Got up in de mornin
Wantin some breakfast
Ended up drinking lager all day on a small motor boat that our gap-toothed captain had to hotwire to ellicit movement. After a few casts on our sports fishing mission, we managed to snag a large fish. Despite my childlike wonder at this new sport, I did not fail to be thoroughly surprised when hauling a 12 kilogram captain fish from the Atlantic. I think my exact words were , “F*ck me!”, and even the captain danced around with glee at the prospect of enough food for his family of six, and that of his brother.
After yesterday’s outing in which our boat netted 120 juvenile fish, I had thought I had got over the revulsion factor. Don’t get me wrong, I love fishing. The sitting, the drifting, the maggots. But yesterday we were pulling up baby fish faster than our faux Jamaican host could shout, “One foe de laydeez!”, I thought it pretty grim for local fish stocks. Sandwiches were deployed against tourist bellies at around midday. During our lunchbreak, the fish under the water had it easy. Those drowning in the bucket around which we sat eating sardine sandwiches didn’t have it so easy.
However, today, when we landed our monster 12 kg fish, there was no quarter either. “Can we kill it?”,
“No, only de barracuda, cos dey bite people.”
“Yes, but can’t we put this one out of it’s misery?”
“Only de barracuda”
“Oh.”
The captain decided that out of sight was out of mind, even if we could hear the monster fish flapping around as it drowned below deck. But it wasn’t until I pulled up an angel fish, and incorrectly identified it as a butterfly fish, that my mind spun back to my marine conservation days. Luckily, any feeling of environmental destruction soon came to an end in the next seven bottles of Jul Brew. This is Gambia’s answer to beer. It even wins ‘best lager to be brewed and distributed in a state monopoly’ prizes here in Gambia, but strangely enough, not every year.
You can take the fish out of the sea, but you can’t take the sea away from Gambia.