Search for a living fossil - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 166

welcoming. I was separated from the rest of the passengers and secluded
in a small, bare room with a silent teenage guard wielding a loaded
submachine gun. Four hours later, without explanation, they released
me to board the Air Comores DC-3 for the two-hour flight over the
Indian Ocean to Moroni, the country's capital.
As we flew in low, the island, with its lush, tropical vegetation, was a
beautiful sight. Edging the sea was black, volcanic rock with a narrow
band of azure blue shallows that dropped precipitously into the dark
blue of deep water close to shore. Just seeing it made me anxious to dive
and see firsthand the exotic Indian Ocean creatures I'd seen only in topics.
John McCosker had arranged for our group to stay at the appropri-
ately named Hotel Le Coelacanthe, run by French proprietress Cici.
Immediately beyond the hotel was a flat expanse of lava; at its edge the
ocean dropped down to a thirty-foot-deep shelf, and from there plum-
meted steeply to several thousand feet.
Sylvia and Al were the most experienced deep divers among us, and
while we were there they made a number of dives below two hundred
feet. They left extra scuba tanks on the thirty-foot shelf to provide air
for their decompression stops so they could safely return to the sur-
face. Sylvia was so comfortable and relaxed underwater that she often
had air left in her first tank even after their decompression.
LES PETITS PEUGEOTS
French divers on the island told us about a little fish with bright lights
that they saw only at night. They'd given it the nickname “Petit Peu-
geot” because of its two little “headlights” that blinked on and o¤. One
night we made a dive during the dark of the moon in front of the ho-
tel to see if we could find them. Dropping down to eighty to a hun-
dred feet, we stopped and turned o¤ our dive lights. I'd seen biolumi-
nescent sea pens and plankton in California, but I was not prepared
for the brilliant and continuous flashes of light these flashlight fish ( Pho-
toblepharon steinitzi ) produced. They seemed to be everywhere, and
the deeper we went, the more there were.
Although the coelacanth was still our primary quarry, we decided to
focus some of our e¤orts on collecting this second fascinating creature.