Banana Islands/ Sierra Leone – While the sun is absent on the horizon, Emmanuel Prat pulls a worn rope to operate its boat engine, to start with the call of life. Its wooden boat, painted in white and dull blue, makes its way across the dark water to extend look. And around him he hears the fruit bats as they hover over the heads.
Pratt, 35, is a diver who is experienced in hunting sea option from Banana Island, an archipelago in Sierra Leone inhabited by about 500 people. For 15 years, he was supporting himself by searching at the ocean bottom for these huge marine -like organisms.
These objects are hidden in silt during the day and go out at night to move across the ocean floor, to feed on the decomposing materials. On the back of the boat, the 25-year-old Omladi Jones also sits sweat in the full-time diving suit- on the tip of the boat and looks at the dark water.
After 10 minutes, the younger diver refers to Prat, asking the engine to stop the engine in preparation for diving. Jones blow into a mask, hold a lamp dedicated to underwater use and wrap the breathing hose around its waist.
The bottom of the sea surrounding the small archipelago covered with herbs was full of sea cucumber. Nowadays, these creatures have become rare and scattered.
Free diving is no longer possible. Prat and Jones diving for a longer period of time, to find their hunting.
The two hunters resorted to “dive with heuka”, a temporary alternative in which the air is pumped from a diesel generator on the boat through a plastic hose. It is a fragile life line fraught with risks. The engines used in it are often old and their air is easily contaminated with diesel fumes. Experts confirm that it is much more dangerous than diving using equipment or free diving.
While vibrating the diesel engine nourishing its air system in the boat, Jones slips quietly from the edge to black water. It is followed by a yellow hose while swimming away from the boat. After a few minutes, his lamp formed a column of light, extending to the sea floor.
Prat sits on the boat, and the cigarette hangs between his lips, and his eyes are installed on the point where the Jones lamp lights. “The sea option runs out,” he says.
In the past, the two hunters brought dozens of buckets from the sea cucumber in one night, but now they are fighting to find a little. Pratt says that divers rarely earn more than $ 40 a day, which is almost not enough to cover fuel costs or rent some diving equipment.
Shortly after Jones leaving the boat, his lamp lights up to indicate that he is ready to swim again. When he reaches the boat, he raises himself on the side with its arms. In one of his hands he holds the lamp, and in the other a small brown sea cucumber.
Pratt takes his role and disappears in dark waters. It later appears in a marine option, but divers are uncomfortable. After a few hours in the sea, they return to the marina with a meager hunting of no more than 3 pieces.
Above them, the moon throws almost complete white shine over the water and lightly light the road to the house.