Diving from a Dhow

While I was having dinner at The Smugglers Inn one evening, I was introduced to Dave, the owner of Sail-Away Dhows, who had lived in Vilanculos for more than 14 years, “waiting for the boom”, as he put it… He had two or three smallish dhows which he used to take tourists out to the islands for diving and exploring the reefs around Margoruque and Benguerra. He also sailed out on three and four day excursions to the island of Bazaruto further north, camping out on the mainland and other small islands…

I decided to spend some extra time in Vilanculos and figured a dhow trip and some diving would be an interesting way of spending a day, so made a booking and paid the US$85.00 fee for a day trip to Margoruque…

Preparing to cast off on the dhow to Margoruque….

Early on Sunday morning, I hopped onto the bike and rode the short distance to Dave’s place to meet the other eight people who would be my shipmates for the day… There were five Portuguese girls from Johannesburg, a Dutch couple who worked on contract in South Africa and a South African couple on leave… We were fitted for masks, booties and fins, and then walked down to the beach a few hundred metres away, to the waiting dhow… There were three crew members, consisting of an interpreter-cum-guide, a cook and the skipper… Near the stern of the dhow was a large sandbox, which served as the “kitchen”… An old metal kettle was set to boil on a bed of hot coals, and before long, a morning cup of coffee was served to all on board… I sat watching the people around me, wondering what they thought of all this… The Dutch couple seemed intrigued by the fact that a fire was burning on board a wooden sailboat! The Portuguese girls spent the hour long trip across the bay to the island, chatting to the crew and enquiring about the lunch menu… The rest of us made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the wooden benches bolted to the gunwales, and enjoyed the views from where we reclined. A small ferry which serves the islands, passed us on its way back to the harbour at Vilanculos, the crew waving merrily as it cruised by…

Island ferry passes by as we motor out to our diving destination on Margoruque…

The bay was no deeper than one or two metres at most, and we were able to see down to the ocean floor, all the way across to the island. As we got closer, we noticed the burnt-out ruins of the lodge which had caught fire just a few days earlier… Apparently this lodge had only just been completed and other parts of it were still being built when the fire started… Margoruque is part of the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park, and only a limited number of lodges are permitted to be built on these islands. A small village is perched on the seaward side of the island, and I assume the labour that worked on the building, and would later work in the lodge, would be drawn from here.

Fisherman wandered up and down the shoreline, looking for octopus and other crustaceans… A park ranger also patrolled the shoreline, ensuring that no shells and other protected species were removed by the tourists arriving to dive and walk around on the island’s pristine beaches…

The dhow turned north for a few hundred metres, then turned south again and drifted to a gentle stop against the rocky reef. One of the crew jumped onto the rocks carrying an anchor which he wedged into the sand. We grabbed our diving gear and began the long walk along the shore to a point about a kilometre away, where we then scrambled over the rocks, kitted up and leapt down into the turquoise waters… I drifted back towards the dhow, taking over an hour to reach it in the gentle currents which ran northwards towards Benguerra Island… It had been a very long time since I had donned mask, fins and snorkel, but within minutes I was as comfortable as I had ever been, when I used to dive on a very regular basis…

The burnt out remains of the Margoruque Lodge….

I had forgotten how beautiful the various reef fish were, and I recognized many of them from my dives on the reefs of Sodwana, Mauritius and Reunion Island, and was able to name some of them when the other divers surfaced to ask what they were… We saw Angelfish, Wrasses, Trigger Fish, Clownfish, Parrotfish and Boxfish, and many more, which I could not remember the names of… Large shoals of fish surrounded us at times, and we also came across a number of schools of tiny silver and blue fish, hiding under the overhangs and in the caves of the reef…

I was in my element, and was disappointed to see the prow of our boat looming up in the clear waters. A few of us decided to keep going along the reef, and passed the dhow, noticing how hundreds of fish were lurking under it, nibbling on the hull and resting in its shade. I hung onto the motor mountings for the longest time, watching them and tried to coax them closer by pretending to hold food out in my hand…

While I was doing this, one of the crew threw a bread-roll into the water close to my head, and in seconds I had hundreds of fish swirling around me…an amazing sight from both under and above the water… We drifted for another half hour and then clambered out onto the rocks and walked back towards where the dhow was anchored… The Portuguese girls had completed their dive and were getting ready to soak up the sun in the lagoon to the north of us… The Dutch couple had settled under the tarpaulin which had been erected by the crew to provide shade for us all…. It was blisteringly hot, and walking across the hot sand had us hopping and skipping in an attempt to avoid blistered feet…

Reed mats had been laid out under the tarpaulin and those who had not gone off to swim and tan, sat and chatted… Shells littered the beach, many of them broken by the reefs before they were washed up onto shore. We were however able to find conches, cowries and cones which had not been damaged… With the beady eye of the park ranger upon us, we knew we could not take any of them back with us and after “ooh-ing and aah-ing” at their beauty, left them where we had found them…

Another dhow had anchored close to ours by the time we completed out first drift dive along the reef…

The crew had meanwhile been preparing lunch and we waited in the shade, wondering what would be served up for us… While the cook chopped onions and tomatoes for the salad, the skipper and his mate carried a large bowl of rice and a covered silver dish up onto the beach and set it down on the table… The lid was lifted to reveal an aromatic and very tasty calamari stew!!! A large bowl of bread-rolls was also brought to the table with the salad, and we tucked into what was a wonderful meal… Slices of pineapple and peeled bananas were later brought to us, and a very large urn of pineapple juice was set down along with a batch of tin mugs… Paradise the easy way…

The cook prepared lunch for us. Note the calamari stew on the coals in the “sand-box” behind him…

Our meal was brought from the dhow to where we sat under the tarpaulin…

After lunch some of the girls chose to walk around the island, which we were told, would take them about two hours… That sounded far too strenuous for the rest of us and we decided to walk just as far as the northern point and swim back through the shallow lagoon…

The lagoon we walked and swam through after lunch….

Our “camp” on Margoruque, bikinis everywhere you looked… Joop and I were seriously outnumbered…

In some places the lagoon was deeper than two metres, and I had to swim with camera and cigarettes held up above the water in one hand, while paddling along with the other… The girls thought this was very funny, and kept leading me into deeper water to watch me struggle… The tide had turned by the time we got back to the dhow an hour later, and knowing that the other group would only be half way around the island by then, the rest of us decided to do another drift dive in the opposite direction to the one we had done in the morning… We got our gear, walked back along the rocks to the end of the point and lay in the water while the current carried us towards the dhow… The visibility was not as clear as it had been earlier, but we still managed to see many of the reef dwellers, including a very large Pink Parrotfish, which hung about, seemingly unconcerned by our presence…

Preparing to cast off on our return voyage to Vilanculos…

The “walkers” had not yet returned by the time we reached the dhow, and the crew were a little agitated… We packed all our gear back into the boat and sat waiting for them for about 15 minutes, and then just as we had decided to cast off and sail south around the island to look for them, we spied them coming across the beach a few hundred metres away… One look at them confirmed that we had made the right decision to swim and snorkel rather than “take a hike”… The girls were shattered!! The combination of heat and thick sand they had walked in had done them in completely… They fell asleep within minutes of clambering back into the dhow…

The sail was lowered and we set off back to Vilanculos. It took a little over an hour to cross the bay, and this was done mostly in silence… Joop and his girlfriend took turns sleeping on the large canvas bag that the sail had been kept in; the Portuguese girls slept in shifts; and the crew mumbled to themselves from time to time… I went to sit amongst them, almost falling into the coals in the “kitchen” in the process… We sat chatting about life in Mozambique, and they showed me how to use the sticks they had collected from the island to brush one’s teeth… Similar to the Gwarri bush used in the bushveld back in South Africa…

“Ronaldo” joins the crew in the stern to discuss the meaning of life….

We arrived back on the beach close to Dave’s house at a little after 5.00pm… His assistant was there to meet us with his Jack Russell puppy… We wearily dis-embarked by jumping down into the shallow water, our kit held high, and then dragged ourselves up the beach… After saying my goodbyes to everybody, I walked back to the house where I had left the “Big Fella”… I battled my way through the thick sand on the way back to Palmeiras, and went for a swim in the pool to cool off… The tide was coming in across the sand banks, and many of the skiffs and smaller vessels which had been left high and dry earlier, began floating up off the bottom and tugging at their mooring lines…

I went back out to buy some airtime and have a light meal at Smugglers, learning that Dave was having another two larger dhows built up on the Tanzanian border, close to Nacala… They would be ready in a few months time he advised, and then he would be looking for an intrepid group of folk to sail them down to Vilanculos… He said that under normal circumstances the voyage would take about ten days, but he was planning to explore the coastline south of Nacala and Beira on the way down, and planned to take about a month to do the trip… I signed up on the spot and we exchanged e-mail addresses so that he could advise me when to set off for the rendezvous in Nacala… I wouldn’t miss this for the world!!!!

Later that evening, as I watched the full moon rise up over the ocean, scattering diamonds over the bay in front of my cottage, I thought again about the folk back home and wondered what they were doing on this Sunday night… My girls would be preparing for school tomorrow and the week that lay ahead… I wished that they had been here today, to share the experiences I had revelled in… Maybe one day…

I rolled into bed, listening to the lap of the waves against the shore, the high-pitched squeaking of fruit bats skimming through the palm trees in the garden, and a few of the village dogs who were howling at the moon…. Could I, like Dave, spend fourteen years doing this…? Yeah…!! Of course I could!!!

Sail away, Dudes!!! Mozambique’s waiting…

Vilanculos harbour, various vessels rising up off the sand on the incoming tide….

© 2008 TBMH