Fund rasising for the capture project was no longer realistic (read P.C.) and trips to the Comoros from NYC cost thousands of dollars a pop. I was not in a position to make regular visits and living there meant giving up whatever life one had left at home for the slight chance of being present for a catch intervention. It was a difficult call. I chose to remain in NYC, counting on our remote resubmergence program with our cages on both Grand Comoro and Anjouan, the two islands where coelacanths had historically been caught.. The coelacanth, like the maelstrom of legend, had sucked me into it's vortex. I was spinning round and round. I had no past, no future, just a dull present in which coelacanth events dripped by with the painful monotony of a Chinese water torture. Suddenly, during the summer of '88 two events broke that tedium. First, I met a woman of similar interests with whom I "melded" rather rapidly. Diana, a rare breed herself with a Polish Father and a Mexican mother, had a six year old son, so I very soon found myself with an instant family. Without lifting a finger we had signed a "mutual stability pact" which continues to the time of writing. I had a life aside from the fish. Second, I had a chance to break my mind lock on the coelacanth, at least temporarily. Based on my earlier filmmaking, I was offered the job of making a video about a group of Japanese travelling in the Australian outback. I jumped at the opportunity. I could escape to different countries and face new challenges. Plus it was a job that could be done quickly. I would be out of touch with our colacanth instant response network for about ten days while we were in the remote part of the bush. But I would have to take that chance. Lou Garibaldi could intervene if he wished.

          The trip took me to Japan as well as Australia. I was to film Japanese fitness instructors at work in their training institute, then follow them to Australia where they would endure an outback "survival" course. In Tokyo, on one of the main streets, not far from the enormous earthquake proof Mitsubishi headquarters, was a sculpture of an odd creature: a coelacanth's body with a mans head. A small plaque on its base labeled the work a tribute to "evolution." The coelacanth it seemed, had bitten deeply, cult-like, into the Japanese psyche.

          The filming done in Tokyo, I joined the mixed group of Japanese men and women trainers and their Japanese and American company presidents for the Australian adventure trip. We nibbled sushi on the flight to Sydney. There, on an organizational overnight, an ancient SONY BetaCam was thrust into my hands, probably one of the first ever built. I was used to working with tiny video 8 camcorders, so I had to do some quick learning not to disappoint my Japanese and American bosses. Somehow it was a relief to be following orders rather than giving them.

           We flew to fabled Alice Springs, and from there by charter planes to an airstrip near a ranch or "station" in the heart of the McDonald Ranges of the North West Territory. After landing, the group of ten mounted camels to ride to their first bivouac. Alarmed by the noise of the departing planes, the camels bucked wildly tossing off Japanese and Americans, like rags thrown helter-skelter from an open dryer. Welcome to the outback.

          We left the station in a convoy of trucks, bound for the rusty, dusty, "back o' beyond", where "our" stockboys wrestled wild camels to the ground and aborigines taught my subjects to root for honey ants whose bloated abdomens burst on the tongue like candies filled with Tokay liqueur. From "bil a bong" to sacred rock mounds our crawl across the land was jinxed by punctures and make-shift repairs. Around the camp fire at night we listened to an aborigine elder tell stories of the dreamtime when the great Caterpillar Spirit rose from the ground, and other spirits came down from the sky, to bring life to these craggy moon rock hills and red Martian plains. These tales were inhabited by marsupials, snakes, lizards, and exotic insects all with supernatural powers. Perhaps it was the dreamtime stories that later one night prompted my own very odd coelacanth dream.

           I was back in the Comoros, on Grand Comoro island. It must have been night as I was carrying my flashlight. Yet everything was perfectly visible. I was walking along the coast road with some other expeditionaires when suddenly we saw a coelacanth in the brush by the shoulder of the road. It was alive and what's more it was walking. Walking on land! It wasn't quick, just shuffling along through the bushes. I shone my light on the fish. It gleamed, the scales still shiny from the water. "No one's going to believe this," I announced fairly calmly to the others. "We must get it on video." We shot some tape, when, just then, the fish turned towards me and looked as though it were about to speak. It made a sound low and guttural and so very primitive and different from English or Comoran that I couldn't make out if it was an animal sound or a spoken word. Then I woke up, performing the larval wiggle necessary to roll over in a sleeping bag. My face was caked in red road dust like a grotesquely over made up actor. Lines were exaggerated into folds that made me look in my late hundreds: a scraggly wise man of the outback, lying between satchels of expensive camera gear nestled in jumbo Zip Lock Baggies and Sports Paks to protect from dust and dew. Now what the hell was that coelacanth "spirit" trying to say?

          The game was again afoot. Misinterpreting the time references in the telex, which I'd jotted down from a telephone machine message, I believed Jean Louis had lowered the fish back down within three hours after capture, rather than the actual fifteen. This would have been a timely and near perfect resubmersion, duplicating that performed with the Iconi "missing cage" fish of the previous January. Further, the specimen would now be in a secure arrangement off the Coelacanth Hotel with the cage tethered to a submerged barrel as J.L.G. had outlined to me on my last visit a year earlier. I sped 650 miles down to New York in a 22 year old roadster to make arrangements. Lou Garibaldi called with an interesting statement. He acknowledged the "opportunism" of the aquarium in the project, and said that the Explorers Club would have final say over this fish. I was appreciative, though I could also see this cleared the NYZS from responsibility in the matter. Lou and William Conway, the zoo's director, also suggested we could reduce criticism my contacting Hans Fricke and offering to collaborate on the fate of the fish. But my impression was that Dr. Fricke would cause all sorts of problems, perhaps even cabling the Comoran government to hold the fish.

          I telexed my congratulations to Jean Louis Gerod, Mombassa, and Bill Carlson for a job well done, at the same time stressing the need for good security measures and asking for frequent updates on the fish's condition. Then I contacted our scientific fish network, namely, Jack Musick and William Bemis. We waited for word from the Comoros. If the fish was healthy after five days, we would consider it successfully stabilized and a group would fly over to deal with the possible scenarios of either studying the fish there or bringing it back.

          A telex arrived from Bill Carlson Oct 13th. He'd gotten my response to his first and reported that there would be no further word on the fish until an inspection dive was made on Saturday the 15th at 06:00 local. Divers were unavailable before then. The cage was under twenty four hour guard. In New York we mobilized for the Comoros, securing seats on the next Paris-Moroni connection. It seemed as if the moment of triumph had finally arrived. Then I reread the original telex of which by now I had a paper copy. My God! the fish had been on the surface for fifteen hours before being resubmerged! That dose of warm water and low oxygen levels had to be lethal. The bad news came on the 15th. J.L. Gerod was of the opinion that the fish had died quite recently when he inspected it at 7:00 am Saturday. In New York, we stood down from our alert, disappointed again. I began to plan instead for a January '89 trip in which Jack Musick would participate with his longlines and sonar tags.

          In the Comoros, our "surrogates" had the messy task of recovering the dead fish and the cage. Details of the entire operation reached me in a letter from Bill Carlson two weeks later. While the fish had been caught off Iconi about midnight on a Sunday- in almost the same place as the lost cage, neither Mombassa nor Jean Louis got wind of it until about noon Monday. Another three hours passed before they got to the fisherman who claimed he had kept the fish in deep water- though no one would venture what "deep" meant. The fish was placed in the cage, then slowly towed to the Coelacanth Hotel as planned. Not until 8:00 pm was the fish lowered to what turned out to be only 75 meters (246 ft). Apparently, there had been some apprehension about the length of the rope. There the fish remained without harassment for the next few days. Although Jean Louis had not gone ahead with the submerged buoy idea he'd mentioned back in January, the marker barrel was kept under surveillance by a dive assistant. Apparently there was at least one attempt to make off with the buoy even though it was sitting in plain sight of anyone in Moroni. Mombassa was sick in bed and Jean Louis was diving over in Anjouan most of the week. At 6:00 on Saturday morning, Bill Carlson met with Jean Louis who with a diving friend swam down to investigate the fish. It was dead, but perhaps not for long, as Jean Louis commented it seemed in good condition. The sea was rough, so the three men in the boat decided not to pull the cage up then, but to have Bill return in the afternoon. At 4:30 p.m., Bill Carlson with three others returned to the spot in the embassy Zodiac. The cage and fish were so heavy that it took the four of them almost an hour to haul it to the surface. Their hands were raw from pulling on the polypropylene rope. As the cage neared the surface, the Zodiac began drifting south with the outgoing tide. By the time the cage came into view beneath the waves the boat was dangerously near the rocks south of the hotel. Great globs of oil accompanied by a disagreeable stench were rising to the surface from the decomposing fish. Meanwhile the boat, whenever it tried to head out got caught in the tide and was pushed back towards the rocks.

         Jean Louis and a diver were able to swim out to help. All decided it was best to put the fish in the boat and leave the cage on the bottom for the time being. The fish was hauled aboard and proved to be large, about 1.2 meters (3.9 ft). The water was too rough to land the boat at the hotel, so Bill headed for the beach at Itsandra. There had been between seventy or eighty disappointed people waiting at the Coelacanth hotel to see the fish. Somehow they all found rides up the coast to Itsandra and were waiting on the beach with several hundred local residents as Bill arrived in the Zodiac. The fish, smelling and slippery, was loaded onto a truck in the dark. The next task was to find a freezer for it. The creature was too far gone for any of the hotels to put up with, and ultimately wound up in the Embassy residence freezer where "Ruggi" had been stowed two years before. Fortunately, Charge d'affairs, Karl Danga, was away, allowing time to eventually move the remains to a government freezer before he'd be served his next meal at home. Unlike Jean Louis, Bill estimated that the fish had been dead for a number of days before they hauled it up.

          I could only squirm in despair at the gory details. In spite of our radio announcements and Mombassa's briefing, communications were still too slow. This fish was no doubt doomed from the start. Furthermore, the intercept of the fish created a bad impression for us. To some observers it seemed that the fish, an accidental by-catch which would have died anyway, had been caught because of our rewards and then mishandled.

         As the fall of '88 ticked away, I completed editing the Australian documentary. It had felt good to begin and complete a job in a set time frame. How unlike the coelacanth experience which was never ending! I needed something to split my mind from this fish who so repeatedly vanquished my spirits. I couldn't yet face getting back to the robots. A small inheritance came my way when the third wife of my "Museum of Natural History" grandfather died. This freed me from the financial concern of earning a profit with the robot company. I turned to philosophy, which I had studied both in college and graduate school. I enrolled in a course on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Every Tuesday night I would get my mind off the fish, ploughing through Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus", struggling with the logical properties of propositions: figuring out what could be truly said, and what could only be shown.

          The plan for a January visit to the Comoros fizzled out. Jack Musick couldn't get his time and his gear organized for then, and he was still concerned about obtaining the appropriate vessel from which to launch his longlines. I was disappointed. I could see our window of operations closing in the Comoros. Charly and Elka had already been reassigned to Madagascar. Bill Carlson and his family were due to leave in June, Karl Danga,the following fall. If we didn't get over this monsoon season most of our infra structure would soon be gone. The political climate for removing a fish from the Comoros was also waning with the lobbying of the C.C.C. But still, it was no go. Perhaps we would yet get a proper activation of our cage system? And indeed we did.

          This time the close call happened with the cage on Anjouan. This resubmergence cage had been standing idly by for almost a year. About 3:00 A.M., on the morning of Friday, February 17th, 1989, two fishermen in a canoe off the village of Bandani, twelve kilometers west of Mutsamudu, much to their amazement hauled up a coelacanth. By 5:00, A.M. Moussa Abdou, Mombassa's contact on the island had been notified. Moussa verified it was indeed a coelacanth then went to the local CARE center at 7:00 AM to borrow a truck to bring the cage to Bandani. By 9:00 AM, the cage had been lowered to seven or eight meters and the fish installed. The cage was then moved and lowered in two stages to about 100 meters depth. By 10:30 AM it was on the bottom. In this case, the surface elapsed time was about seven hours compared with fifteen for the previous attempt.

     

     

           All was going well. After first raising the cage to 60 meters, two Comoran divers associated with the Japanese fishing school on Anjouan, dove on the fish twice a day. One time they offered the fish papayas to eat. It refused. On another dive, they brought down a mixture of chicken bones and dried fish parts which, reportedly, the coelacanth enthusiastically consumed- undoubtedly the first of its kind in four hundred million years to eat poultry. Saturday passed, then Sunday, with the fish still apparently healthy by Monday, its fourth day in captivity. Unfortunately, while all this was going on, because of Anjouan's isolation from Grand Comoro, no alert came through to me in New York. Then disaster struck. On Tuesday, the divers found the fish dead, with bites out of the stomach and other areas. They interpreted that the coelacanth had died as the victim of an eel attack. The cage did not have protective netting around it. For all his efforts, Moussa was nearly imprisoned by the stepson of the President, as he did not have a copy of our document of authorization from the Ministry of Production.

          This was an intriguing episode. Had the fish been stabilized? Had it recovered from the trauma of capture? Or was it slowly dying the whole time and only after it was dead, scavenged by an eel? The carcass went to a freezer on Anjouan and I guess we'll never know the answer. By now with three fish lost in cages and the causes of death still inconclusive, I felt I had to call off the passive capture resubmergence operation. Though we had simply intercepted Comoran catches bound for the freezer anyway, I was concerned there would be criticism that we were killing the fish. Again, I had to deal with perceptions rather than realities. A successful resubmergence test depended on getting the fish back down quickly so heat stress could be eliminated as a cause of death. I called this limiting the T.O.T. or "time on top." The fish in the lost cage and the Anjouan fish both had fair to good T.O.T's but unknown endings. The Itsandra fish, "Ruggi" caugh on our first vist had a good T.O.T. but had not been put down deep enough in a cage to try for a recovery. The second Iconi fish had a poor T.O.T. - 15 hours. All four were inconclusive. There had to be another approach.

          Over the winter of '89, while I was brooding over what that approach might be, betwixt and between philosophy classes, a startling piece of news landed on me like an anchor hitting bottom. A large commercial Japanese aquarium, called Toba, was planning a massively funded, multi million dollar, expedition to capture a pair of coelacanths for exhibit in a new building then under construction at their facility. The expedition would be in the Comoros next September. I was sunk. Surely the Japanese with their technical skills and capital resources would succeed where we had failed. The word also came that Hans Fricke was planning to return with a new submersible in the fall of '89. My only hope was to get there first and try one last time with an active fishing approach before the Japanese onslaught. I turned my attention to this possibility in the early spring of '89.