Day 14: Snorkeling in the Indian Ocean

We just got back from an awesome snorkel outing. The scenery was beautiful, the snorkeling was some of the best I've ever had, and for lunch we had fantastic fruit and seafood including a full lobster for each of us. Wow. George and I and the two kids were joined by Thomas and Soizik, a nice young couple from France. We started snorkeling on a pristine isolated sand bar and from there we moved to two different open water snorkeling spots. At each spot we found fantastic coral and abundant sea life including a few creatures we had never seen before, such as a Giant Clam shell and, most incredibly, a large moray eel weaving its nasty looking head out of a rock hole about 15’ down. I must have gotten a little too close on one dive as about 2 1/2' feet of it's body came out of its hole toward my facemask (I don't know how long the creature was in total). It was all muscular and rippling and speckled with black spots over shimmering electric blue skin. It was an incredibly awesome experience and only in retrospect did I consider the fact that perhaps I should have been a bit scared. For our party of six passengers there were five staff on our boat: Hadji, the tour “operator” and his young driver/assistant who wore an elaborate cream-colored pillbox type fez with intricate gold stitching above an old Seal Beach Volleyball Club shirt and cutoff black pants. The rest of the crew was similarly attired in mismatched second-hand clothes with either chewed-up rubber footwear or none at all. Their jobs seemed to be pretty limited, a lot of sleep was caught up on during the hour-long ride out and back from the snorkeling area; one guy even curled up on some sacks under the cover of the small prow. As Dad said, "there's not a lot of work but they don't work very hard." Out in the middle of the water we spied two separate fishermen in fins and masks hunting with spear guns. Each was trailed by a little buoy that marked their passage. We agreed that this would be fun sport but it must be a difficult way to earn a living. Our island shore lunch was prepared by a different group of guys who seemed to provide food for all of the parties on the beach. They cooked over coals on the sand in a grass shack just behind the thatched roof shelters under which we ate. They did amazing work in such primitive conditions but, of course, garbage was strewn in an unused area near the cook shack and tree rats prowled among the refuse and around the mangrove trees near the beach. This is Africa.

The boats and scenery were worth the trip themselves. The whole scene reminded us a lot of the Krabi Peninsula in Thailand. Long wooden boats appeared to be suspended in crystal clear water alongside pristine beaches backed by bright green mangroves and banyan above sharp coral rock. Our charter boat, the Jambo Mambo, was about 25' long, relatively narrow and constructed of wood; the frame was constructed of hand-hewn tree limbs over which was laid a plank floor. The superstructure, including the mast, consisted of tree limbs which were lashed together with nylon line in lieu of nails. The anchor was made from large-diameter rebar which had been cut, bent, and welded together to form an effective set of flukes that held just fine on the sandy bottom. While anchored we were passed by a man paddling, from a standing position, a small pirogue-type boat that looked to have been carved from a single log. We saw more of these from shore. Most were supplemented with an additional gunwale along the top to give the craft some greater depth and some were supplemented with outriggers, again lashed on with line. The shallow water behind the coral reefs are vulnerable to changes in tide and when we landed we had to disembark and walk about half a mile, over shallow tidal flats and around other boats lying on their side with their keels almost indecently exposed, in order to reach shore.