Paraw Regatta: An Uncomfortable Evolution

Only one truth is besetting the 53rd Iloilo Paraw Regatta Festival: nostalgia alone does not pay the bills.

Robert Somosa, who chairs the sailing events this year, said the quiet part out loud recently. Nobody really fishes in a paraw anymore. Today’s coastal communities have transitioned to motorized pumpboats because they are practical or they have abandoned that way of life.

Building a traditional double-outrigger sailboat from scratch now costs anywhere from PHP 60,000 to PHP 100,000. Sinking that kind of money into a vessel used exactly once a year for a single race is financial suicide for a local fisherman. There’s zero return on investment.

So we should not feign surprise that organizers expect only 30 to 35 seaworthy boats to show up. That number is not a comfortable baseline but an urgent economic wake-up call.

Without the livelihood aspect to sustain it, the festival is visibly morphing. We are watching the rapid gentrification of a centuries-old maritime tradition. What started in 1973 as Asia’s oldest traditional craft race – a grueling 30-kilometer open-strait endurance test – has been aggressively slashed. This year, the main event is a mere four-kilometer sprint along the shoreline.

Organizers cite the valid need to keep the Iloilo-Guimaras commercial transport routes open. Fair enough. But pair that shortened route with the heavy new emphasis on the Kusina Regatta and celebrating the city’s UNESCO Gastronomy status, and the picture becomes clear. The festival is trading maritime grit for a land-friendly culinary spectacle. We’re putting the seafood on a pedestal while the sailors themselves recede into the background.

Then there’s the bizarre paradox of how the remaining race is actually being policed. Organizers announced they are strictly enforcing international sailing rules this year. Clip a race marker? Automatic disqualification. Imposing rigid global yachting bureaucracy on an indigenous outrigger race feels entirely tone-deaf. We are taking veteran fisherfolk who navigate by instinct and muscle memory and forcing them to heel to sterile international rulebooks. It prioritizes the sanitized spectacle of an organized race over the raw reality of handling a dual-outrigger craft.

But maybe that’s the point. If the paraw is dead as a working fishing boat, its only survival path is as a curated competitive sport.

This is why the festival’s pivot to the youth is actually its most realistic saving grace. By actively recruiting high school teams – like the students from the John B. Lacson Foundation Maritime University – and launching formal training workshops, organizers are admitting a hard truth. Sailing a paraw is no longer an inherited survival skill passed from father to son in the barangay. It’s now a highly technical heritage sport that needs to be taught in a classroom.

There’s a model worth studying. Indonesia’s pinisi boatbuilding tradition in South Sulawesi was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2017. In the villages of Tana Beru, Bira, and Batu Licin, about 70 percent of residents still earn a living through boatbuilding and navigation. Shipwrights now produce vessels for tourism alongside cargo ships. Heritage became livelihood, not ceremony. The Philippines, an archipelago of over 7,600 islands, has no comparable framework for its own maritime traditions.

None of this means the festival should stop evolving. The gastronomy events expand the audience. But when the culinary programming visibly outpaces the sailing in scale and attention, the regatta risks becoming a food festival with boats in the background. A better path: ring-fence the race as the protected heritage core, with a boat-building subsidy and institutional support that matches what the cook-off receives.

It’s a massive identity shift. Getting a generation raised on smartphones to master wind-powered maritime navigation won’t be easy. But it’s the only viable way forward. We can’t preserve the regatta by pretending it’s still 1973. We have to stop romanticizing the poverty of traditional fishing and start treating the paraw like the specialized athletic pursuit it has become.

Otherwise, in a few years, the only place we’ll see a paraw is painted on the side of a food stall.