Back to the day job

The weather has been dreadful down here, very strong gale force winds have mean that there has been little opportunity for fishing, but at least that means I get nice dinners !
The weather has to be checked several days in advance to allow for travelling out to the fishing ground and the time the nets will be in the water and again for getting back out to collect them. The website XCWeather is one of those used also the Met Office website.
The weather finally settled this week and nets were put out on Monday for collecting on Friday,

nets being 'shot'

So it was an early start on Friday and expectations for monkfish were met 

Monkfish,

usually they are dead when the nets are hauled this one was alive but not after he had had his head chopped off and his tail wrapped in Parma ham and roasted for 20 minutes !

There was also about 100kg of Spider crabs which can be fiddly to extract from the nets, the legs are very delicate and break easy so it took a while to finish.

so the kettle went on for a brew (looks like the cooker needs a bit of clean)

The red dot is the marker indicating where the nets are.  The bay is full of those big tankers and they are causing a problem for the inshore fleet, one fisherman has lost over £1000.00 of pots because they go over the markers dragging it with them.

Saturday was not such an early start but it was a bit misty

St Michael's Mount

Does what it says on the tin and very useful in misty weather, the autopilot, you type in your course and it takes you there - you do still have to watch out for other vessels !

There were a few rays in the nets too, the one one the left is a spotted ray and the other one is a blonde ray, can you see the difference? 

Nets cleaned time for a bit of photography, 

back end of the boat, also known as the stern, the front pointy bit is the bow (I think!)

This looks like it is Lizard way - it's that damned Lizard again Peter !

While Ken was being a fisherman I was being a cleaner, I posted the following on my Facebook Page

I was up at 7.30, bathroom cleaned, fridge cleaned, windows cleaned, the bedrooms cleaned, all downstairs cleaned, all floors washed, you name it I cleaned/washed it, shopping done and fridge re stocked, he comes home from fishing and asks "what have you done today, sat in the garden?" Good thing I'd not got anything sharp in my hand!!

Now back to those rays - could you see the difference? the spotted ray is the one on the left and has two more prominent spots either side of it's body and the other spots don't go to the very edge of it's body as they do on the blonde ray - the fishermen have a saying to differentiate between them "blondes go all the way!!"

Enough for now, and there's still more Gambia ramblings to "look forward to" 

A bit more birding

I promise this will be the last post about birdwatching but please be advised the fishing blog is still under construction so you are not out of the woods just yet.

Chronologically we are still in the first week of our holiday and have not yet been to Georgetown but the timing isn't really relevant. Our next trip out with Famara and Pax (the taxi driver) was to Tanji and the surrounding area. Tanji is another fishing village south of Gambia which you can smell as you approach,

the smell of smoking fish at 0730am in the morning combined with the decaying rubbish in roadsides is something quite indescribable !

The beach at Tanji, photo from Trip Advisor.

This was our first birdwatching trip to Tanji since our 2nd visit to Gambia back in 2002 and I was looking forward it it because it is by the sea so cooler and I like wading birds. First stop was Tujereng, a village a bit further down from Tanji we had a good walk round the reserve as the sun was coming up and had quite an impressive list to tick off, we've been walking round in the sun for a couple of hours now so we decided to head back on to the main road and stop at a bar for a cold drink before going down to Tanjji reserve.  So it was 4 Sprites - it is usual that the guide and driver are included in drink stops, and if we were to have lunch they would be asked to accompany us too but for that they would decline and eat the staff food which would be given to them free as a gift for bringing paying customers to the restaurant - the exception to this was when Buba was with us at Stala - while he would quite happily have eaten the staff food we specifically asked him to join us.

We were sitting happily watching an approaching donkey and cart slowing ambling along the road, we then heard a rather loud scraping/banging noise and realised that the young boy guiding the donkey had become preoccupied and the donkey and walked into Pax's car ! !

We paid and headed back to Tanji, and began the walk through the reserve, we had not gone far when it became apparent that there were not many birds to be seen and it was extremely hot (by now it is about 12midday) I mentioned walking on the beach and was told that wasn't really an option nowadays (they suffer with coastal erosion so the beach had probably gone) we decided it was far too hot and went on to the next and final stop of the day Brufut wood, another place we had visited previously but with it being a forest you have shelter from the sun.  We picked up the official guide (every Forest/wood seems to have one!) and set off.  Gambia does not have the infrastructure of modern countries and the photo below shows that they don't have regular refuse collections.

 We had realised by  now that Famara had been looking at the 'ticks' in our book and was trying to fill in the blanks, while this was very thoughtful of him it did mean that we spent a fair bit of time staring at particular trees because that was where his target bird liked to roost, personally I would have been happier wandering round the forest finding any birds, it doesn't bother me too much how many times we see each species. The target species on this trip was night jars and I'll be honest when we found it I was a little underwhelmed, I was only a couple of feet away from the bird but I still couldn't make out what I was looking at and even now when I know what it is it still looks like a san ache to me - if you were paying attention to a previous blog you will know what I mean by san ache! 

Long tailed night jar,  

We carried on round the forest and spotted many birds but didn't take too many photos. We saw another Verreaux Eagle owl and many other species mainly consisting of LBJ's or Little Brown Jobs which is how small plain birds are known locally!

Then it was time to go and thankfully there was a bar area where we could get a cold drink and wait for the taxi drive to wake up !

 The guides had put a bit of a feeding/watering station round here so many birds were coming down for drinks like us, the following photos weren't taken here but show the species that we watched while enjoying a bottle of Sprite and they were taken by me at some point during one of our holidays.

 Common Bulbul 

  

 Weaver birds

Yellow crowned Gonolek