The equipment is minimal: a tube and a pair of plastic goggles, there is, luckily, no skill to it at all, yet the pleasure I discovered snorkelling the warm reefs of Mozambique and Northern Zululand, has me hooked. I am a snorkaholic looking for her next fix!
We had successes at Nacala Bay, Santa Carolina and Margaruque on the Bazaruto Archipelago and then a late flash at Kosi Bay mouth after the weather changed and scotched our chances in potentially great spots such as Zavora and Tofo. It seems as if chancing upon the perfect day is as ephemeral as the visions that await you as you slide into the warm water and goggle upon a world that is simply – and the cliche is unavoidable – breathtaking.
The diversity of fish I saw got me thinking… just how could there be so many varieties and combinations and weird, vivid colours, shapes, patterns, many completely over the top? I know that the scientists would have you believe that each twist is an evolutionary adaptation, a breeding strategy or an attempt by a species to find their niche in the ecosystem. I couldn’t help but feel that something else is at play here, some evolutionary whorl that has slipped away from its original raison d’etre. We do know this happens. We humans and the development of our brain is an obvious example – what possible evolutionary purpose does Shakespeare fulfil? The reef fish, I decided, had got caught up in an extra-evolutionary passion. Their complex language of colour, shape and pattern had spun clear out of the realm of what was necessary and entered the world of superfluity, imagination, invention. I have no scientific proof of this, of course, yet to me, these little fishies were Shakespeares of the reef!
The photographs below show the trip out on a dhow to the island of Margaruque from Vilancoulos on a silky calm day where the sea seemed like a glass-green goddess we were dipping into. The dhow moored on a long rocky shelf along which you floated, allowing the current to take you from the one end to the other, creating underwater scenes rather like reverse television: you are moving, the picture is more or less stationary. Because we had no underwater camera the photographs of the fish we took from the surface do not reflect a fraction of their true colour. But what a juxtaposition! A boat whose crew were cooking the most mouth watering lunch on an onboard brazier ( prawns, barracuda streaks, salad, rice and fruit) floating on a transparent turquoise sea in which a host of fish mill awaiting discarded scraps from the cooks. When one of the sailor-cooks, scraping off bits of fish skin from his chopping board into the sea, said, “They are eating family,” I found myself utterly enchanted by the place, the time and the company.
