There’s been so much going on Pia and I are both writing blog posts today!

We are getting some great information from the interviews.  This week we focused on ‘key informants’ (makes them sound like prison rats!) – people who should have a lot to say about the sea.  One of the questions we ask ‘do you know of any rules or regulations related to the sea?’.  Most people say they have heard about the ban on turtle fishing, and when we ask if this rule is enforced, the response is generally ‘yes’ because there was this one guy who got caught with turtle meat and had to pay an $8000 fine!… I’ll come back to this..

Somebody asked what we do all day……..So, we’ve been happily driving around introducing ourselves, arranging interviews, conducting interviews and entering the data.  We are using Dragon software which is a headphone you speak into and it types out what you say – very cool.  Pia and I both have sore throats because we are literally talking ALL day 😉  About 5:00pm we’ll go down to the beach, have a beer, maybe some dinner and try and pick up some more interviews for the next day.  Lately we’ve had quite a few interviews later in the evening.  We also use the time to catch up on work e-mails, make plans for the community meetings, write reports / blogs / plans etc.

Dawn – the lovely lady who we rent our car and villa from, put us in touch with her brother who is a fisherman.  One conversation over the phone with Pia and he were hooked on each other.  We were immediately invited around for dinner on Friday night!  This guy is a REAL character, kinda got the gay hospitality thing going on, tells tales like a sea dog, hates authority and is funny as hell.  We laugh our way through the evening with his random assortment of guests eating freshly prepared creole snapper, veggies, passion fruit lassi’s, sweet potato and some kind of polenta thing made by rolling your hips around.  He made us drink his special tea made from Moringa and lemongrass (look it up – it has amazing properties including 100’s of health benefits and is an aphrodisiac).  We never actually got to the interview but the conversation comes round to fishing…. He gets his spear gun out from under the bed, talks about the fish he catches and mentions that turtle meat is soooo sweet… then they all laugh…. And it suddenly clicks!  The first fricking dinner we go to is at the house of the guy everyone’s been talking about – the fool that got caught with turtle meat!  Not the best image for two marine conservationists!!  He said it was his wife – a judge from Dominica who he was going through a divorce with who called the fisheries department to dob him in as an act of revenge.  He was so animated saying that the governor, the chief magistrate and the chief minister had all been around his house for thanksgiving eating turtle a few months before!  All in all a wonderful night.

I suppose I should briefly mention that Saturday we hired a great, young Anguillan to work with us on the surveys, we saw a man, go at another ma,n on the beach with a machete (some kind of family feud).  We also went to the pump house for dinner, met some lovely people, danced to the live band, and Pia transfixed the locals with her German hips! 😉  “Keep circular movements between the chest and the knees”!