Living Rainbows

The outer coast of Zanzibar, as mentioned before, is buffered by a coral reef running more or less parallel to the shore, a couple miles out. This reef knocks out any swell coming in from India, so inside it’s smooth sailing. The Gambaguru sits anchored in two or three feet of water when not out fishing. In fact, at low tide, much of this inside corridor isn’t much deeper than a meter or two anywhere. The water is absolutely clear, deceptively clear, making the jet-black sea urchins two meters down look like they’re within an easy arms reach. Most of the inside seafloor is bare white sand, mostly void of bigger forms of life, but where odd-shaped patches of coral and seaweed lay on top of the blank slate, life is suddenly abundant and flamboyant.

It was towards the darker patches just inside of the reef that Mosquito, his younger brother “Captain” Stephen, and I headed today. Traveling to the fishing grounds, albeit a short journey, was especially quiet and pleasant in the Jambiani-style dhow/outrigger. We turned into the wind over a dark patch that Mosquito selected, out went the anchor, down came the sail, and we were ready to fish. The secret recipe for success today: careful presentation of a #14 Royal Wulff pattern, two pound tippet, laid out by a weight-forward QRST5 sinking line using a graphite 5/6 weight rod. Just kidding. A couple plain old hooks tied onto hefty monofilament and baited with small chunks of octopus, with a small piece of lead clamped on a foot above, worked just fine. With a flick of his wrist, Mosquito tossed his line 10 meters away from the boat and let the bait sink to the bottom. Nibbling commenced. He set the hook, and in most cases a bright little reef fish came up on one of his two hooks. Sometimes he caught a pair with one haul. Many times the octopus had crawled away from its station, and Mosquito needed to rebait. Sometimes Davy Jones decided to keep the hooks. So it goes. You’d think Davy Jones would be sick of collecting fishing gear by now.

Here the three of us sat, slowly collecting a kaleidoscope of fish in the bottom of the boat. Mosquito tells me that some days catches can be as high as 2,000 fish, with a good crowd of good fishermen aboard, and when the bite is on. Today we caught about 40. Sometimes barracuda, tuna, and turtles, even the occasional shark, wander into the tranquil swimming pool on the land side of the barrier reef, but this day we only encountered fish like chang choray, mcheche, gowgow, cunday, chengua. Big scales, bright colors, and mouths equipped with predatory fangs or coral-crushing chompers.

We eventually called it quits, raised the patchwork quilt of a sail- a faded banner of advertisement for Zanzibar grain, Arabic meal, Camel-brand flour- and slid back toward the palm trees, which welcomed us with ecstatic waving. The darker patches on the bottom faded into white sand, and then closer to shore more dark patches appeared but instead these had straight edges and the patches formed definite rectangles. I hadn’t noticed the geometry on the way out. Mosquito tells me that here they cultivate a certain seaweed species (a marine look-alike to Old Man’s Beard) to dry and sell to the Japanese. “They eating like a-spinach,” he told me, and I could tell he was more of a fish-and-rice kind of guy. This side of Zanzibar must be damn close to paradise: the sun continues to smile, the trees are friendly, and there are thousands of rainbows swimming just offshore.