Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
to worry that we might not find our morays by the time we had to
leave. Anything was worth a try, so John and the other divers went to
where the fisherman indicated and dove in daylight. They found it was
loaded with morays, of all sizes. They actually caught so many that they
could be picky about which to keep and which to release. Saving
two nice ones and releasing the others, they took them down and
placed them in the underwater escape-proof eel cage, and this time they
stayed put.
All was going well, so John O'Sullivan decided to drive to La Paz to
pick up our collecting permit. Little did he know what awaited him.
Arriving at the o‹ce of the Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecología
(Secretariat of Urban Development and Ecology, or SEDUE for short),
through which we'd originally applied for our permit, he found that
the permit had in fact been issued by a competing government agency,
the Oficina de Pesca, which oversees fisheries in Mexico. The SEDUE
people said the Pesca permit wasn't valid and that SEDUE should have
issued the permit.
Although John wasn't actually arrested, he was told not to leave town
while they worked the matter out, an innocent victim caught in a
jurisdictional battle between two competing Mexican agencies. Luck-
ily, they understood his plight and issued him the second permit the
next day, though not for the exact same list of animals as on the first
permit.
The collecting had gone well, the shuttling of aquarists between Mon-
terey and Los Cabos had been smooth, and nobody had gotten lost,
hurt, or stranded. The time came to make the last air shipment of fish
to San Francisco, break camp, pack all the equipment back onto the
trucks, and head north to Bahía de la Concepción and Bahía de Los
Angeles to complete the collecting. The big morays would ride in the
large transport tank on the stakebed truck.
Breaking down camp and loading the two trucks went quicker than
expected. The Mexican fishermen lent a hand, and for their help we
gave them the propane stoves, the cookware, and the sun tarps, none
of which we expected to need again for an aquarium project. I'm sure
they had much more use for this equipment than we did in Monterey,
in any case.
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