A diary: Crab catching on a F$3 million island

A day on Yasalaga Islet,
Nadi,
Fiji Islands.

Words and Pictures by Dionisia Tabureguci


Caption: "John the Cannibal" holds out a mud crab we caught that day!


Sunday August 7, 2005

YASALAGA is a tiny island flanking multimillion-dollar Denarau in Nadi, Fiji’s Gold-Coast-in-the-making. We didn’t need to get to this islet on a boat, much to my surprise. It used to be an island before that area was reclaimed and the thing that strikes us most about it is how different it is from its hotshot neighbour. There are no golf greens, no cultured turfs, no well-manicured lawns. The landscape is unplanned, the dwellings are as close to nature as dwellings could be. Even this sun-filled slow Sunday morning feels different here than 100 meters away. If this place ever gets chalked into a list of choice for different experiences, Yasalaga is ideal for just lazing around coconut groves, watching tiny ripples in the river and not caring at all what time of the day it is. Its very naturalness is what puts us instantly at ease. One could easily understand why someone would want to pay F$3 million for this piece of paradise, an offer that was made not long before our visit. We are here to catch mud crabs, not buy the island and the truth is, even if we could afford it, John the Cannibal will not sell it. “This island has been in my family for generations and I promised my father that I won’t sell it so it’s not for sale,” his eyes lights up as he sweetly smiles afterwards when we are savouring our prized catch.
‘John the Cannibal’ is a trade name for this Nadi native who is also of Indo-Fijian extraction. With the help of his good friend Captain Paul McCulloch from Robinson Crusoe island (that is a champion backpacking story), John had started what he calls the “3hr Crab and Culture Tour” and it is this tour that we are here to try out today. The cost: $150 per person. The experience: it depends on the expectation. We have come with none. John is somewhere in the bure which is also home to his wife and two children and as we wait for him to take us on his “jungle cruise”, I savour the quiet peacefulness of the island, thinking how easy it can be for one to simply slip in between the moments of time and be happily lost forever.
Finally, Capt. Paul – he drops in now and then to see his friend - nods over to the bure to indicate that John the Cannibal is ready. We all turn to look. The attire catches my eye.
One could be forgiven for thinking that our host might have forgotten to get himself Westernised.
I get this queasy feeling thinking that either he has stepped out of the history books or we all have made a quantum jump to the past.

JOHN the Cannibal confidently looks us over. He is wearing a thick brown grass skirt with a cloth of tapa-design around his waist. The strip of cloth and grass skirt are held together by a coil of magimagi, fastened by two cowry shells. Around his ankles and upper arms are grass strapping that complement the boar’s tusk that hang around his neck.
His face is set in stone as he frowns from beneath his midnight-black Afro hair, his generously oiled dark brown skin shimmering in the sun. With one swoop, he lugs a Fijian war-club over his shoulder and just when you begin to wonder if he is also going to use it, he breaks into a smile and warmly greets us with a hearty “Bula!”. “Welcome to Yasalaga,” he booms, then proceeds to usher us into a small open bure.
John goes through this process every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday if he has visitors for the tour. “The Fiji Backpackers Association have used him quite a lot,” Capt Paul explains. The guests are first taken through a short “yaqona” (kava) ritual, in which John formally welcomes them to the island. It takes our six-member group only a few minutes to “feel welcomed”. A bowl each of that tribal concoction and we are all chatty, all loosened up.
“This is Junior Cannibal,” John gestures towards his seven-year-old son who is wearing a less elaborate matching costume. We laugh at the pun. “What we are showing you here is the yaqona ceremony which our forefathers performed to welcome visitors,” John says after a moment to smile at Junior Cannibal. “We are now performing it to welcome you to our shores.”
The visitors grunt in approval.

AFTER the ceremony, my two friends and I join Hitoshi, Takako and Yuka to check out the compound and follow John to the plantation. We are going to pull out a few sticks of cassava for the lovo (earth oven, traditionally used by Fijians to cook food – still used today). Inside the bure, John’s wife and niece have already prepared the chicken, fish and dalo (taro) for the lovo and we brought in the cassava to add to the feast. I am keeping an open mind. It may feel all too simple but this is the very reasoning behind the tour, which is for visitors to understand how things were done in the olden days where life was simple and agrarian based. In a way, John the Cannibal is still living a life in which the Fijian has not changed very much.
At the lovo pit, the fire is raging, heating up stones to be used to cook the food buried in earth. We sit around near the pit while John explains his way through the process. But much of our attention is focused on the fish. Clearly, the poor creatures are a delicacy not just in Fiji. The Japanese also savours them.

IT’S almost noon and we finally step onto the Tabu Tabu Soro, John’s catamaran, which had he bought from the Fiji museum and then modified for this purpose.
The highlight of the tour is just beginning. We are going to catch some crabs! I’ve done this before and today in Yasalaga, I look forward to fixing up a crab trap myself.
To quench our thirst, John brings on board a few cans of cold beer and soft drinks. Then he makes his way to the aft and grabs hold of a pole to steer the vessel while Tui, his assistant, is in the front to guide us to the traps. My expectation is a little too high. “We prepared and set the traps early this morning,” John informs us, dashing my hope of fiddling around with the bait. “We put in the traps when the tide came in so when tide comes out again, the crabs come down to eat and that is when we hope to catch them.” The tide is on its way out right now. John points upstream to the blob of Styrofoam, which marks a trap. “Let’s go there and check that one.” We all gasp as Tui pulls up the trap. Less than ten minutes after we left the dock, we are pulling up seven crab traps onto the boat, each clearly carrying a good-sized prize, teasing our empty stomachs. Each time a trap is hauled on board, the Japanese women squeal in delight. John carefully picks a crab from inside the wire contraptions and holds out a thin wooden pick. “I am just going to push this here…” he strikes the instrument straight through the middle of the crab’s body, a little too suddenly, launching the critter into a painful convulsion while we are momentarily lobotomised.

“THIS will kill the crab and make it safe for you to hold it,” John explains the wooden pick trick. Not being an avid crustacean feeder myself, I wonder at that moment if I should be taking part in this practise of killing and then eating crabs. Takako’s remark rings in my ear. “Oh,” she exclaims, “I feel sorry but I want to eat it.” My friend, with his smattering of Japanese, looks at the crabs with an evil glint in his eyes: “Onako pekopeko,” he says to Takako. “It’s Japanese for: ‘I’m very hungry’,” he explains when he sees my puzzled expression.
That settles it. The crab is going to the pot and I am going to partake in this meal.
Caption: Our new Japanese friends Hitoshi, Takako and Yuka totally enjoyed their crab feast!

MUCH can be said about Yasalaga and its crab tour that one has not seen in a typical tourist brochure. This must not be mistaken as a trekking adventure or sightseeing cruise where the visitor gets to enjoy Fiji’s natural beauty. Guided by John the Cannibal, the excursion for me was pretty much a do-it-yourself getting back to simple living exercise. We helped uproot our own crops, we watched the food being prepared, we took to the river for the crabs and got back in time for the lovo to cook. That was as simple as how the old world was lived. By the time lunch was served, we were all citizens of the island, merrily blending two worlds with the clinking of champagne glasses over the firm flesh of mud crabs and lovo feast and an enterprising native by the name of John the Cannibal standing by and watching us display our ravenous appetites.
By the time they sang ‘Isa Lei’, no one was really in the mood to leave.


Caption: John sings "Isa Lei", the Fijian song of farewell

NOTE: This article was published as: "Crab Catching" in Islands, the Complimentary Inflight Magazine for Air Pacific, Fiji's national airline; pp 24-35, Volume 1, 2006 edition. 

Islands is a publication in the Islands Business International portfolio.

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Study complete on third longest barrier reef in the world

WWF Pacific releases Great Sea Reef survey report

Photo Caption: Divers counting fish in the GSR. Photo supplied by WWF Pacific's Suva office.


By Dionisia Tabureguci

FIJI’s marine scientists have, for the first time, surveyed and documented the marine ecosystem of Fiji’s Great Sea Reef (GSR), the third longest continuous barrier reef system in the world and which is said to stretch a distance of some 150 kilometres along the Northern tip of Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island.
The exercise, which culminated into the launch last month of its report titled: “Fiji’s Great Sea Reef – The First Marine Biodiversity Survey of Cakaulevu and Associated Coastal Habits”, has also provided new insights into the previously lesser understood marine life in the reef system and re-emphasised the need to document Fiji’s relatively unknown marine and reef systems.
With funding support from Vodafone Fiji Foundation, the project was administered by the Worldwide Fund For Nature’s Fiji Country Programme (WWF FCP) and also financially and technically supported by a number of organizations including the University of the South Pacific’s Institute of Applied Sciences, the Packard Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
“This survey is the first ever systematic effort to document the marine biodiversity of this reef, locally known as Cakaulevu,” said WWF FCP in a statement. “Findings of the survey include the GSR having 55 percent of the known coral reef fish in Fiji, 74 percent of the known coral species in Fiji, 40 percent of all known marine flora in Fiji and 44 percent of Fiji’s endemic reef species.” The 12-day survey expedition was carried out in December 2004 and sets the pace for efforts to document the Fiji Islands Marine Ecoregion (FIME), which experts say remains largely unknown, and which is also being streamlined in an accompanying report titled: “Setting Priorities for Marine Conservation in the Fiji Islands Marine Ecoregion”, also launched last month.
FIME, according to WWF FCP, is “one of the 16 natural jewels of outstanding biodiversity found in the Pacific, comprise about 844 islands and islets with over 10,000 square kilometres of reef and strewn across 1.20 million kilometres of oceans.” The little that is known about this ecoregion has meant that conservation efforts remain a scientifically ill-informed exercise, a situation that inspired a meeting in December 2003 of over 80 scientists, community members, non government organization representatives and government administrators and decision makers who shared current scientific information on the biodiversity of and threats to the country’s marine environment.
One of the important outcomes of that meeting, as elaborated upon in the report, was the identification of “35 priority conservation areas, which try to capture the full range of marine biodiversity, species and communities that make FIME unique”, and whose conservation would “contribute to maintaining the integrity of Fiji’s marine systems.”
Of these, five areas were ranked to be globally important due to their uniqueness, endemism and high level of diversity; 15 areas were considered to be of national importance and 15 of sub-regional importance. The five areas of global importance are the GSR, which is located in Vanua Levu, the Lomaiviti Triangle (Vatuira Channel-Ovalau-Makogai-Wakaya Channel), Namenalala, Southern Lau Group and Rotuma.
In anticipation of it being a costly exercise, the documenting of all 35 areas has been portioned to prioritise the five areas of global importance, according to WWF FCP manager Kesaia Tabunakawai. Of the five areas of global importance, the GSR is on the top of the list, being the “third longest barrier reef in the world, with an exceptional level of endemism and intact systems of lagoons, channels, mangroves and seagrass habitats.” Photo Caption: A clownfish protected by its host, the anemone. Photo by Baravi Thaman, Scientific Survey Team. Supplied by WWF Pacific's Suva office.

“The study (of GSR) is a step forward in understanding our resources and what we have so that we can better plan and manage them,” said Tabunakawai. “It has also helped in decisions making for organizations that work in the areas of conservation or environmental concerns because we now have an idea of what is there.”
Scientists surveyed 23 sites over six major habitats and made some significant findings, including the discovery of new species of a coral and a fish, the importance of the reef as home to a diverse species of marine life as well as breeding ground for some and as home to some endangered marine life. The scientists also noted that aside from the marine biodiversity and conservation status of the GSR being poorly understood, it was also “increasingly threatened by burgeoning human populations, associated industrial and coastal development, and the rising international and local demand for tropical reef products.”
A WWF FCP’s March/April 2006 socio economic survey in Dreketi, Macuata, Sasa and Mali disctricts – part of the EBM initiative – showed that 100 percent of households earn income from their natural resources (marine, freshwater, forest and agriculture). Of these households, 75 percent depend on these natural resource harvests as their main source of income. “Local community residents of these districts traditionally fish two thirds of the Vanua Levu portion of the GSR. The reef is therefore a major part of living their life and sourcing their livelihood,” WWF FCP said.
To the end that this human factor is managed and that the GSR system is protected, the findings of the GSR survey will provide part of the building block to an Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) initiative, a partnership between Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) as the lead partner, WWF FCP, Wetlands International – Oceania (WI-O), USP and in association with the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Areas (FLMMA).
“The EBM area extends from Macuata through the Bua Peninsula to Kubulau. Its aim is to protect the marine environment by addressing land-based threats to coral reefs and other marine habitats.” said WWF FCP.


SOME DETERMINATIONS OF THE GREAT SEA REEF SURVEY:

➢ Populations of 12 species listed on the 2004 IUCN (World Conservation Union) Red List of Threatened Species, including 10 species of fish, the IUCN threatened green turtle and the spinner dolphin;
➢ Population of the nationally endangered species of Bumphead Parrotfish (Kalia), previously presumed locally extinct; one new species and one presumed new record, previously known from the Indian Ocean, 44 percent of endemic coral fish species were observed;
➢ Within the hard corals, 43 new records were documented for Fiji. Of these, two were new genera, and three are believed to be geographic range extensions;
➢ Sixteen species were found to be new additions to the flora of the Fiji archipelago. Two possible new species were also recorded;
➢ Unusual distant offshore mangrove island fringing reef habitats were found to be of surprisingly high diversity and productivity. These highly dynamic, tidally influenced systems are considered to be “keystone habitats” of crucial importance to maintaining the ecological integrity of the entire coastline;
➢ Overall, commercially important fish were found to be in low numbers and small sizes. Fish important to local subsistence were found in higher numbers, but this varied greatly from site to site. Fishing pressure, as indicated by discarded fishing lines, was greatest around the vicinity of Labasa.


NOTE: This article was published as "Fiji's Great Sea Reef: What's really there" in Islands, the Complimentary Inflight Magazine for Air Pacific, Fiji's national airline; pp 60-65, Volume 2, 2007 edition.

Islands is a publication in the Islands Business International portfolio (see: www.islandsbusiness.com).