Sandy Islands

Yesterday, the school closed at midday to avoid taking any risks linked to demonstrations, road-blocking, car-burning or stone-throwing, which seem to have become rather fashionable local pastimes.

Faced with a long week-end, as Tuesday – 1^st of November, All Saints’ Day – is a bank holiday and I don’t have any lessons on Mondays or Wednesdays, I was thinking about all the wonderful sleeping-in I was going to be able to do when the phone rang. It was a colleague called Philippe, with whom I’ve already been out to see whales and scuba dive, who told me another colleague was organising a boat trip the next day and had a space left in the boat if I was interested. Come to Agathe’s house at 8.15 a.m. There went sleep-in number one.

We set off this morning, eight of us in a boat rented by Agathe, a lovely English teacher at my school who has been teaching in Mayotte for eight years and knows the country very well, and her husband Hervé, a maths teacher at the same school and also a trained scuba-diving instructor, who is planning to give up teaching maths, move to Vanuatu and open a scuba-diving club.

We went up to the north of the island to see the îlots de sable blanc, small “islands” of beautiful white sand which become visible at low tide. We had to wait a while to see anything, the time it took for the tide to go down, and at a sea level of roughly three metres, a white blob of sand slowly emerged from nowhere.

At low tide, lumps of coral also become visible below the surface, at a reachable distance with just a mask and either a tuba or just holding your breath (which was my case, as I’m rubbish with a tuba). Lumps of coral which housed pretty fish of all colours, smaller fish than could be seen by going down deeper, but still… blue, orange, yellow, black fish, hard and soft corals, anemones… From where we’d anchored the boat, we could easily swim to a few lumps of coral and reach the sandy island on the other side. It was a more of a small patch of sand than an island in itself, but I like the idea of a temporary beach in clear blue sea which is only there for a few hours before it disappears again.

We ate breakfast and lunch together between coral-gazing and going onto the sand, then Hervé offered to take a few of us scuba-diving. He’d rented oxygen bottles and diving costumes, which are hard work to pull on – I tried to put a full-length one on and couldn’t manage it, so fell back on the short-legged one – and took two of us in turn to a depth of about six metres. There were much bigger fish down there, clever fish with large black spots on their tail to persuade enemies that they were made backwards, and Lionel, another English teacher who also went scuba-diving, swore he saw a lobster or creature of the lobster family. I had problems keeping my balance this time, kept on turning upside-down without meaning to and swerving to one side. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my arms and legs so didn’t really do much, then got told off for not “palming” (swimming with my legs) enough, because it meant the monitor had to do all the work. That would apparently also have helped with my balance problem. He let me go at one point to take a photo, and my legs promptly went up and over my head, leaving me upside down and staring at nothing. I now know I swim like a turtle : preferably upside down, arms and legs flailing.