But magic it was not. Our guide directed us to a stretch of water off that volcanic bluff, no more than a fifteen minute run from the harbor and barely a quarter mile out to sea. "So these are the hallowed coelacanth grounds," I thought. But I soon noticed wooden, two-man fishing canoes scattered at intervals all about us. We were simply in the routine fishing "footprint" occupied by Iconi fishermen on every night of calm weather. Of course! Our guide had quite logically taken us to a place where once upon a time a coelacanth had been caught. And that would quite logically be none other than where the fishermen fished anyway, for whatever they could catch. So there were no hallowed coelacanth grounds--at least none that the Comorans would know about. Damn! I had to get all the way out here to realize that.

               The current, at about four knots to the southwest, was fairly stiff. The driver would position the boat up current, where the guide told him to cut the engine. Our cannonball and lines would then be lowered. By the time they were at the right depth we had maybe five minutes before we'd drifted too far out to sea away from the fishing area. I flicked on the Lowrance X-16 sonar unbit. I could see the bottom drop off the sonar graph. The guide would catch a roudi or two, then everything would have to come back up, the snarls undone, the engine started and the boat maneuvered back to the starting point. It was a ridiculous exercise. The glamor of fishing for coelacanths lasted for about two of these cycles. Then I had a boat load of tired and frustrated fishermen.

                I concentrated on operating the sonar, and soon found I could not track the cannon ball at the five or six hundred foot depth necessary to spot coelacanths. Rich operated the down-rigger. He found that even though the cannon ball was attached to its plastic-coated braided steel wire through a swivel, the entire wire twisted on the way down. This caused the clips that held the fishing lines, attached above the cannonball, to wrap around the down-rigger wire so that it could not pull free when a fish bit. Each time the down-rigger was raised, it brought up a snarl of fishing line. We had our hands full.

                 Rich was leaning over the gunnels checking the wire with the underwater video light when a floorboard slipped underfoot upsetting him. The jolt knocked the light free of its handle, sending the $700 lamp spiraling lazily into the depths. Sinking back-end first, the light cast a beam that circled up and around us through the aqua- marine haze, like a pointing finger describing a circle in the sky. That lamp was our first votive offering to the deep. It must have burned bright for about an hour on the bottom. Perhaps a ring of coelacanths gathered round and wondered at it, like the ape men who gathered around the monolith sentinel in "2001." But more likely the light burned into darkness, lighting columns of plankton, with one or two dimly puzzled roudi flickering through the beam. At least the flashlight fish could save their energy. I would have to describe that first time out as more of a floating circus than a fishing expedition.

               The next night, Judy, Josie, and Rich eagerly volunteered not to come out. That was O.K.. We'd been overcrowded anyway. The active "hi-tech" fishing approach, what I'd called the "smart hooks" in contrast to the "wise hooks" of the Comorans, had to be reworked. First, the sonar was basically useless if I couldn't see where the bait was in relation to fish. I solved that by finding a paint can lid in a heap of rubble behind the People's Palace, a meeting hall monstrosity built by Chinese aid in the Seventies. I fashioned the lid into a sonar reflector and attached it just above the cannonball. Second, the steel wire's twisting made the cannonball useless for lowering the fishing lines. O.K., I could put a short baited line off the end of the cannonball where twisting wouldn't cause a snarl, or matter if it did, because I would only be pulling up the one cannonball wire from the boat. That would solve the twisting problem on the cannonball line. The others would have to fish with rod and reel, using sinkers. After all the snarls of the night before, that would probably come as a relief. But those lines would no longer have "smart hooks," they would no longer be directly coordinated with the sonar, and that was a setback to our whole fishing concept. Well, at least they'd be near the sonar "window." This seemed the only trade off that made any sense.

              We tried out the new arrangement. Peter began catching roudi on his own. With the new "reflector" I could now track my bait on sonar down to seven hundred feet. I even caught a roudi on the cannonball line, but I didn't know it until I pulled the ball up. Now I realized that with the ten pound cannonball on the end of my down-rigger line I couldn't feel the delicate ingestion of a fish strike. It was scarcely better than an untended line. Element by element, our "high tech" approach was coming apart. What's more, the bottomscape, according to my sonar, was strangely barren of large fish. Roudi didn't show up at that depth, so when they were caught they seemed to come out of sonar "nowhere." Occasionally, I would get a trace of a large fish, presumably at least a few feet long. One time, such a trace coincided with a good strike on Peter's line. But only once. Just a teaser to keep me plugging away with the instrument and Peter baiting his line while the coy ocean smiled.

               I was having another problem with the sonar. In tests in shallow water with a sandy bottom, I discovered I was getting false bottom readings about three feet off the actual bottom. This meant that fish of whatever size lurking close to the bottom would be lost beneath the ghost layer reading. There was reason to suppose, at least from the videos, that coelacanths are often prone to swim near the bottom. I could not be sure that the same sonar phenomenon wasn't occurring in the much deeper water where we fished, and thus that the coelacanths might be down there without my "seeing" them.

             We had an offer of help, this time from the Embassy staff. I had invited Bill Carlson, the Embassy operations officer, out for a night of fishing. Before he fell asleep on the boat, he noticed how difficult the Japawa was to maneuver in the current. The idle was too fast to maintain position, so the operator had to continually cut the engine off for drift sweeps. The boat simply was not designed for inshore fishing. The US Embassy maintained two Zodiacs of its own. These were officially evacuation craft, to be used in case of a coup or if the volcano Kartala blew its top. Each was powered by an Evinrude 40 HP outboard. One was in the warehouse and the second was up at the north end of the island. Bill Carlson pointed out that he could not officially rent us these Zodiacs, but he could lend one of them to us in return for maintenance and gas expenses. This would also fulfill a need of his, namely, that the boat would be in serviceable condition near the Embassy if he needed it. And that need was not so very far fetched. Though we did not realize it at the time, a coup against Abdallah was attempted that very month--while we were there--foiled by loyalists of the President. The coup leaders were executed in a contrived "accident" outside the army barracks and Comoran life went on as usual.

            The Zodiac offer was more appealing than the expensive, difficult to maneuver Japawa. We could operate it ourselves, just bringing along one Comoran fishing "guide." The guide Mombassa chose was a small man, perhaps 5'5", with smooth, light coffee-colored skin. He wore a sweatshirt wrapped round his shaved head like a turban. His chest was bare, and around his waist clutched a pair of khaki shorts that had seen better days. He looked to me to be in his late fifties. As best as I could make out, his name was "Ottoman," like the Turkish Empire. Ottoman spoke no French, and certainly no English. He was Comoran through and through. Our communication had to be via sign language, grunts and the word "Gombessa," which he knew well, as he had caught three. Ottoman was what anthropologists of the region call an artisanal fisherman- fishing with the evolved techniques of the area. He was thin but wiry, and a strong swimmer. He always carried a small bundle, which contained his personal items. These included a woven thatch container about three inches square. This little box housed green leaves and white lime powder. Whenever we were on the way to the fishing grounds, Ottoman would make a preparation from the leaves and powder, which he tucked in his mouth. He was wide awake and very energetic all night, laughing at the slightest occasion. If Peter caught a fish he would laugh. If he didn't, Ottoman would also laugh. I had an artisanal "coke head" on my hands. But Ottoman was quite amazing. He could both cut bait and fish in what seemed like total darkness, never missing a beat. To me, he became another odd sort of friend. We had many non-conversations, giggling in the dark. I paid him whatever Mombassa suggested. It wasn't very much. Some days Ottoman refused to go out. Either he had the "fever"--a bout of malaria--or the next day would be a religious holiday and he couldn't work the night before. When he had the fever, I gave him tablets of aralen phosphate to "eat," as Mombassa put it. He would usually feel better by the next night.

           The Zodiac did prove more maneuverable than the Japawa, but it came with a bizarre set of circumstances. The Zodiac was moored off Itsandra beach. This is the very same beach that Bob Denard's mercenary commandos had stormed at night, in their successful takeover of the Comoros back in '76. For that reason, a pill box, with a machine gun and a garrison bunker, had since been set up at the north end of the beach. The machine gunner could cover the entire approach to the beach at night. As this was the very same beach we would have to return to after a night's fishing, at three or four in the morning, in a Zodiac, no less, we ran a very real risk of being mistaken for the vanguard of an invasion. Our solution was to station Mombassa next to the garrison with one of the walkie-talkies and alert him by the other, when we were ready to come in. He would then tell the C.O. to hold fire. Naturally, we were a bit nervous making our landings. This system worked well, but God forbid the radio fail, or Mombassa fall asleep at the switch!

            On Thanksgiving night of 1987, the Embassy put on an astounding feast at the residence. Our host was Karl Danga, who in the past year, had replaced Ed Brinn as U.S. Charge d'Affaire in the Comoros. Turkeys with all the trimmings had been flown in from South Africa. Sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie, apple pie, wine, and ice creams with sauces made this the most sumptuous Thanksgiving feast I'd ever seen. Our whole group was invited along with a couple of other Americans, malaria researchers, then in the Comoros. We celebrated with our countrymen. For a few blissful hours we forgot the nightly challenge.

            The Zodiac bore us out to either the Itsandra fishing area where "Ruggi" had been caught, or the Iconi bluffs, where we'd been that first disastrous night in the Japawa. I still found that at low idle forward, five hundred feet below us, the sonar reflector drifted out of the sonar graph window. But I could jerk the shift lever in and out of gear, slowing the boat enough to watch the bottom and my bait at the same time. Peter fished relentlessly with rod and reel, pulling up almost as many roudi as Ottoman.

             Her week up, Josie left with a gaggle of memories, some new friends in the Comoros, and a pad full of sketches. Judy, neither a fisher nor a technician at heart, was fast losing faith and interest in the complicated fishing procedures. She was also enduring a clash of personalities with Peter. Now restless, Judy planned an early return. Josie and Judy were replaced by Marla Warner, a Canadian acquaintance of Peter, who'd just finished a tour as a social worker in Tanzania, and Eric Findes, a graduate student in Marine biology who worked under Dr. Bemis at the University of Massachusetts. Marla was paying her own way, but Eric came as part of a compromise I'd reached with David Wilkinson on funding the science part of the project. Peter and I were paying for him out of our own pockets.

           We had reached a point where we could divide up shifts on the boat either during the same or alternating nights. Our catch was paltry, but the monotony was sometimes spectacularly interrupted. Rich hooked a sailfish, which breached the surface and arched, silhouetted, across the face of the moon. But still, not a trace of Old Fourlegs. I began to think about using longlines, a technique in which several dozen baited hooks are run off a single line. The line is left in the water for several hours, then pulled up. Jack Musick, the scientist at V.I.M.S., had explained it to me in New York. I had brought longlining gear. Now, after three nights of conventional fishing, I asked Rich to rig it for the next attempt. The longlining effort did not go well. On our first deployment we lost the entire down-leg line due to snarls in the boat. On the second attempt, we lost the feeder line pulling it off a reef snag. On the third, we lost what was left of the rig, along with two B.C. vests tied on as floats. Perhaps the tide, or a shark, had pulled the whole assembly out to sea. One fisherman told me that large sharks, probably Tiger sharks and hammerheads, cruised the inshore waters at night. But others claimed that with the advent of the motorized canoes, sharks were now rare in the shore waters. We never saw any sharks except occasional small fry for sale at the fishmarket. More likely the vests had been spotted and pilfered by fishermen in canoes. In any event, I managed to reconstruct the entire longline apparatus again from spare line and other materials. I rented the Japawa one night, and while the others fished in the Zodiac, finally got a decent deployment. But when I pulled up the hooks a couple of hours later, they were empty. This technique, which had seemed so promising on paper, fell prey to coral heads snagging lines on the bottom and to the difficulty of setting out the longline from a small boat.

             Fishing with rod and reel off the Zodiac, we settled into the disturbing realization that ours were nothing more than a few additional hooks added to those of the Comorans on their routine fishing outings all about us. The Comorans were just fishing for whatever they could catch. Only once did I see a boat with an oilfish on board. The old notion that coelacanths are caught as by-catches in the nightly quest for oilfish seemed somewhat out of date. The fishermen now could scarcely expect to catch an oilfish, let alone a coelacanth. They hauled up anything they could, contented just to catch and take home the foot-long barracuda-like roudi.

             The meager inshore fishing is part of the reason why the effort to stimulate coelacanth catches by offering rewards is not taken very seriously by the local fishermen. Rewards had been there since J.L.B. Smith in the early Fifties. The fishermen had grown up with them. They were scarcely motivated to put to sea at any particular time in search of coelacanths. The fishermen knew, and we were learning, that it wasn't something you could go out and just do. Catching a coelacanth was a chance happening, like winning a lottery.

            There was evidence, nonetheless, that some of the coelacanths that were caught accidentally, never made it to the government freezers. A certain percentage, perhaps one or two a year, were intercepted by middlemen who tried to peddle the fish themselves. Judy had been approached by a man offering her a frozen coelacanth that was not of government registry. She was shocked. I wasn't. I saw it as a natural outcome of the months of waiting that the fishermen who caught coelacanths had to endure before they received their government reward. The fishermen were tempted to make immediate cash settlements with middlemen who would "take responsibility" for the fish. That had happened unknowingly to us with the first coelacanth we bought at Insounsou. The fisherman didn't think he was committing a crime, and neither did we. When we learned the official procedure from the Ministry of Production, the government was content that the fisherman had been paid his reward and did not hit us with an additional fee. Yes, there was evidence of a black market in dead coelacanths, but not one that was causing them to be caught. Much would later be made of this phenomenon.

            Seeing that the fishing was going nowhere, Rich suggested we focus on preparing all aspects of our transporter system to await a local catch. I agreed with that. The problem was where to station the transporter, fill it with water, and keep it running. It could only be moved by flatbed truck, which would have to be rented on a job by job basis. Could we put it at the airport, or the Coelacanthe Hotel? Charly thought the idea impractical, and he was the one who would have to make the official arrangements. The transporter needed to be inside, otherwise, the life support gear would be stolen. Better to go first with the cage submersion plan, then rent the truck and power up the transporter. Rich had had a good idea. Had it been implemented things might have turned out differently.

           We made sure that the cage would be ready. Except for Marla, the others left. Officially, the first expedition was over. Marla and I made Sonar charts of the shore drop offs from various landmarks. We tried fishing one night down at Insounsou, where "Ahmed" had been caught. Off Itsoundzou, the dugout canoes carried Coleman lanterns. Spread out over the calm waters, the boats resembled floating candles on the still pond of a Japanese garden. But even this enchantment failed to entice a coelacanth to our baited lines.

            The main thing now was to be sure our "passive capture system" was intact, so that a catch, should there be one, would be properly handled, even in our absence. The fishermen along the Southwest coast would contact Mombassa if they caught a coelacanth. Mombassa would notify Charly at the Embassy, who would bring out the cage, fetch a diver friend, and resubmerge the fish to the depth it had been caught at. Then we would be telexed. To cover all bases, in case Charly or Mombassa were indisposed at the time of capture, I also briefed Jean Louis Gerod on the procedure. Neither Charly nor Jean Louis would take any kind of payment from us, which though it helped us financially, made matters otherwise difficult as we had to motivate them purely through the interest of the project, and tactfully at that. In no way could we simply tell them what to do. I'd brought along two interesting books on sharks. One was a big glitzy coffee table affair, the other a small handbook. I'd already given the handbook to Jean Louis as a token gift for showing us the videos and helping with the flashlight fish. I was trying to decide about the big one. Charly, a sportfisherman, was not that interested in fish books. Jean Louis was, but was he really helping us or not? He seemed so casual about everything. However, when Jean Louis agreed to help with the cage submersion procedure, I handed him the big book as a "Christmas present." He was delighted. As events would show, that simple act might well have spelled the undoing of our entire project.

            On December 18, 1987, after staying on two weeks longer than planned, I returned to New York to celebrate Christmas 1987 with my family. I was not that terribly depressed about the expeditions failure to catch a coelacanth. The Comoros are always exciting for me--I was getting hooked on the place--and this was just our first try. We would be back in January with some kind of new approach. Then, On December 27, 1987, two days after my Christmas in New York, the following telex from the Comoros was read onto my answering machine in New York by Janet Olsen, Arn Neice's secretary at company, E.T Browne Inc.:

FOR: EXPLORERS CLUB--J. HAMLIN
SUBJECT: COELACANTH
COELACANTH CAUGHT BY ICONI FISHERMAN EVENING OF DEC 26. FISH PUT INTO CAGE AND LOWERED TO BOTTOM AT 150 METERS BY 3:08 AM. DC 27. BUOY INDICATING LOCATION OF SUBMERGED CAGE/FISH DISAPPEARED NIGHT OF DEC 27/28. ATTEMPTS TO LOCATE ROPE/CAGE FROM SURFACE UNSUCCESSFUL. BELIEVE SONAR COULD BE USED TO LOCATE CAGE, BUT NO ONE HERHOW [here knows how] TO USE IT. SUGGEST SOMEONE COME ASAP TO TRY TO RECOVER CAGE AND/OR FISH. PLEASE ADVISE.
AMERICAN EMBASSY
MORONI COMORES

The words etched into my brain as though they had been traced with a soldering gun. The "biological find of the century," the focus now of two years activity, was alive in a cage with no marker, on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, eight thousand miles away.