October 4

October burns here as hot and humid on the island of Sal as any of the summer months. It makes it even harder to believe that I have already reached my final few weeks here in Cabo Verde. As with any place I am fortunate enough to visit, I am trying to fit a last few extraordinary experiences in before I leave Cape Verde. It is arguable that one of the excursions one should undertake while in such an island nation is to jump into one of the traditional, painted wooden boats that bob in the beautifully clear Santa Maria bay – and go fishin’.

So I did just that, today, as it was my one day off in the week. I started the morning with my customary breakfast, banana pancakes with maple bacon and a cup of coffee, at my favourite place on the island – Papaia. I woke up particularly early in anticipation of the fishing trip, so I got to watch the last of the sunrise as I sat on the outdoor deck, wallowing in the last breath of cool air that the day would afford. It was a fantastically beautiful day, one with the rare clarity of sky that affords a view of the island of Boa Vista, twenty-two miles to the West. Beneath purple and white cotton balls of clouds, the jagged mountainous silhouette was visible across the sparkling, aquamarine waters of the sea. I watched purple martins swoop through the air above the deck, catching grasshoppers and riding the cool morning updrafts. A small school of tiny, vibrantly-striped reef fish floated lazily around in the water below the deck, only to scatter suddenly when a big, long, bizarre fish with blue and green spots and a long, trumpet-like nose came poking his way over the rocks and sand. A good omen for a day of fishing ahead. I paid Sarah at the counter and headed across the white sand beach to the pier, where I met with Nathan – an avid fisherman, looking to make up for not having caught anything while aboard the Kafeoli a couple of weeks before. We wandered out onto the pier – bustling as ever with fishmongers, ropes, nets, sassy women shaking their filet knives as they haggled over prices per kilo, and the glistening of scales. There we met Fernando, a Sal native who has dabbled in a number of different trades over his forty years, always looking to be outdoors on the next adventure, usually with wide-eyed tourists in tow. He had been accurately referred to me by a friend that lives on the island, and he was full of incredible stories about life around the island. We clamoured down a slippery wet ladder and into his peeling wooden boat. The bright orange rope keeping the bobbing craft secured to the pier was tossed down to us, and with a little persuasion the motor was started up and we wove in between the many other fishing boats – busily coming and going in the morning light – out into the clear bay.

Fernando told us of a time when he took a couple of German tourists fishing, and they had come across some local fisherman hauling turtles illegally out of the water. The Germans had begged Fernando to protest. Cautious of defying what he understood to be cultural norms (albeit illegal ones) Fernando offered up the money he had set aside for their lunch – fifty euros – in exchange for the turtle. The fishermen huffily agreed, and traded the turtle for the money, upon which Fernando loaded the turtle up into his car, drove down to the police station in the capital, Espargos, and asked a policeman who was also a friend to help him get his money back, the turtle in the back of his car as evidence and the Germans as witnesses. The policeman went down with Fernando and forced the angry fishermen to pay Fernando back. Nervous that he had made enemies in his own home, Fernando went ahead and put the turtle back into the sea. Later that afternoon while scuba diving with another group of tourists, the same turtle swam right up to Fernando, looked him square in the face, and then disappeared off into the eternal blue.

Fernando has a turtle tattooed to his right shoulder to put into other expression the thanks the turtle gave him that day.

We continued out into the bay at a leisurely pace across the calm surface of the sunny sea, heading parallel to the buildings of Santa Maria. It was a perfect day for fishing. Fernando pulled out two fishing rods and put them together in the same fashion as tent poles before tying two hooks and a homemade lead weight on to the line of each. He pulled small, silver bait fish out of a frozen ball from a plastic bag, and cutting off the tails, hooked two bits of bait onto the hooks. We dropped them into the water, letting the weight hit the bottom of the shallow bay and then waiting for the hit. The first spot we tried yielded nothing in the first ten minutes, and a fidgety Fernando quickly had us move on.

We soon found out why he had been so quick to judge the first spot unsuitable. Almost as soon as we three dropped lines in at a second chosen location, the fish were jumping at them. Fernando pulled in the first fish of the day – a small garopa, apparently the tastiest catch in the waters around, and one of the most beautiful fish I have ever seen. They are a crimson red, dappled with light blue spots and wide, fan-like fins that are reminiscent of beta fish. Nate had the next fish, a small reef fish with wide black bands and hints of yellow in between. I caught the third in rapid succession, a tiny bika fish, too small to keep but a happy start to a successful day. In the end, I would be the one to catch not only the largest fish of the day, but the most. Who said women are bad luck on ships.

We would fish in a spot until the schools passed through and stopped biting, than we would putter over to another, looking always for spots where the lighter blue water became darker, signifying rocks, reefs, and holes where the fish preferred to congregate. We caught mostly bika, a small orangish fish with sharp spines down its back that is apparently quite tasty when cooked in oil with rice and piri piri. Sometimes we would get two at once, one on each hook on the reel. The largest fish of the day was another black striped one, like the first fish Nate had caught, except that I got to be the lucky one to reel it in. There were a few holes where we had only to toss the line to the bottom and start reeling, and we would immediately hook a fish. Images come to mind of Burt and Ernie sitting in a similar wooden boat while Ernie calles in a sing-song voice “Here, fishy fishy” and giggles his particular laugh as fish came jumping freely into the boat. We soon had a basket half-full of fish resting between my legs. We jumped into the gloriously-colored water a couple of times to cool off. I had a bika slip out of my hands at one point while I was pulling it off the hook, and with a hilariously satisfying thwack it smacked into Nathan. In the last spot we stopped – a favourite of Fernando and one he had obviously been keeping for last to end on a good note – I ended up catching two of the coveted garopa myself, and even caught one on one hook while snaring a bika on the second hook.

By the time we pulled back to the pier around noon, we had a couple dozen fish and an utterly satisfying morning. We gave a man a handful of fish and 1 euro to scale and clean our catch for us. It was pretty impressive to watch how fast the men on the pier can clean a bucket full of fish. Nearby, massive yellowfin tuna, marlin, and a black-tipped reef shark were also being cut up and cleaned. I’m not sure how I feel about the fishing of these species, as they are short in numbers – especially the shark – but as with the turtles, it is difficult to expect an island nation that has always lived off the bounty of the sea to understand that they must change their traditional, small-scale way of life because a bunch of commercial entities with no consideration in oceans far away have devastated the marine animal populations to such an extent that the effects are penetrating the waters even of the much-isolated Cabo Verde. It was difficult to watch, and impossible to judge.

Once the man had finished with our small pile of fish, Fernando took home those he had caught, and Nate and I happily put our share in a bag. We grabbed a celebratory ice cream on the way home. I’m quite looking forward to asking Fredy – the Cape Verdean volunteer in Turtle House – for the best recipes for cooking each type of fish.

Even as I sit here writing, I am still rocking and swaying in time to the waves.

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