Recollections of the Past 30 years pursuing Coelacanths
Jerome Hamlin, creator dinofish.com
Arriving in the Comoros, June,1989, the action began immediately. Before we disembarked the aircraft, the Belgian manager of the hotel we stayed at came on board the Air France 747 to coordinate the plane's food service. Spying me he alerted that a coelacanth had recently been caught and placed in Jean Louis Gerod's cage. A new fish, not the one I had learned of earlier in the year. The divers were about to bring up the cage. We left our gear at the hotel, and then returned, cameras in hand, to the location of the catch, a town not far from the airport.
What we saw was a sociological event. Thousands of Comorians lined the shore as the divers brought up the cage. I had a semi water proof SONY 8mm video camera and was able to grab snatches of the divers and the fish, an enormous female, as they brought her in. She was dead. You could tell from the cloudy eyes. She also seemed to have rust smudges around the snout where she had been banging against the cage. It took three divers to carry her up to the back of a pickup. Then they all left. As night fell, we were alone with the giant fish and the truck. They assumed it was for me. I was not in a position to process another dead coelacanth. Stephen, my helper made preliminary measurements, and then we directed the truck to deposit the fish at the Moroni government freezer room, where the other bycatches were piling up.
We had brought with us a small aquarium and the equipment to run it. We set this up as a first order of businesss at the Moroni science and culture museum (C.N.D.R.S.) For a couple of years after, this tank was maintained with local reef fishes, and so I had the consolation of establishing the first public aquarium in the Comoros!
Stephen, one of Mombassa's sons, and another helper construct our trap from local hardware. It was shaped like a giant minnow trap with funnel entrances at both ends- a design I had used in Canada as a child.
The Comoros are a relatively small place, and so you become aware rather quickly as to what is going on. Emissaries of the forth coming Toba Aquarium Expedition were there, attending the appropriate government meetings and already leaving off advance gear. If they saw me, I was carefully avoided. "The Japanese know how to do it." the director of a newly instituted Peace Corp contingent told me scornfully at a Fourth of July get together the U.S. Consulate had organized.. Meanwhile, Stephen and I collected local materials and began constructing our coelacanth trap.
When the trap was ready for deployment, Mombassa purchased some bait of fish parts such as local fishermen use in their smaller traps, to hang from a line inside and we set out at night by boat aways down the coast to a well known coelacanth area. The trap was attached to a strong line to allow it to be pulled back up. To avoid the marker on the surface being stolen by other fishermen, we tied the line to a bouyannt bannana tree trunk, which presumably would be of no value to anyone but ourselves. Now we returned to the hotel to wait out the next couple of days and give fish a chance to enter the trap. But the weather was very poor the next few days and the seas rough. This was winter in the Comoros. When we ventured back down to the trap area nothing was to be seen floating on the surface. The tree trunk marker was gone!
