Moose made landfall at Ilha de Mozambique, an ancient island city built just offshore with the clear intention of protection. The Portuguese took over the island in the early 1500’s and the colonial architecture is striking with an austere yet feminine feeling. It’s necessary to sail past the massive fortress to shelter behind the island. Once in the shoreline has a human scale and is even inviting.

The tower of the church dominates over stores, residences and the refurbished governor’s mansion. But there is a run-down dilapidated air to the town; it reminds me of Havana. And it has achieved its romantically down-at-the-heels appearance by precisely the same mechanism: socialism. After independence from Portugal the inhabitants were reduced to pulling up the paving stones from the streets to build shelters, and it today creates an odd impression to see a swirling dusty noonday street flanked by elegant buildings. In fact Mozambique, at least the small slice we saw along the coast, is quite full of contrasts.

The country is poor. A working man will earn one or two dollars a day, and few have work. As a visitor, even a barefoot yachtie, you are wealthy in terms which can only be estimated. We found, in the face of this disparity, that people fell into two groups: those who offered whatever services they could for cash or trade and those who were shameless beggars. As a footnote let me add that the most aggressive of the beggars were not thin or sickly, they were usually quite sleek and when they rubbed their bellies, to indicate that they urgently required food, they had to laugh themselves when I mimicked the gesture on my similarly generous midsection.

Officialdom also is poor, and staggeringly creative in their conception of fees, tariffs and charges. We are not as a rule familiar with the notion of negotiating the immigration fees upon clearing in. It is a useful system though because the officials in the next port will not recognize the stamp given up the coast and will have an entire new set of requirements, with attendant charges. Once we cottoned on to this situation we attempted to get small, but it isn’t so easy to hide a honky in Africa…especially one arriving on a yacht.

The coastline going south from Ilha de Mozambique isn’t generous with its anchorages; most small islands will have protection on the north side and heavy coral on the other; consequently when the wind shifts from strong southerly to strong northerly - its two favorite tunes - you are caught on a lee shore with a long fetch coming down on it. We sat out a night in 25 knots with a 5 foot sea, taking green water over the bow… at anchor! As you go further south the magnitude and volatility of the weather systems increase. We had a one-side-favored anchorage at Ilha Casurina, a small sandy island covered in these pine-like trees. There was a tiny camp of fishermen on the side away from our anchorage – which should probably have indicated something to a thoughtful person. They had a few remnants of nets and lines but beyond that they had fundamentally nothing; one man my age stood in a T shirt and a pair of underwear; it was what he had. They came and stood around us when we went ashore, never asking for anything, but since Swahili would have been the lingua franca, had we spoken it, we were largely without conversation. That notwithstanding we communicated quite well.

One day, when we were cruising in the dinghy, we found a young fellow snorkeling and spearing fish. He was diving without fins. Later he offered two lobsters for trade, and we had brought in a bag of rice. But the rice was only a handful; we had only intended to use it to show that we had it to trade. However he put on a reluctant but philosophical smile and did the deal. I felt I’d been unfair.

Back on Moose I rummaged in the lazarette and came up with a pair of diving booties and fins that we had kept for a hypothetical visiting snorkeler. In 10 years that person had as yet not materialized so I took them ashore the next morning in response to a distant hail from the beach. My friend was there with more lobsters and he helped me pull the dinghy up the slope. As he did so he cast a quick eye over the fins on the floor. When I indicated that he should sit down and try on the booties he just beamed. It is extremely satisfying when something of marginal importance to one person is a treasure to another. I actually felt so good I fixed up a speargun that I never used and gave it to him the next day when he and the man in the underwear met us on the beach.

A few days later found us a several hundred miles down the coast running with a firm north wind from behind and headed toward a shoreline that was only sand banks and breaking waves; sweet, but I reckoned that my karma was at an all time high, since the day we left Ilha Casurina I took the dinghy over to the fishing camp and gave a pair of Nautilus shorts to the fellow in the underwear.

We were making landfall at Inhambane; a large bay with more sand banks than water and what water there was was ripped with tidal currents and pockets of overfalls. It’s always an uneasy thing to take a boat that is safely in deep water and bring her in toward obvious danger. All I could make out was that there was a spot where the surf wasn’t breaking, that would be the deep water we would need to cross the bar. The only problem was that chart datum said that the deep water was .8 of a meter, and since Moose draws 2 meters of water there was a definite shortfall. Chart datum is of course the lowest possible depth – when all the planets in the solar system lined up behind the moon on a spring tide and sucked the water, that was over the bar, elsewhere.

We blew in, surging at seven knots, tide and wind up the tail-pipe and scrupulously following the fourteen waypoints on the GPS; it really must have been fun in the old days. But what did Dr Johnson say, “…anyone who would go to sea for fun would go to hell for a diversion.” We threaded our way up the bay to a place called Linga Linga (probably because it resembles a long tongue) and anchored ten minutes before the wind went up to 30 knots and stayed there for the next two days.

When the wind subsided we ventured down a further ten miles or so to the city of Inhambane by speedboat. The city was a colonial provincial capital and is today a well laid out place with wide avenues and pleasant parks. The architecture is chiefly from the late 1800’s and has a leisure that corresponds with the Victorian style. Markets were full of fresh produce and even after the political adventurism of the previous decades there remains a feeling of productivity. It must have been very nice to live here in the colonial period…especially if you were white.

We stayed very small during our visit and had no interaction with the officials and consequently would have returned back to the boat with no unexpected expenses, had not our boat drivers decided to re-negotiate the contract at the halfway point. This was eventually resolved into a lose/lose arrangement; it is apparently bad form to mention all the costs on the front end because it may be prejudicial to the acceptance of the contract. It seems a local phenomenon because the next day we went ashore to a lodge to buy diesel at a set price, which was honored, but a $30 charge was brought up on the grounds that the fuel was obtained at some distant location. At the end of the day all that really matters is the answer to this question: is it a good deal or not? We speculated that contract law at the local business school must be taught at lunch.

Looking back at Mozambique from the vantage of South Africa I’d say it was a good experience. If it’s on your route, visit it; as the Spanish say, “Lo que no mata, engorda.”

Whales and Whales

It’s not everyday that you see something fully novel and utterly inexplicable. I’d gone below to get a book.  I was down for five or six minutes when I got an odd feeling that I should get back on deck. I went up the companionway ladder and took a scan forward; well really I would have taken that scan if there wasn’t a tail just ahead and a hair to starboard. It was a whale tail and I knew from many sightings along this coast that it would dive momentarily; after all we were approaching with the motor running. It was sticking straight up in the air, perhaps to a height of ten or twelve feet, and it was absolutely motionless, looking vaguely like a plastic palm tree. The tips of the flukes were held tense and curled rigidly upward. We sailed fifty feet from the tail and it didn’t dive, it didn’t flinch. The depth in the area was around 100 feet. We sailed past and for another fifteen minutes I watched it remain motionless. I was really at a loss to explain this behavior.

Irene’s theory was that it was a teenage whale and there was a group of other whale-teens hanging around watching this guy show off by standing on his head. Among the people I queried the best response to the question “why?” was, “…because he could.”

What do you think?