DONGSHAN, Fujian: Teenager Shen Yaozhong sat with his father in their wooden fishing boat as they drifted out to sea one day in 1961. They were facing a week of bad luck, during which they had failed to track a school of fish, and their vessel was being blown off course by a forthcoming storm.

Suddenly, their boat jerked back and stopped. Shen's father knew exactly what had happened.

"Damn! Our fishing net got caught on reefs!" he yelled. He knew he needed the net to feed his family, and he also knew he could not afford another one.

Sensing his father's frustration, 17-year-old Shen Yaozhong gulped a big breath of air and dove into the sea.

Eighteen meters beneath the surface, Shen found their net was hopelessly twisted around a rock. The teenager struggled to unhitch it.

Several minutes later, Shen was almost out of breath. However, he did not return to the surface, because he knew the storm was approaching swiftly, and every second counted.

When an exhausted Shen finally flopped back on board the boat, his father noticed his son's nose was bleeding from holding his breath for too long.

Forty-six years later, Shen Yaozhong, father of seven daughters, recounts the tale while sipping a cup of Kong Fu tea in the hall of his two-storey villa. He says a lot has changed in the past half century.

Shen quit fishing in 1999 and now works from home crafting seines for his family and other villagers.

He has become the talk of the town in Gongqian village, on the Isle of Dongshan, where 40,000 of the 200,000 people living there fish. Shen earns his living selling well-crafted nets, and today, one of his famed seines sells for at least 2,000 yuan ($270).

By now, he has traded in at least four fishing boats, and the steel-shell boat he bought this year, equipped with built-in sonar and navigation systems, cost him 1.8 million yuan ($243,000).

This July, the Dongshan government launched a project to invest 100 million yuan ($13.5 million) to help its 18 fishing villages replace their wooden boats with steel vessels.

Through the policy, Shen, like most of his fellow villagers, took out a 400,000-yuan ($54,000) loan from the local credit union.

So far, 74 new steel vessels have been delivered to fishermen in Gongqian village.

In addition, fishermen received diesel oil subsidies according to the power of their fishing vessels' engines. Now, they can afford long-distance fishing trips and can track schools of fish to the high seas near Argentina and Africa.

To protect the lives and property of fishermen, the local government has also taken efforts such as developing a typhoon alarm system, organizing a coastguard for sea-rescue operations and opening safety training classes for fishermen during summer, when fishing is banned.

"Our fishermen have realized that only a sustainable development could benefit the next generations," head of Gongqian village Shen Longping said. "No one goes fishing from June 1 to August 1, and they strictly follow the safety regulations."

This year, the Dongshan government extended liability insurance to cover the whole island.

"Under any circumstance, nothing is important than human life," Shen Yaozhong said.