Nick Gentle, Banda Aceh – Darmin's first catch since the tsunami is a good one.

In a little less than 12 hours, the three-man crew of his eight-metre fishing boat has hauled in more than a tonne of tuna, mahi-mahi and something the locals call cakalang – all good-eating fish worth up to 60,000 rupiah ($50) apiece when they get to the local fish market.

So why isn't he smiling? "Yes it's a good catch," he says as he dumps the fish into the back of a small truck. "But this is the first time one of my boats has gone out in 10 weeks, and I used to have 15 of them. Now I have three."

Also preying on his mind is the fact that all the fish will have to be sold in Banda Aceh. The tsunami destroyed the cold storage facility and ice plant the fleet relied on to ship their catch overseas.

And, as another fishing boat owner, Baktiar Talib, explains, selling fish to the people of Banda Aceh has been a difficult proposition since the tsunami swept a great number of their neighbours away. "No-one is eating fish.

It's like they have developed an allergy to it. Before the tsunami, every household in the city ate about a kilo of fish a day. Now they don't want it. It's good for the fish, but terrible for me."

Mr Baktiar used to run two 20-metre boats, each employing a crew of 20. One boat was destroyed in the tsunami, and since then he has been leasing the other to a government contractor, shipping relief supplies to devastated towns down the coast.

"The road down the coast is still broken, so the government has to use boats to get the supplies in. It's not more money than fishing, but it's not charity. It isn't regular – if there is a request we go."

He estimates that 100 of the 250 or so 20-metre vessels that used to work out of Banda Aceh were destroyed in the tsunami, putting at least 2,000 fishermen out of work. Carrying relief supplies down the coast requires a crew of only five, so a further 15 people are put out of work every time one of the remaining boats is put to such use.

The Asian Development Bank estimates that the fishing industries of Aceh and northern Sumatra will suffer losses of more than 5.7 trillion rupiah as a result of the tsunami. It anticipated annual output would drop 60 per cent due to the loss of so much of the fleet and 15 to 20 per cent of the 100,000 people employed in the industry.

Someone trying to redress those figures, albeit in a small way, is fisherman Agus. While pleased that his boat received widespread media attention after it ended up on the road outside Banda Aceh's Hotel Medan, he would have preferred it to be floating.

"We've been working on it for about a month now," says Mr Agus. "We had to wait to get it back because there were so many boats spread around [town]."

His boat, the Ikan Terbang – or Flying Fish – was eventually returned to the waterfront by a team of Australian army engineers, who were given the task of removing all the miscellaneous watercraft from Banda Aceh's streets. All the waiting around left the Flying Fish's crew with very little to do, and with the Indonesian government predicting that up to 30 per cent of the Acehnese labour force would become unemployed in the disaster's aftermath, they were thankful to be able to get on with the task of making her seaworthy again.

"We're just happy to be able to work on her at this time," says crew member Mohammad Nur, 56, who earns about 30,000 rupiah a day.

Nearby, in what was once the village of Lampulo, Sulaiman, 31, watches as 24-year-old boat repairer Mahdi planes a new beam for another grounded fishing boat. "I was a fisherman before the tsunami," he says, "but now I just work on cleaning the city up.

"There is nothing else for me to do. The boat I worked on was destroyed, my house is gone and my wife, my son and my brothers and sisters were all killed. Me and my neighbours, we are all working together to clean up the village. Once that is done, then we will rebuild and start again."