"Who's been messing with the machines?" Mark Erdmann was annoyed. The power point program had crashed. I suggested a reboot which seemed to fix the problem. We were at the coelacanth symposium of the Coral Reef Association conference in Bali, November, 2000. Many of us had come from around the world. Eugene and Christine Balon, Jack Musick, Susan Jewett, Christine Henon, John McCosker, Robin Stobbs, Said Ahamada and others, including Indonesian scientists and Japanese businessmen. The coelacanth symposium had been organized by Mark and a colleague under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. The Fricke Dive group was absent. They were diving in the Comoros. Talks were given. Most were scientific. Jack Musick questioned if the new Indonesian coelacanth, Latimeria menadoensis, could be typed from a single specimen. Susan spoke of specimen preservation. Eugene's was biological. John McCosker, now retired as director of San Francisco's aquarium, detailed his quest for the coelacanth. Said spoke of conservation efforts in the Comoros. Mine did not go well. Reviewing the history of our project, the humor fell flat, the slides got out of sync with the talk, and I ran out of time, compressing the last three pages into thirty seconds with hand gestures like a Charlie Chaplin puppet. Following the presentation of papers, there was a symposium in which questions such as the pros and cons of live capture were debated. For the argument, I was given the con side. The outcome of these discussions had little bearing, as, curiously, a proposal outlining the conclusions of the conference had already been prepared. Live capture for local display had been approved.
Two groups were videotaping the conference. One was Japanese. They claimed to be making a documentary, but were in fact part of another group of Japanese in attendance from the Tokyo Electric Power Services Co., LTD. Their leader, Mr.Shigeki Wada, was organizing an ambitious and interesting project. He planned to bring a ship to Indonesia with R.O.V.'s on board to drop down and televise coelacanths swimming about. The pictures would then be beamed to schools around the world. The project had an odd slogan that could only have been conceived in Japan: "Forward Coelacanth Friendly World." They handed out T shirts with this slogan on them. Planned for August, 2001, the educational research program was either canceled or postponed.
The other video team was headed up by Celia Lowenstein, an American living in the U.K., who was making a film on the coelacanth for British Channel 4 (and later PBS NOVA). For various reasons, perhaps because she set a new low temperature record for "coldly efficient," Celia had pissed off about half of the "coelacanth community" by the time of the conference. (My turn would come later when she cut me out of the film!) We were all anxious for our fifteen minutes of fame and performed for her cameras whenever they rolled. To curry favor, Celia handed out "Forward Coelacanth Friendly World" t -shirts that she had gotten from the Japanese group.
Bali at the cusp of of terror, was a friendly place divided into ocean and interior oriented tourism. We did some of each and even visited other islands in the Indonesian chain. Parts of Indonesia are highly developed with an industrial and technical infrastructure, even a scientific culture- a far cry from the Comoros. It seemed likely that coelacanth research might refocus there. But within a month that prospect would change- and not from a terrorist's bomb.
At the end of the conference, I flew to the Comoros via Singapore and Mauritius. Celia Lowenstein planned to visit there later with another film crew. This was my third visit in the same year. The reason for all of them was Fin Walk I.
"Fin Walk I" was the name of a new resus installation- for intercepting accidental by-catches- that I'd been planning for some months. It would have advantages over the first set up at Itsandra. First, based on an inflatable pool it would be portable; and second, it would be located down the coast at Itzoundsou under the management of highly motivated Said Ahamada, in an area where "many" coelacanths were caught- the site where six years earlier, Hans Fricke had called for an intercept station. As before, the new components of the set up were sent on ahead.
When I first arrived on my own in February of 2000, the Comoran heat was almost overwhelming. After meeting with Said, the first task was to recover elements of the Itsandra set up that could be salvaged and put to use again. These included the tent, the cooler unit, and any submersible pumps that may have survived the years. To do this I had to pay some back fees still owed by the departed Mombassa. The gear was scattered in different locations, some of it being in the house of one of his daughters. When she saw me her eyes welled up. We had a tearful reunion thinking of the old days when "Momba" was the man. Now I had new helpers: Justice, a waiter at the Itsandra Sun hotel, who assisted on his time off. Justice had also helped with the Itsandra set up; and Ali, a young Comoran cab driver. Ali would drive us with our gear, up and down the coast road over the two weeks it took to establish Fin Walk I.
Said Ahamada and his colleagues had established the Association for the Preservation of Gombessa with a base "office" in an old school house in the vicinity of Itzoundsou. The office had a desk and a poster. Said helped me extract the new gear from customs. With Said, I picked a site for the 1200 gallon pool to be inflated. It was at the side of a stone beach below the village- a spectacular location. The sea here rushes ashore on black lava cobble stones that spread over an arc of a quarter mile, flanked by lava caves and palm trees. Many of the village young were eager to pitch in with the work, while the elders wondered down to the site to look on, nodding approvingly. As before the set up was accomplished with record speed. (Any visitor to the Comoros is up against their departure ticket as a change in flight arrangements can cost thousands in penalties.) Ali tracked down a repair shop for our old pumps and a refrigeration service to get the old cooler unit back up and running. As Itzoundsou had no electricity, we used Said's house generator to run the gear.
All seemed well, until we hit a snag. The Zodiac pool was supported by an inflated air sidewall. I was relying on the air in the sidewall to provide insulation against outside heat while we lowered the temperature of the water. But it was inadequate. The water the cool down tests failed. We couldn't get the water cold enough for what I thought would be needed to revive a coelacanth. Additional insulation would be needed and that was not available in the Comoros. Nevertheless, the new resus unit was inaugurated with a meeting of village and government officials and a grand feast. Many speeches were given while I moved about with my video camera. It was my last day and I very nearly missed my flight. The door of the jumbo jet was held open. I was the last to board.
When I returned in July, 2000, I found the set up all but abandoned. I had brought with me several rolls of a very effective foil-air sandwich insulation. The project was immediately re-energized. With the insulation applied the cool down tests were successful and Fin Walk I became operational. It looked like a flying saucer had landed in the Comoros. But would a coelacanth be caught? With the aging of the fishermen, use of the maze stone fishing technique- the one which occasionally snagged coelacanths- was in decline. I had also promoted the deep release technique and the idea of releasing caught coelacanths was spreading in this area. The resus pool would simply provide a research and display option.
Now, in November, 2000, on the third "check out" visit, I raced down to Itzoundsou to inspect the facility. It was again collapsed and in disarray. A meeting was taking place next to it which had nothing to do with its success. Hans Fricke and Raphael Plante were ashore from their leased ship, the "Indian Ocean Explorer." They had been doing a village survey to see if any coelacanths had been caught recently. It was good to see them again after six years. Hans graciously invited me to come stay aboard the Explorer, but I had to decline for the time in order to get the resus working again. I had received a curious email from one of my correspondents on dinofish.com. A "coelasafari" was being offered on ebay which consisted of some visits to East African game parks followed by a dive on the Jago submersible in the Comoros to view coelacanths! I mentioned this to Hans and Raphael and they seemed to know nothing about it. I surmised it must have been an arrangement concocted by their charter ship, the Indian Ocean Explorer and hidden somewhere in their leasing contract. I was obviously intrigued.
The pool resus was back up and running in fairly short order. In Bali, Celia Lowenstein had arranged to meet Robin Stobbs and myself in the Comoros on a given date. "Why deal with emails and phone calls," she said. "Lets do it the old fashioned way....just set a date and be there." We had agreed. But Robin was ill and couldn't make it. The date came and went with no Celia. Now I was "hanging out" in the Comoros. When Celia did finally arrive I helped her with her filming arrangements. She and her crew stayed at the same hotel and made use of my assistants when I could no longer afford to employ them on a daily basis. Said was also made available but they could not come to a financial arrangement. Said had been warned by the Fricke Dive Group that "Celia is only interested in herself." Celia had planned to purchase live coelacanth footage from Hans Fricke, but I had learned in Bali that there had been a falling out. Then on a visit to the I.O. Explorer, I found that Hans was livid. Celia had not responded to a footage offer, and had heard from others that she was trouble. Not taking sides, I continued to help her free of charge, and she assisted me with a possible project for a local school to help with the resus project. But there would soon come a conflict of interest that was almost comedic.
I was running out of funds. Trying to pay off my credit card bills from the Comoros was not easy, even though emailing has come to the country, supplanting telexes and faxes. I would have just enough to pay the hotel. With my work finished, it would have served me well to take Hans up on his invitation and move to the I.O. Explorer. I might even be able to look at that "coelasafari" opportunity. But the I.O. Explorer had moved from its anchorage off of Itzoundsou and was performing coelacanth population surveys along the coast of grand Comoro. The Dive Group had left Said with a ship to shore walkie-talkie. The night the ship left Itzoundsou Said and I wasted valuable battery power communicating with Hans about Celia. "There will be absolutely no filming underwater." he mandated. I had to distance myself from Celia if I wanted to get on board! For the next couple of days, while Celia filmed about the island, Said, Ali, and I followed the ship along the coast road trying to reestablish contact. The batteries failed. We tried flashing headlights at night. Nothing worked. Finally the ship returned to Itzoundsou.
Thanksgiving in the Comoros passed with scant notice. On the morning of November 27th, my mind was focused on trying to snag that "coelasafari." Imagine what it would mean to me after all these years to see the fish from the sub. Forget about living on the ship. Celia, her crew and I, left the hotel and drove down to Itzoundsou. Her plan was to interview me at the "Fin Walk I" station, but her real agenda was to try to get aboard the I.O Explorer to interview the Dive Team sans Hans. That would be Jurgen Schauer and Karen Hissman. She could also get footage of the Jago onboard.
When we arrived, the I.O. Explorer was several hundred yards off shore at its usual anchorage. I thought I could help both Celia and myself by getting on board, announcing I was prepared to pay for the "coelasafari," and smoothing the way for Celia to come aboard and film. Some fishing canoes were approaching the shore. I climbed down the rocky coastline and signaled one to come come pick me up. But above me on a bluff, Justice, at Celia's instruction, was sending the man back out to the I.O. Explorer with a message. The canoe turned around and went out to the ship. Soon the I.O. Explorer pulled anchor and disappeared from sight. Now I was annoyed- to put it mildly. My shot at a dive on Jago had been blown. Not since the days of Michael had I seen such a hustler in the Comoros. Celia's crew set up their camera in front of the resus. I was preparing comments when a Zodiac appeared from around the corner of the Itzounzou beach. It was Karen Hissman and a boat operator. I rushed to the shore to intercept them, insisting that Celia not intervene. My intention was simply to tell Karen to tell the ship's captain that I was interested in the "coelasafari" independent of anything to do with Celia's filming. But as the boat approached the shore, a wave surge caught it from behind thrusting it into me. Without thinking I jumped in the air and landed inside- a sort of sideways somersault. I was not hurt. It was too rough to land and thus I was taken out to the I.O. Explorer.
Not much was happening on board. The sub was under water somewhere. I made my way up to the top deck where David, the captain and part owner, was putting a repair patch on the other Zodiac. I told him of my interest in the "coelasafari." He said he would check with Hans. He didn't know the diving plans, but he did know the dives were winding up. In a few minutes, I hitched another ride back to shore with crew members who had time off to visit Moroni. Celia and the film crew were gone. I walked up to the road with the crew members and sat with them as they awaited transportation to town. The chief engineer said he had grown tired of the dives with the endless preparations. Some of the Itzoundsou villagers gathered round. The girls fiddled with our hair, giving us different "do's." I sat there in the shade of a palm tree. For once, I was in the Comoros with nothing to do. After half an hour the crew members got a ride up the coast. I walked back down to the black rock beach. The calm sea spread out before me in the afternoon heat. I knew that somewhere down there the fish of my obsession were swimming.
The Zodiac returned in mid afternoon with David on board. It brought me back to the I.O Explorer now moving back to a point off Itzoundsou. Soon I was back on board in my sweaty T-shirt and soiled khakis. I sat in the common cabin, the salon, and talked to Hans who was back from his morning dive. I still had no clue as to what was happening. David came in appearing to ask Hans for the first time if I could do the "coelasafari" dive. Hans said yes. I felt like a life-long UFO buff who had just been given permission to meet the aliens. I had to ask the cost. I was hoping that with the East Africa game parks and the airfares trimmed off, the price would be quite reasonable. When David said $3,000, I did one of those internal gulps. But who in my position could say no? I said I would have to pay in the future when my credit card could stand it. David agreed. It was settled. Hans seemed disappointed by the high price. He said they had been convincing David I was out of money and wanted to take me as ballast on a dive with himself and Jurgen- three in the sub. Communications had been so difficult. I was not about to start complaining. That very afternoon I would see the FISH!
Karen came in and said I would have to take a shower and put on clean clothes because of the close quarters. I would also have to be weighed for ballast adjustment. Hans showed me to cabin 4. Karen brought in a bathroom scale which I stood on. I weighed 70 kg. I showered and put on the t shirt and trunks that she had left. I went back up to the salon and sat with Hans. I told him Celia was only coming to film the boat and do interviews. Hans said no, no interviews, which surprised me. He said if he went to the BBC or Celia and was making the same film she was, what would she say? Good point. David came in and gave me a pre briefing. I would get in the sub on board the boat with Jurgen. We would be lowered into the water. The sub would be towed to the dive location by Zodiac. The tow line would be disconnected by a diver. We would begin our descent.
Karen came into the salon again and said they were ready. I went in back. While we were standing about Jurgen sneezed, and I joked "Hey none of that we will be in close quarters." He nodded, then added, "and no farting either!" Jurgen had me climb up the back railing. Hans at my request, began filming with my camera. Karen had me remove my sandals when I was on the top platform. She seemed to be in charge of sub ops at the logistical level. I had just the t shirt and bathing suit on as I climbed down the hatch tube. I'd been up since 5:15 a.m. with no idea what the day would bring. I was by now an exhausted nervous wreck, but I was so psyched to do this that I didn't care how I looked or felt. I went in first. I was to sit on the platform in front with Jurgen behind operating the controls. I had expected the pilot to be in front. Jurgen climbed in behind and offered me a small cushion to sit on.
The first thing I asked was how to bring the sub up in case something happened to him. Jurgen showed me how to blow the ballast and begin Jagos ascent. Once on the surface an additional valve had to be turned to stabilize the craft. Jurgen reassured me I would not be the one using the procedures. The crane began to lift us. We rose above the deck in the manner of a ferris wheel car when people are being loaded in and your seat rises slowly in steps. I peered out the one front window, a semi-spherical bubble, at the others on deck. We swung out over the water and were lowered down until, with a gentle sloshing, the bubble was underwater, a bright blue green in front of me, while just behind and above, the top hatch bubble was in daylight. It must have been 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. Jurgen said this was Jago dive number 725.
From the swirl and motor noises you could tell we were under tow for the next few minutes. Suddenly a black body in shorts, surrounded by a swirl of bubbles, plunged like a dagger thrust in front of us. The sudden disruption of the serene view out the window was startling. A boy had dived in from the Zodiac to release the tow rope. Jurgen began to flood the two ballast cylinders underneath the submersible's cabin pod. Slowly, slowly we settled lower in the water, the top bubble eventually showing a water line. It seemed as if the sub did not want to go down.
After about five minutes the top bubble covered over and we began a slow descent. I couldn't help thinking that more people have been to outer space than have gone down to see the coelacanths. Inside the passenger bell was an array of instrumentation surrounding us on the sides. This was not an integration of really hi tech stuff, more a collection of devices from different sources that Jurgen had installed probably one at a time, saying now I have the depth meter working, now the thruster control box, and so on. An ad hoc array. The depth meter was a red LED display to my left, there was a time clock, a ten year old Lowrance X 16 sonar unit for bottom finding- the same model I had used so often in our searches! A small air scrubber was next to Jurgen. The thruster controls were switches on a small hand held box with a cable running out the back. It was Radio Shack upgraded to German standards. The manipulator arm had a mechanical linkage to a handle inside. The linkage went through a pressure tight port about 3 inches in diameter just next to my right knee. By my left was a similar unused port with an inscription on it in plastic letter punch tape: "For Lords and Ladies Only." I had to double check that this was a joke. It was, there were no on board facilities. Nary a bag nor a bottle. A plastic electric blower fan whirled a few inches from my face. I found it a relief to direct it right at myself. Without the fan there was a damp heaviness to the air that could have triggered a claustrophobic response. The platforms we sat on were rubberized mats with a texture of small round knobs. Around them the curved walls were damp with condensation from the last dive. The whole interior was barely larger than a Mercury space craft, somewhere between a Mercury and a Gemini, about the volume of a standard telephone booth.
The interior of the cabin remained lit by daylight as we went down, slowly dimming at the same rate the eyes adjusted. It never went completely dark, nor did Jurgen bother much with the interior lights. They would just confound the viewing outside. As we slowly sank, Jurgen put a new age tape into the cassette payer. Karen's voice checked in from time to time on the ultrasonic transmission system. Picked up by the Jago's hydrophone it sounded like an effect on the music's soundtrack, a cross between a whale's song and the Beetle's commentary in Yellow Submarine. "How's Jerry." Jurgen answered back. We are ok. We are relaxed here. Jurgen gave periodic depth readings in English, perhaps as much so as to indicate that he was conscious and alert. The sub was equipped with a "dead man's button" which had to be pressed once every ten minutes to avoid an automatic surfacing procedure. The fear was unconsciousness due to oxygen deprivation. Back on the Indian Ocean Explorer, the sub's progress was tracked on a laptop computer with software that was part of an acoustical locating system, a package that the Jago team brought aboard the mother ship.
"60 Meters," Jurgen announced, reading the LED'S next to my head. Light began to change color. The light green blue was gone. A deep indigo set in. Millions of bits of debris were visible in the water column, like house dust blown from a leaky vacuum cleaner. This is the constant plank tonic rain of detritus that feeds the bottom dwellers. A shape appeared in the distance out the front bubble and moving closer. I saw quickly that it was a ray. "A manta ray," said Jurgen. It flew by the side of the sub, then reappeared coming towards us again. Unsure of the size distortions from the curved bubble window, I had no idea how large it was. What if it were huge and bumped us. Would there be damage? Jurgen later said the ray was about a meter across.
We were left alone again in the water column, sinking slowly. "150 meters," announced Jurgen. I chatted with Jurgen much of the time. Hans checked in and I answered that we were doing well. During silences, there was the new age descent. Of course, without visual references there was no sensation of movement. But then I saw something looking down. Dark lines separated by white stripes. Very dim. It was the bottom. But how far away? What was the scale? It could have been three feet away or 150 feet. Judging by the time to bottom contact it was somewhere in between. Our depth was 194 meters. I was surprised to find a flat bottom here after all the talk of a 45 degree slope. Perhaps it was a sandy platform. Now Jurgen began operating thrusters and turning the outside lights on and off. We rotated and bumped along until we came upon a formation of what looked like brown rock. The color was from algae. Whether the formation was coral or lava was not evident, but from the depth I assumed it to be lava, but it was not black as above.
I was looking at a wall of this brown stuff which seemed to be just in front of the bubble window a couple of feet away. There were some tiny fishes and incrustations. Then Jurgen said , "There is the cave, are there any coelacanths?" But where was the damn cave? All I saw was the brown wall- (They called this one cave 4.) Then along the top arc of the window, I saw that the brown wall receded. I twisted round on my side to get my head low, looking up. "There are no coelacanths," said Jurgen in his good German English. He seemed to be asking a question. I was now looking into a jagged slit in the rock. It looked like a small hole a few feet across and about two feet in front of the bubble. I saw schools of small fishes, what looked like solitary wrasses, and then, in the same place, but better camouflaged, two coelacanths overlapping each other. They seemed to be about seven inches long each. The fish were sideways to me, head to tail. At each end of the assemblage, a fiery golden eye blazed at me- the tapita cells in the back of the retina . "Yes," I said, "I see two in there. They look very small. " "No, no, they are big. They are 3 or 4 meters away," corrected Jurgen. The optical illusion was that they looked close. The sub was sticking its bubble and lights into the cave opening and could go no further.
The cave, or panga in Comoran, darkened at the rear, but about 97 percent seemed visible. There were no juveniles in the back, however, as proposed by Eugene Balon. The entrance and walls of the cave had white incrustations of oyster shells and other materials that were mimicked by the patterns on the coelacanths, one of which was massively freckled with white marks, while the other had almost none. The fish had no startle response to the lights, but they did slowly turn away until their tails were facing us. I noticed that one of them was missing the famous third epicaudal fin. Yet it had normal fine membrane around the end of the tail. ("I finally get to see coelacanths and one of them is a mutant!- I mused.) Now slowly they turned back again. On each fish nine fins- eight for the one with the missing epicaudal- were operating in a complex coordinating rhythm. The body of the fish is like a great dirigible and the fins like positioning propellers. The two paired pectoral fins paddle in alternation to the two paired pelvic fins. The first dorsal rises and folds periodically. The second dorsal fin and the anal fin wave from side to side, while the tail fin curves slowly to this side or that and the epicaudal flicks from side to side possibly detecting current shifts. It's a cliche but the effect is of a ballet, and Jurgen now appropriately accented this evolutionary dance with a Pink Floyd concert tape.
The fish were a dark blue black in the sub lights, and depending which set of lights were on, and from which angle they were hitting, the eyes changed from bright gold to ice blue white to pure white. This, as noted, is due to the light collecting and reflecting tapita cells in the back of the retina. Creatures that see well in low light like cats and crocodiles also have reflecting tapita. They shifted their positions yet again, but no head stands as coelacanths were once reported to perform. Jurgen now attributes the headstands to a reaction to an electro- magnetic field leakage from their first submersible, the Geo. Jago is an electrically tighter ship. I told Jurgen I felt like a child hiding under a bed watching something I wasn't supposed to. Peeking voyeuristically into another world. One of the fish turned toward me head on, both eyes glowing at once. As beautiful in its complexity of form as the coelacanth is in profile, when it turns head on there is an element of ugliness that has damaged its reputation and led to its being called "a beast." Teeth seem to be growing in all parts of the mouth- an orthodontist's nightmare (or dream!), and a curve of the mouth line gives an impression of permanent disapproval, a frown, from an anthropocentric perspective. The fish I was now looking at was wide bodied like a jumbo jet, and I knew that from overhead these creatures look like salamanders. Swarms of small fishes swam round them with impunity. Jurgen said that only on two occasions did they see feeding behavior within the caves and on those occasions the small fishes may have been frenzied by the sub's lights causing movements that triggered the feeding behavior of the coelacanths. In fact, what Jurgen complained about was a lack of behavior of the coelacanths they observed, no aggression, no feeding, no sex, just swimming in place. But at about five thirty every evening the fish in the caves would come out and descend the marine slopes to unknown feeding destinies below. Early in the mornings they would return. Jurgen hoped that the use of a low light camera within the caves might reveal more with the subs lights turned off.
Behind me Jurgen, the proficient d.j. was changing tapes again. He took out a still camera and a digital video camera and began filming. A slight current consistently rotated Jago to the right causing the coelacanths to disappear off stage left. Jurgen would then reorient us with a blast of the opposing thruster. By now I had dropped off the rubberized platform and contorted myself embryonically along the metal interior ringing the window, the better to look up and out. Now I felt like the embryo at the end of 2001, which gazes at the earth with fresh eyes waiting to be reborn.
Jurgen lifted the sub for a minute to show me the seascape above the cave. This was a ridge with darkness beyond. A lone tube worm projected above the ridge on one side, it's fan open to collect plankton. We watched and watched the coelacanths for well over an hour, every movement and readjustment, never bored with their lifelong dance of fins. We chattered away like aliens viewing humans for the first time. Although Jurgen had viewed coelacanths hundreds of times by now and they were totally routine, he said he felt something of his original enthusiasm return for the moment. For myself, I was looking into a box of gleaming jewels, a treasure found after years of searching.
Jurgen mumbled something about a line from Titanic, taking one last long good look. I took the look, but then we stayed even longer. Finally, eyes still glued to the scene, we backed off. Jurgen switched off the lights, blew some ballast water from the tanks and the slow ascent began. We rose through thousands of bubbles released by Jago that climbed to the surface more slowly than us. Jurgen read off the meter reports. I had many things to tend to back on the surface. But at least for a few days, nothing would seem the same. I had seen the gods. And something else. Maneuvering near cave 4 we crossed over an encrusted rope line on the bottom. "We always see that," said Jurgen. "My God!" I thought. "That's the line from the trap we set way back in '89." I had been there before.
We broke the surface and began bobbing gently in the swell. Jurgen opened the top hatch. There was only a slight sensation of pressure shift. We climbed out and stood on the platform a minute with the sun setting behind us. The Zodiac picked us up and took us back to the boat. I was quite high from the whole thing. I reported great things to Karen, David, and Hans one by one. The sub was brought back on board and Karen and Jurgen cleaned and prepped it for the next day. I changed back into my clothes.
Word was "unstopable" Celia's group had been by in a boat they had leased at Itsandra. They had negotiated to come on board tomorrow. I would later learn that the exchanges had been quite harsh. We assembled for a tasty dinner at the salon's table. Soup and an expertly prepared fish dish. There was much talk about the coelacanth situation. They had seen more coelacanths this year than on the previous dives. A good sign. On scientific issues, Hans said the coelacanth's swimming pattern is a pre adaptation to terrestrial walking. In other words, the pattern is actually adapted to keep the fish from rolling over in the water, but it later became useful for walking on land. He did believe the classical theory that the coelacanth's cousin, eusthenopteron is the one that came ashore and gave birth to all of us. Why had the coelacanth changed so little over the millennia? It did change quite a bit, but it found a niche where there were no competitors. No further changes were needed. The Jago crew called themselves "Jagonauts." But having seen the fish I prefer "Coelaseens". Hans put his arm around my chair in an avuncular fashion and said "And so Jerry, we hope there will never be a fish in your tank..." Hmm, I thought to myself, I remember it being your idea!"
I arose the next morning after a poor sleep on board, and saw all at breakfast. David debriefed me on the dive for a write up on his web site. The ship had weighed anchor and was moving to Moroni for a dive and expected rendezvous with Celia's boat, which sure enough was waiting for us. Her crew did some circular filming of the ship, then came on board. After shaking hands, Hans cornered Celia and said a five hundred dollar donation to Said's Gombessa Society was the price for filming on board. Celia did not positively agree, saying she preferred to negotiate with Said. I later transferred that amount from her to Said on her behalf. What we did not know at the time was that the coelacanth story was about to shift again, this time back to South Africa where it had begun in 1938.
On the same day that I dove in Jago to see the fishes, a group of mixed gas divers with cameras confirmed a discovery they had made some months earlier: The existence of coelacanths off the coast of South Africa in an area known as Sodwana.
Reports without material evidence had continued to seep into dinofish.com of sightings by divers of coelacanths in shallow water in the vicinity of Madagascar. As coelacanths were only known to live at depths of several hundred feet (250m-700m) in the Comoros, these accounts seemed to strain credibility. In South Africa, the search continued on and off over the years. One diver, 46-year-old, Riaan Bouwer, lost his life exploring for coelacanths in June, 1998. But lightening struck quite accidentally on October 28th, 2000. Off the Northeast coast South African town of St. Lucia, just south of the Mozambique border, in KwaZulu-Natal, is Sodwana Bay, part of the St. Lucia Marine Protected Area, a world heritage site comprising a wetland and marine reserve known for its reefs and SCUBA diving. Two deep submarine canyons indent the continental shelf near Sodwana Bay from a depth of 1000 meters. There pleasure divers Pieter Venter, Peter Timm and Etienne le Roux made a dive to 104 meters (320ft) using a mixture of diving gasses. "I saw this eye reflecting towards me and that made me curious," Venter said later. "I approached…and underneath an overhang, I saw a fish of about two meters long." After several seconds he realized it was a coelacanth. "I did not expect anything like this. I was not trying to find it." He signaled Timm and they saw two more. They had no cameras. "It was like seeing a UFO without taking a photograph." Timm took some convincing to realize what they had seen. The group decided they would return with cameras. This would be the shallowest confirmed sighting of coelacanths.
Calling themselves, "SA Coelacanth Expedition 2000," the group with several additional members, returned in late November. On Sunday November 26, they performed a first dive without seeing coelacanths. On Monday, the 27th , Pieter Venter, Gilbert Gunn and cameramen Christo Serfontein and Dennis Harding, assisted by a five member team, went down again to a depth of 115 meters (350ft) using four different mixes of gas for a dive lasting 134 minutes. They had a "bottom"-time of 15 minutes. Moving from cavern to cavern, 12 minutes into the dive they found three coelacanths. The largest was between 1.5 and 1.8 meters long, the other two 1.2 meters and 1 meter. Whether these were the same three seen on the earlier dive or a different group making a total of six was not confirmed. The fish swam heads down and appeared to be feeding off of ledges. The cameramen took video footage and still photos of the three. Then disaster struck. Assisting Christo, who had passed out under water during a decompression pause, 34-year-old Peter Harding rose to the surface with him in an uncontrolled ascent. Harding complained of neck pains and died in the boat as fellow divers tried to resuscitate him. Apparently, he had suffered a cerebral embolism. Christo recovered after being taken underwater for decompression.
The find was big news in South Africa. Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister, Mohammed Valli Moosa ,took immediate measures to further protect the fish and put it off limits to divers without special permits while research protocols were established. Fishing in the region was already prohibited. This was also the break Celia needed to get her underwater footage of the fish. When plans for a small submersible, the "Delta," already in South Africa to visit the scene were blocked by the government, she arranged to finance a return set of dives by Venter and his group. Another diver died after a training session, but they returned in the spring of '01 with Celia in tow. But there were complications. The South African parks department attempted to block the dives! One problem was that the Venter group had contracted with a for profit online service to charge pay per view fees for web access to fresh videos from the dives. They set up their own web site, sent out press releases, and were doing well when the plug was pulled. However, being resourceful, Venter wrangled his way back into the water and coelacanths were filmed. Celia got her footage. But how many of the fish were down there? Next came Jago.
Little Jago had its work cut out for it. There may be as many as 13 underwater canyons between the Tugela River mouth and Kosi Bay in the north, extending beyond the Sodwana site- quite a search area. In the 2001 dives, Jago found fifteen fish some of them repeats of the fish seen by Venter. In a second set of dives in 2003, the sub found 18, again with overlaps. Is this a new population of coelacanths, a new species, or a group of strays swept down the Mozambique channel in the supposed manner of the 1938 find? In 2003, tissue samples were taken using that manipulator arm. These awaited DNA analysis. A sonic probe attached to one of the fish showed that it went up to feed rather than down as in the Comoros. But the numbers seen at Sodwana are not reassuring, and some of the excitement of the new South African discovery has begun to fade. Unless a significant population is discovered somewhere else, I believe coelacanth attention will return to the Comoros.
Meanwhile, back in the Comoros, things had not gone well with "Finwalk I." A few weeks after I left in the fall of '00, the cover was stolen from the pool. Debris collected in the water. In an attempt to clean the pool, its tough rubberized skin was ruptured and it began to leak. Said was unable to apply patches that I sent over. The Comoros themselves had undergone yet another political transformation. After two of the islands had attempted to seceed (unsuccessfully) from the Federal Republic, the country eventually reorganized itself under a new constitution into the Union of the Comoros. With travel funds and psychological energy depleted, I subsided from the fray, completing this account and managing the dinofish website. In 2003, a new group emerged with its eyes on the coelacanth. Long time aquarium guru, David Powell, whose brains we had picked way back in '86, teamed up with commercial fish collector Forrest Young, and another Japanese Aquarium, to go after a living coelacanth for live display. Their multi year plan is just getting underway. For my own part, I am just watching, watching until the restlessness builds, the energy returns, something snaps and once again I am off chasing Gombessa - The Fish Out of Time.