"We're tying down the house that cost us an eye from the face (to build)," said fisherman José Manuel Callejas, 46, standing on the stairs to his wooden house on stilts.

"I've been here thirty years and I know how these things play out," said fisher Lázaro Osorio, 61, citing a familiar local saying: "It's better to say this is the place he ran from than to say this is the place where he ended up."