Travels of a Fish Nut

I'm off again. I'm due to be out for between 3 and 5 weeks depending on the fishing. I'll write when I get back.

One dark and cloudy night we had a rain of birds. I’m not exaggerating (much!). It was a few days before new moon and the sky was incredibly dark. Our boat (as all boats do) had bright deck lights and when I came out of the factory around midnight birds were on deck and flying all around the boat like moths attracted to a flame and, like moths, hurt themselves in the process. They would fly towards the light which was attached to a wall and then fly into the wall. I spent some time picking the birds up and letting them fly off until I realised it was pointless, particularly when I let one go only for it to fly right back into the lights and landed on deck clearly stunned. The next morning I went out and caught in nets on deck and hidden around the boat. Some had got around the winches for the warp cable and had got covered in oil. Luckily we were heading back to drop someone off in Stanley that day so I gave them to a friend who then gave them to Falklands Conservation. Unfortunately (...

I’ve just come back from a few weeks on a squid trawler. We were fishing near Beauchene for a lot of the time, which is an island to the south of the main groups of the Falkland Islands although it’s still part of the Falklands. It’s uninhabited and is a wildlife sanctuary with visits being strictly controlled. Fishing around this area brings lots of birds to the boat (more on those later) due to the large breeding colonies. For two days we had peales dolphins around our boat. On the first day they came and visited up for a few hours but on the second day they followed us all afternoon and into the evening. The numbers grew from about 10 on the first day to at least 20 on the second day. The number wasn’t the only thing that was surprising – their behaviour was incredible. They were highly active, jumping out of the water repetitively (I counted one jumping 35 times and it had already jumped at least 10 times before I started counting!); swimming upside down and slapping their tail fin...

When you need your grass cut the normal thing to do is get the lawnmower out. But what if you don’t have one? In the Falklands this isn’t a problem as people are always looking to loan out their environmentally friendly lawnmowers and it doesn’t cost anything. In fact, you do them a favour! There is a real shortage of good grazing in and around Stanley but lots of people have horses. This leads to the predicament of what to feed them. During the winter this means they are often turned free to a large extent to roam over commons or islands. During the summer the predicament is lessened somewhat as people have gardens with rapidly-growing grass. The two problems – lawns that need mowing and horses that need feeding happily solve each other by putting one with the other. And so it is that we sometimes have horses in our garden! In February we had an old friend back, accompanied by a new friend. Samira, a grey mare, had come to graze just before christmas. At the time she was heavily pregn...

At the end of January I went with some friends into Camp for the weekend. One of my friends was leaving the islands to go travelling and had hired a house for the weekend for a party. It was in the middle of nowhere about an hour’s drive or so from North Arm, a small settlement in Lafonia. I had a great time and got to try out my new camping gear which was great. The best bit, though, was going to the beach which was a 15 minute drive from the house. The beach had been the site of a massive pilot whale stranding about 5 or 6 years ago. Some of the skeletons still litter the beach, although a lot have been taken by collectors. The bones got better the further you went along the beach as you went further than most people would be bothered to go. Many of the skulls had been looted for their teeth, but eventually we came across some with jaws largely intact. As we went further along the beach the skeletons got better and better until we came across a few that were largely complete. Some ...

Ages ago (November 2007 to be precise) I found a fish on a boat that I recognised as an anglerfish but couldn’t immediately identify. I took some photos then froze it and took it back to Stanley for identification. When I showed it to people no-one knew what it was. This was surprising to me as it was only my second boat and I’d apparently found something new. I tried identifying it but didn’t get very far and my fish languished in formalehyde for several months. Then I was given the name of an expert who I could contact to help with the identification. He gave me some advice and I identified the fish as a Himantolophus appelii. It hadn’t been reported this far south before, giving me the opportunity to write a short article for publication to tell anyone interested that the species was found further south than previously thought. I got the paper written and sent to a journal and got the reviewers’ comments in my last week of my last contract. I was told that my fish, by now nicknamed ...

I’m sorry the posts have been rather lacking in quantity recently. I have been meaning to write but haven’t been in the mood. For those who haven’t heard, my uncle, Dave, died suddenly just before I got home for Christmas. It came as a huge shock and I’m still coming to terms with the loss. I’ve written a few posts while I was on my last boat which I’ll be posting now. Hopefully this will make up for the silence.

For my last day one of the local’s had offered to take me to Green Mountain. Green mountain is, as it’s name suggests green. In most places this wouldn’t be worthy of comment but on Ascension it makes the mountain an oasis, a place of welcome shade. The drive up green mountain is a perilous affair, with blind hairpin corners every couple of hundred metres. The view from the top is spectacular with the whole of the island laid out below you. In the photo below you can just about see Georgetown, the couple of white spots on the coast near the centre of the photo. The domed hill to the right separates Georgetown from Comfortless Cove . The village in the foreground is Two Boats. To the far left of the photo is the army base and part of the runway may be visible (I can’t remember) as the light patch partly hidden by a hill. Green mountain is covered in foliage, some native, some introduced. Ginger was prolific and in flower. People used to live on the mountain and a large house had gardens...

Many places with a lot of volcanic activity have places supposedly inhabited by the devil. Ascension is no different. There’s the devil’s race-track, the devil’s ashpit and a couple of other devil-related sites. On the third day I got invited to join a group of people on their tour of a couple of these tourist attractions which I readily accepted. The first place we headed to was the devil’s racetrack. This is a caldera, the basin often found at top of volcanoes. Many are lakes. Lake Taupo in New Zealand is a caldera from a huge volcano which exploded thousands of years ago. The caldera on Ascension is dry because it’s on a island at the equator so water isn’t readily available. Tourist maps of ascension are pretty limited in their detail and the first challenge we encountered was finding this tourist attraction. Every leaflet mentioned it so we thought it should be easy to find. It wasn’t, but we eventually found the ‘carpark’ and pulled in. The next challenge was reaching the place. ...