The Turtle

I keep retrieving the old photo albums from my father's Arab chest and browsing through them, sometimes finding pictures of events I had completely forgotten about - as on this page, in an album which my mother made for either my brother or me to take back to school in England, presumably to remind us of the places which were constantly in our minds.

The boat in the picture is an ngalowa, the small, elegant local fishing boat of Africa's east coast. As a boy, when I saw one returning to the beach from a fishing trip, I was drawn to it like a magnet: perhaps this was my Norfolk fisherman genes asserting themselves. 

Most of the fishermen, particularly those going out during the day, offloaded a catch of relatively small fish but occasionally something much bigger came ashore. By any standards....

....this turtle was an exceptional catch. The ngalowa it's wedged into is larger than average, suggesting more than one man went out in it - and they would need every man they had to haul it aboard without turning the boat over.

I remember the day well, not so much for the turtle - I did feel very sorry for it - but for the bloody butchering that followed after they had dragged it out onto the sands.