Jambiani Jambo

Jambiani is a small village on Zanzibar’s southeast coast. From here, you can look out upon a sea that stretches east all the way to India, although you'd have to dodge the Somali pirates to get there. The coral reef a couple miles offshore makes a nice breakwater and sort of protects Jambiani’s beach, making a giant tranquil buffer that is fishable even when outside waters are stormy. House walls are made of coral and cement and then whitewashed; roofs are of woven coconut fronds. In Jambiani the paths are dirt, goats are common, stars are bright, smiles are big, soccer is huge, the unending beach is pure white, and the ocean is, amazingly enough, the exact color of the margin of a Microsoft Word application. Check it out if you don’t believe me. How convenient, leave it to Microsoft to save me from floundering around in my shallow mental database for a novel way of saying “really, REALLY bright blue”...

I've made some lopsided alliances with locals in Dar Es Salaam and in Stonetown that turned out to be more interested in playing the role of Robin Hood than offering any services for the money I’d foolishly advanced them to help with petro or fishing line expenses. So it was with reluctantance and caution that I've come to team up with Issa, a.k.a. “Mosquito”, here in Jambiani.

Incidentally, I’ve had more than a few internal laughs about the trend in the “profitability curve” of my fishing “work” over the last year. From making good wages deckhanding on somebody else's boat in Alaska, I shifted towards working harder for less in my own skiff. I worked in Newfoundland for a half-share, traded my labor for food and lodging in Chile, worked as a welcome but unpaid volunteer in the Amazon, and was reduced to full-on begging to volunteer in Asia. The Azores were slightly out of this progression, as I was a welcome volunteer and in any return trips to Sao Jorge (in coming years, for tuna!) I might even earn a wage, but here in Africa it seems expected that I should pay for the experience to work alongside local fishermen, covering any boat expenses and ensuring a little secondary income for the fishermen. This is understandable I suppose, and is relative to the local economy. My interest hasn’t been in making money, but more in making it clear that I’m not interested in a charter or in sport fishing- that I’m trying to see exactly how fishing goes on a typical day in the particular area, to not impede in any way by letting outside money foul the bilges. Hats off to the fishermen-entrepreneurs of Zanzibar! Returning to paying work will be a strange feeling after this!

Back to Mosquito and Jambiani. For a small fee, Mosquito agreed to be my fishing liason, to keep tabs on the local fishing fleet and to get me aboard any trips I was interested in. I was then supposed to tell them some complicated fib about how I’d already paid the tourism board officer (a position that probably doesn’t exist) such-and-such an amount for so many hours and so had arranged to go out with Mosquito as my guide. I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the story and none of the other fishermen seemed to care a bit. Mosquito helped explain to them that I was a mzungo interested in fishing, and that was fine to them. Wind provided most of the moving power, I was another hand to push when the boat ran into shoal water, and I wasn’t taking any fish home for myself.

Mosquito is 28 years old, and strong and fit like every other person in Jambiani. He has especially dark skin and especially white teeth. Despite red alerts from his tendency to repeatedly verbalize what a nice guy he is (if I’ve learned anything in the past few months, it’s that there’s an inverse relationship to how many times a person says, "I'm a really good guy" aloud and how nice a guy he is in truth), I’m convinced he really is decent, an outlier to this pattern. He started fishing with his dad, and alone from the beach, at age 10, and has always lived in Jambiani. Now his dad is dead, and his mom takes care of his two young kids he’s had with a former wife. He has a brother, “Captain” Ali, 22, and a sister, age 10, in town also, and a little brother in Stonetown, age 20. Mosquito works as a fisherman, a carpenter, and whenever possible as an officially unofficial tour guide, hustling mzungo to earn food for his web of family and himself.

Mosquito owns the Gambagumu (something like “Swift”), a dhow-outrigger canoe combination craft typical of the kind on this side of the island. Within sight, there are around 70 dhow in the water around Jambiani, with hulls somewhere between 7 and 12 meters. Although these boats aren’t quite the heart-stopping beauties of Stonetown, what they lack in elegance they compensate with utility. And on this side, dhows are fishing boats! With a steady breeze from somewhere on the compass, usually an onshore breeze (this time of year from the southeast), wind lends the moving power at the right price.

The Gambagumu is a little under 10 meters long tip to tail. The boat is basically a deep, heavy dugout canoe, with an outrigger on either side made of planed wood. A squat mast juts vertically, looking ineffectively short in relation to the length of the vessel at hand. With dhows of this style, there is a single sail, and it is huge relative to the length of the boat. The lead edge of the sail, its longest side,is lashed to a long wooden pole (sailors probably have a fancy term for this type of sail, which I don’t know about and neither of us cares about). Roughly the center of this pole, often around its balance point, is pulled to the top of the mast. Thus, this pole, and with it the front edge of the sail, run from a fixed point in the bow sharply upward, past the top of the mast and into the air above. This is different than a “classic” (western-style) sailboat, because there is no boom, there are no spars, and the sail runs high beyond the top of the mast (excusing the squat mast). Aside from being a little slow to “come-about”, this design is brilliant. There are no pulleys, no cables, no levers, no winches, no widgets, bells, or whistles. The sails of the Gambagumu, like nearly all of the dhows in Jambiani, are made of modern burlap sacks (woven plastic grain bags) cut open and stitched together. Nothing but wood, line, empty grain bags, a few handfuls of metals spikes, and a few hand tools can make a perfect boat, to be anchored (a big hunk of coral serves the anchor) just off a perfect beach. Jambo!

Stay tuned for the Mosquito chronicles, when we take the Gambaguru in search of unsuspecting tropical fish with a variety of fishing modes, assuming Mosquito doesn't evaporate like some of my other Tanzanian fishing friends...