Ouakam Dive Saturday: Diving With Hunters

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The sea temperature has dropped, and the blustery off-shore winds have begun, a pattern that will remain with us through the spring. I was without a wetsuit yesterday when I swam out to my usual dive areas beyond the Ouakam cove along the Mamelles. The water was chilly.

I did a little filming (see photos 2-4, including the interesting jelly) before Arona and his boat team stopped by in their large piroque and invited me to check out a couple of their favorite dive sites.

Like driving in an automobile, getting around by piroque compresses the landscape. We zipped along the Mamelles headlands, heading south, and stopped about 500 m off Restaurant Chez Fatou in the Almadies.

I must explain that the traditional Senegalese piroque is long and narrow, with a heavy, dense keel, necessary for tracking in a straight line and hauling it, without damage to the hull, up and down the beach, where the boats are stored. The piroque feels tippy, but I found it relatively easy to enter and exit with my snorkeling gear.

While my hosts were exceptionally kind, they were not indulging, as I might be with a novice. Arona quickly had his gear on and was over the side swimming. I watched how he exited the boat, thinking okay, got it, he eased his weight over the gunnel and slipped in, to avoid a sudden weight shift. I did the same.

The sea here was cool to cold, there was an abrupt current, the water was reasonably clear and relatively shallow, perhaps 4-6 m. There were pinnacles of rock here, rising several meters off the bottom, attracting larger fish stocks, no doubt the reason why this was a preferred dive site. There were thiof, grouper to us, larger and in greater numbers than I'd seen. Arona later commented that next time he'll bring along his spear gun.

We then headed north, past the Mamelles, past Ouakam cove, to a location again about 500 m from shore, just south of Club Olympique.

Getting into the piroque was less the challenge than I had anticipated. Arona and another who was in the water with us, lifted themselves over the gunnel with ease, like kids with zero percentage body fat. Me, okay, it took a bit more hoofing, but I was in, obviously lacking finesse, feeling more like a clod than a fit dancer, but who cares, they didn't.

The boat team was comprised of about eight people. While I didn't get everyone's name and relations, Arona explained that they worked together, but weren't necessarily family. Two acted as divers and scouts, locating the fish. The oldest member of the team operated the outboard, directed the deployment and hauling of nets, and even assisted with diving. Then there were the younger flunkies, the swabs, who hauled stuff -- the anchor line and nets. I observed that even the three young swabs had a pecking order, with the youngest receiving the brunt of the ordering. Hauling the anchor line was one of his chief duties. There were few smiles from him.

The seine net was deployed at this second stop, in a large circle. Being new to all of this, I mostly stayed out of the way, filmed the guys working in the water, and tried to sort out the logic of the operation, being that I didn't see much on the bottom worth harvesting.

A diver collected a armful of mussels from the tops of a pinnacle. The mussels are quite large here, up to about 8 inches in length, clearly bigger than anything I've seen from the North Sea or the California coast.

Note the yellow stems in photo 7. Arona said they were corals, that he sees them often, but were of little relevance to the work as a hunter.

At a third stop, things got exciting. While I was still in the piroque, a diver in the water excitedly indicated that there were fish, and that the net should be deployed immediately around him. The boat accelerated, angled sharply as the net was dropped. Over the next hour, a second net was set-up in tent-like fashion inside the larger seine net, entrapping the fish. The center net (which must have been drawn in at the bottom, though I did not observe this) was hauled first, and contained a load of fish. Very exciting, for me. A day's work for the others.

The catch consisted of primary two varieties of fish -- parrotfish (which are on the market here, not so in Florida), and another smaller fish. There was plenty of by-catch, such as puffers, which were all thrown back. The poor puffers are victims of their own defense strategy. Funny to see them fully inflated, struggling on the surface, flapping their little fins, like motorized balloons, gradually deflating, then disappearing.

I was overextended by these dives, exhausted, and chilled. I'm in good diving shape but, as I mused while in the water, I was tagging along with group of marine cowboys on a round-up. I was the Billy Crystal character from City Slickers riding along with veterans. I certainly share their love for the sea, that's clear, and am familiar with the vocabulary. Still, my personal interest has been more in things small, the ecology of a square meter. This is my advocation, not my profession. Still, it was and is a privilege to witness and document their work.

Once back on the beach, I helped haul the boat up the beach (what little help I could offer, more a gesture), and shared in grilled fish and mussels with a half dozen members of the boat team, joined by Frederique.

Frederique and Arona walked with me back to our flat, and we chatted with Randi for a time before they departed, all sweet and convivial. We have much more to talk about.

Language is an issue, as is culture. Arona's learning English, I'm struggling with Wolof and French, and Frederique's the intermediary, for now. There's much to learn from each other, more than will fit herein.

You'll find six video clips on you tube of this day at

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