Once I spotted an old anchor in the floor of the sea. I wasn’t even diving, I was snorkeling with a friend. The bottom was, probably, like a meter under us. I somehow recognized the shape, and managed to pried loose it from the bottom. I don’t even remember how we brought it to shore since the shank was about a meter, and from crown to fluke might have been 70 or 80 cmts. Our excitement might have help with extra adrenaline. We were snorkeling in Pampatar’s bay, a corner of the caribbean rich with tales of pirates, smugglers and storms. What if we did manage to get a pirate’s anchor? In the end we reckon that the anchor might have been few decades in the sea instead of few centuries. I remember myself peeling the layers and layers of coral, sponges and algae that covered it. We took it from that shore to Caracas, where I lived then, and few days after I settled it in the rooftop terrace of my house I started, with a hammer and a chisel, to get rid of whatever it wasn’t anchor. I believe that this was my first contact with the marine biology of the tropics. For every hit I gave with the hammer, even a week after, some new animal scurried away from the anchor. Anemones hidden in the curves of a coral that was covered by another coral, covered in calcium depositing algae. A polyquetum that had survived on the humidity trapped under the third layer of crust, and that was totally surprised at finding itself hundred of kilometers away from the sea. The tropics are not exuberant in our imagination. The tropics teem with life that is beyond the imagination of any template country dweller.
Or diver.
Today I dived in the lake Vinkeveen, between my city Utrecht and Amsterdam. I did not find an anchor, but the bowl of an old meerschaum pipe, or, on second thoughts, the bowl of a clay one. It is about 5 cmts long, and 2 wide. It had few tiny mussels attached to it, and that was all. That lake was historically used as a source of peat, and it is likely that the workers drop their pipes with frequency in it. Closer to the bowl there was a crayfish. And today we spotted about 4 freshwater jellyfish which, at least for me, is really something new. Besides this, in the hour that we expend under water we might have spotted 3 or 4 kinds of fishes, a sponge, and the crayfish.
The lakes of the Netherlands are not the caribbean sea.
But I wonder if it matters. Right now I am regretting that I did not expend more time enjoying the pulsing of the jellyfish. I took some photos, but why did I not took a video? There is something fundamentally foreign, alien, to the way a jellyfish moves. I started wondering about how selection could produce such differences, just imagine a jellyfish pulsating and a normal fish moving its fins. There is nothing in common between those ways of moving! Half way the dive we surfaced, and we realized that we have never before swam so far away from our entry point. We submerged again, and structures that I could not recognize stuck out of the lake floor. What were those things? remains of an old pier? relatively modern chain, covered in algae? the remaining poles of an ancient wreck? I marked the spot to get back to it. Getting closer to our exit point, a school of juvenile Perca fluviatilis first, and then another made by the juveniles of Rutilus rutilus accompanied us. There might have been few hundred fishes in each.
When I am not typing, the fingers of my right hand slide to touch the founded bowl. I can hardly imagine something more different than an anchor found in the sea. And yet, both my anchor and my pipe’s bowl tell the story of workers, fishermen and turf cutters, life’s entangled with the vagaries of the water, and the even worse vagaries of their employers.
And after all, plenty of pirates of the caribbean smoked a dutch pie, didn’t they?