peaceful home that they could claim. The kind wind guided their sails to an island inhabited by the Aetas led by the chieftain Marikudo and his wife Maniwantiwan. The 10 datus, led by Datu Sumakwel and his wife Kapinangan, bought the island from the Aetas for a price of golden salakot and a gold necklace long enough to touch the ground, and that is why it was called manangyad. The event was dubbed as the “Barter of Panay” (a politically incorrect historical text if your consciousness is post-colonial), a business transaction that exiled the Aetas to the mountains.

The Maragtas is the historical background of the Paraw Regatta Festival. Already on its 37th year, this festival started in the early 1970s. It is a race of sailboats in the strait between Iloilo City and the island-province of Guimaras. According to the Iloilo Paraw Regatta Foundation Inc., the organizer of this annual event, the primary objective of this festival “is to help develop the local tourism industry and preserve the paraw as the legacy from the earliest period of Ilonggo history, and to celebrate the skills of paraw sailors and bring a fiesta spirit into their lives.” The organizers also acknowledged the environment-friendly potential of paraw as “it does not need fuel and is practically pollution-free.” And as all sports events would, it is also the aim of this regatta to develop the spirit of sportsmanship among the racers.

For the first time, I stayed in Iloilo the weekend of Feb. 21 and 22 to witness the famous regatta in Villa de Arevalo Beach. As a rule, I don’t attend these so-called “island festivals.” I think they are a waste of time, energy and money, and we would be better off laying the foundation for the true revolution (cultural or otherwise) that would save this benighted country of ours and not to dance and revel for nothing. But I went to the Paraw Regatta. It seemed the mermaids and the syokoys inhabiting the coral gardens of Iloilo Strait were calling me.

My former students in the University of San Agustin, Pietros and Cara, promised to cover it with me and they did. Pietros is the editor-in-chief of the Augustinian newspaper and Augustinian Mirror magazine, while Cara is the managing editor. I was their adviser before I resigned from San Agustin. Their friend Apple, who acted in one of my plays before, joined us later. I also asked Noel, a talented fledgling photographer, to take photos for me.

We went there at around 9 a.m. At the beach outside the famous Tatoy’s Manokan were almost a hundred paraws of various sizes. (A curious note about this restaurant: Tatoy’s is a seafood restaurant famous for its native chicken. A trip in Iloilo will not be complete for a tourist without pigging out in this restaurant in Villa Beach.) And their sails! Their sails were bursting with colors and images. The sight was so beautiful, almost intoxicating. I had seen pictures of the Paraw Regatta before, but it was an entirely different experience being there in Villa Beach, gazing at the sails and touching

no ugly lubid or rope cordoning the paraws. We noticed that many of the “guards” were rude to the viewing public. An ugly man who thought he owned the ocean shouted at Cara when she mistakenly entered the cordoned beach. There were many people in Villa Beach. Many were swimming. Children were running in the sand. Teenage boys were skim-boarding. It was a festive morning by the sea!

One paraw in particular caught our attention. It was named Flory and was assigned the number A-13. The painting on its sail was beautiful, dominated by a distorted image of a giant hand in blue, cupping the face of a smiling boy with a nose of a wild boar. The images of a yellow flower were on top, yellow and red fishes and stumps of young bamboo poles. The mood was happy and so alive, and indeed, very Filipino.

The paintings were done by Iloilo artists the night before in a contest called Pinta-layag. Deep in the night, the artists labored over these masterpieces to be displayed in the regatta the next day.

Flory was a small boat. I asked its “captain,” Edgar de la Cruz, who had painted his sail. “I don’t know,” he answered almost sourly. He looked disappointed. “Why?” he asked me. “Well, I think it’s the most beautiful sail that I’ve seen this morning.” Upon hearing this, a wide smile appeared on his burnt face. “Really? I thought it was ugly,” he said scratching the back of his head. “It’s beautiful; that is why I want to know who painted it,” I said. Edgar warmed up to me.

He told me that they came from Nueva Valencia in Guimaras, and every year, together with his brothers and cousins, they joined the regatta. A fisherman like his father before him, he told me he had already won twice before. His father, when Edgar was a small boy, used to join the regatta and won several times, too. His father is old now and Edgar and his brothers Rey and Quirico have continued this family tradition. They join the regatta to honor the legacy of their father. Flory’s crew were Edgar, Rey and their cousin Eduardo. Quirico had his own boat and crew. Edgar remembered how happy his father was in joining the regatta. Now a father himself, Edgar’s pride was almost palpable when he was telling me all this. I asked him how old he was. He told me 35, only my age, but he looked older, from the cruel sun and the salty spray of the sea. But then the sea also has the inherent gift of sculpting the bodies of fishermen.

The secret of winning, according to Edgar, is to use light materials in the making of your boat. He recommended the lawaan wood for the hull. Teamwork also is very important. Of course he acknowledges that the lucky nod of the wind goddess plays a major role in one’s success. Ah, just like the luck of fisher folks everyday. It depends upon the mood of the wind and the sea.

The sky was so blue that morning in Villa Beach. The Iloilo Strait was almost calm and the wind perfect for sailing. When the siren sounded the beginning of the race, the paraws were like big brushes painting the wide canvas that was the sea.

The 37th Paraw Regatta Festival had so many activities that started Feb. 15. But I was not interested. There were reggae band concerts, samba dancing contest and the search for Miss Paraw Regatta 2009. Even if I banged my head several times against a bamboo pole, I could not find their connection with the regatta.

During merienda time, in one of the seafood restaurants in Villa, while watching the progress of the race, Pietros noticed something in the press kit. “Sir, why is it that the prizes for Miss Paraw Regatta and Samba de Regatta are bigger than the Paraw Regatta itself?” Pietros is one of the very few bright students I had and I was happy that he was very discerning. The Paraw Regatta’s first prize winners would only get P14,400 for the Category A and P18,000 for Category B. They would received additional P8,000 and P7,000, respectively, if their sail was painted. The first prize winner of the dance contest would have P50,000, while the Miss Paraw Regatta winner would take home P30,000. The discrepancy was, indeed, disturbing.

I challenged Pietros, who contributes in the student section of an Iloilo newspaper, to write about it. We agreed that something was wrong with the organizer’s sense of priority.

During lunch time, the seafood restaurants along Villa Beach, especially those near Tatoy’s, were full. We walked on the beach going northward to Breakthrough Restaurant. We were dreaming of a special halo-halo on a young coconut fruit. But Breakthrough was also bursting with eating families and barkadas. So we took a jeepney and headed to the next barangay of Calumpang. A friend of mine, Sonia, who is an active civic leader of the Homeless Peoples Federation Philippines, runs a simple seafood restaurant there called Kayang-Kayang, meaning “to relax in abandon.” It is just a short ride from Villa. It was almost two in the afternoon and I found Sonia busy in the cash counter. She was surprised and happy to see me. I told her we were going to the second floor. She told me it was full, but I ignored her. There was no vacant table upstairs. We stood by the window for a while and watched the crowd in the neighboring restaurant or resort and on the beach having picnics. There were groups of men who were already drunk. The almost dilapidated huts were filled with families with their pots and pans of food. They looked happy and contented.

After a while, a teenage nephew of Sonia working as a waiter during weekends gave us a table and four chairs by the window. We ordered beer and bought our pulutan of boiled peanuts and crispy chicharon from an old woman vendor. While talking about the latest development in our love life, we looked at the paraws passing by. They were going home to Guimaras or northern Iloilo.

It was dark when we left Kayang-Kayang. I was tipsy after drinking three bottles of beer. On the jeepney ride back to my pad in Molo, I was smiling at the caress of the cooling wind on my face. I thought of Edgar, Eduardo and Rey. I thought of the smiles on their sun-burnt faces, and the boyish twinkle in their eyes a few minutes before the race. Did they win? I didn’t really care because for me they were already winners. They had joined the regatta to honor their fathers before them who for many years, two days in the month of February, painted the serene face of the Iloilo Strait in fellowship with their fellow fisherfolk.

I closed my eyes. And my inward eye saw a beach cove filled with paraws with sails bearing the dreams of suns, stars, flowers and vari-colored fishes. I could hear the intoxicated laughter of men and women loved, castigated and loved again by the sea. Pietros, Cara and Apple were also lost in their own thoughts. Perhaps they were also seeing their own private sea coves filled with beautiful sailboats?

I was grateful to God for the gift of eternal summer blooming in the deepest garden of my heart.