Wet, wet, wet but still singing in Canaries

IT ISN’T all blue skies in the Canary Islands.

Last week, we had torrential rain a dozen times in 24 hours and once got caught out in it.

With our three-year-old grandson snug inside a hooded pushchair, his grandparents sprinted along pavements, suddenly an inch deep in water, holding cardboard boxes over their heads while he called “Faster, faster!” clearly having a wonderful time. After he’d enjoyed a half-mile of high-speed high-jinks, the rain suddenly stopped, the cardboard boxes were discarded, and sun and grandson came out to play.

We were almost as dry as him by the time we reached home.

All the following day, the bed of the valley was a rumbling, grumbling torrent of water and rocks rushing headlong to the sea.

The sea, too, was spectacular. In the bright sunlight, wind-driven waves four metres high crashed onto the beach, white against the black, shining stones — there being no sand left — and drawing them back and forth in thunderous roars, stones as big as footballs, all smooth and rounded from the wear and tear.

On the sheltered beaches, holidaymakers lay scattered over the black sand. The sun was strong, the water calm, brilliant blue on the surface, cloudy beneath. Yet, suspended face down in the sea, breathing through a snorkel, one could watch all the familiar fish go about their business, the wrasse, patterned like Scottish tartans, the puffer fish, with curious angular bodies, the brilliant damsels, jet black with iridescent blue on the fins and tail.

Our friend the fisherman, Pepe, told me that two days before he’d caught 140 kilos of pargo, fourteen fish in all. It had taken him 2½ hours to reach the fishing grounds on the other coast of this almost circular island. There, the sea bottom drops away to a depth of 800m within half a kilometre from the shore. The land below water reflects the land above. La Gomera rises to 5,000 feet, a broad tableland of cloud forest from which many ancient watercourses have worn deep canyons down to the sea. The sea bed is a range of submerged cliffs and mountains: some cliffs drop sheer away for a thousand feet, and it is in these deep trenches that the big fish are caught on hook and line.

La Gomera has many fishermen like Pepe. They fish alone on the empty sea, reminding one of the famous Hemingway novel. Sometimes, I can watch them through binoculars, a lone man in a boat dwarfed by the immensity of the ocean. Hook and hand-line is the only method used, a single hook, baited with squid, heavily weighted to descend to a great depth. It cannot be easy to haul a fish weighing (as in the case of medregal or boca azul) up to 20 kilos from half a kilometre down.

But Pepe and his compañeros are proud of the fact that their fishing method is sustainable and does no damage whatever to the sea bed.

They complain of trawl nets, with iron jaws like the buckets of JCBs, dragging along the bottom and capturing indiscriminately, or destroying, everything in their path. Bottom trawls cannot, of course, be used in the topography of their local ocean; they’d snag on the cliff faces and sink in the gulfs.

For the last two weeks, a music festival, initiated and paid for by the local ‘town-hall’, has been an enjoyable feature of life in the Valle Gran Rey. A few nights ago we enjoyed a session in a bar, led by Christy Barry, from Doolin, Co Clare. Playing a flute or spoons and giving voice to song, he and the largely voluntary ensemble tooted and fluted and carried the crowd away.

It was a sesiún in the best sense, an impromptu celebration, with two more flautists fluting — both from west Cork — two bodhráns banging, a banjo twanging, an accordion according, two guitars strumming and the vocal contributions of a-man-from-God-knows-where who had lived on Sherkin Island for seven years (where his wife ran an English language school) then in Tasmania (where he saw the old Courtmacsherry lifeboat moored in St. Helen’s and still bearing the name) and now in La Gomera.

It was a humdinger of a session: they set the hands clapping and the feet stamping. I think I have never seen or heard a better hooley, even in hooley-land.