I got up about 6 and the tide was waaaaay out. The boats which had been floating in probably 8 feet of water, were now sitting on mud, and were about 40 from the water line. I was quite surprised.
Monday, August 7
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I got up about 6 and the tide was waaaaay out. The boats which had been floating in probably 8 feet of water, were now sitting on mud, and were about 40 from the water line. I was quite surprised. |
Breakfast was at 7, and about 8 we got set up to do a bit of “fish snatching”. Guy and Gregg came out into the courtyard with a large bundle. It was a fine mesh net about 60 to 80 feet long, with two poles attached, one at either end. All 21 of us worked together to take this net, held upright with one end of the pole in the water touching the ground and the other end out and above the water, out into the water walking in at a right angle to the water line. Once the “taller” people reached chest height in the water, the leading edge net people made a right turn and slogged along parallel to the shore at chest depth until they reached the rock pier edge. Then, with most of us being “beaters”, who slapped at the water to get the fish to swim toward the center of the net, the net handlers slowly walked back toward the shore. Once the net was back to the water’s edge, we had hundreds of little fish flip-flopping around in it. Our next job was to “fish” out one of each kind, put them into a bucket of sea water, and let all of the others go, unharmed. We must have gathered about 15 different types of small fish, from halibut, to needlefish, to shrimp, to grunion, to a baby barracuda. All from just barely off shore. I don’t even know for sure what all we caught.
 
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After one of each type of fish were culled and the rest released, our next job was to learn how to identify the different types of fish by looking at shape, mouth, jaw, eye, fin type, the number of spines on a fin, where the fins are located on the body, number of gills, gill coverings, etc. The list goes on and on. Jeff and I were a team and our first fish to identify was the halibut, a nice easy identification process. But our second fish, it required about 35 steps to identify, and if you make an error somewhere in the beginning in your identification, you have to go way back to that point and start over. It was very interesting and very frustrating and took a long time! |
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In the afternoon, we all went out in the boats to the lighthouse that was at the end of the point, to look at birds. Plenty of gulls and pelicans, but not much else. There was a bird waaaaay far down the beach at the inland part of the point, but if you didn’t have a good set of binoculars, you couldn’t really make it out. |
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I found three little murex shells and then Jeff found two. One of the boys had been looking for this type of shell since our first day in Bajia and had found one but it had a hermit crab in residence so he couldn’t keep the shell. I shared with him and another man who’d been looking for one, too. I wanted to go back out to the lighthouse point again at another time and look for more of those shells, but Jeff and I never found the time to get back out there. Also, when we DID have the time, usually someone else had the two kayaks already out on the water. |