Damien Enright: ‘The Sausage’ finds himself between rock and a hard place

Lots of news to be reported from this remote island, despite the fact that we’re still banged up and only allowed to leave our flat for essentials.

We should never have sold that house we renovated from a ruin up the valley 39 years ago. What a mistake. It had two banana plantations in front of it and an unimpeded view all the way down the valley to the sea, a mile below.

Anyway, what the hell — we live in a nice two-bedroom flat two streets back from the sea, lent to us by an Englishman friend who, now I come to think of it, was my major helper when we were re-roofing that old house all those years ago. The flat doesn’t have a garden, let alone a plantation, but it has a balcony and a roof and from that we can watch the goings-on.

These can be exciting. The other day, for instance, we watched, through our bird-watching binos, a notorious Tenerife fisherman known as El Salchicón, The Sausage, getting busted in his boat out on the horizon. It was the day when an embargo against commercial boats was lifted and there were three out there, spaced along the line where the sea met the sky.

Then, suddenly, a large boat, previously unseen, was side-by-side with one of them and there was a whole lot of action going on. The big boat had an official-looking name written on the side, and it had launched a rib, a big, rubber inflatable, with three men aboard.

It was, apparently, Guardia Civil officers from the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) doing their job. Spain has been outstanding in protecting the sea around its coasts and has prosecuted some big-time illegal fishing concerns. It has shut down everything from the illegal catching of blue fin tuna and Patagonian toothfish, to the trafficking of baby eels. As we know, European eel stocks have experienced a dramatic decline, around 90% since 1980.

This is not the first time The Big Sausage has been busted to the applause of local Gomero fishermen. Actually, he’s called after another type of sausage, but I’ve used this name.

He uses huge, illegal shrimp pots, with apertures to allow big fish to enter. The frames are as long and broad as a single bed, with a capacity of six single-bed matresses. They are dropped to 1,000m, marked with buoys and collected days later.

This time, the Seprona officers also found shellfish pots full of “bucios”, conch shellfish, whose capture is prohibited. Conches are considered magical and sacred in some African cultures, and I’ve heard them used as shellfish saxophones here in the Canaries. The riffs weren’t quite Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, but worth a listen, nevertheless.

More excitement seen from our rooftop — and happily not fatal — was the massive rockfall from cliffs about a mile down the coast. We heard the rumble, we saw the skyscraper-high cloud of dust over the sea, and we heard and saw the rescue helicopter roaring over the port to reach it. The cliffs are 800m high and straight up as the Cliffs of Moher.

Beneath them, only a few hundred yards away, is a small beach where latter-day hippies live in caves. They are entirely isolated; at high tides, the sea swamps the sand and reaches the cave mouths. All food and water must be carried there over a mile of rock debris, without a solitary blade of shelter from the sun.

Why do they live there? How are they living now, in this lockdown, with all the holidaymakers, their source of meagre income, gone?

With the closing of the valley’s holiday beaches, the little they earned by putting on drum shows and light shows has entirely disappeared. Every evening, toward sunset, a handful or so of barefoot, honey blonde, California-dreamin’ girls and desiccated, leather-skinned men in ragged pants and dreadlocks — with a couple of superannuated, ancient hippies, too — would make the trek to the main holiday beach carrying congo drums and firesticks.

There, they would stand, three or four drummers in a line, intriguing tourists sitting on the wall, beers in hand, watching the sun go down over El Hierro, far behind them on the horizon. Sunsets can be magnificent over the empty sea. Later, when darkness fell, the girls would juggle with burning sticks, making them whizz about them like fireflies in the night.

It had become a new-age tradition, sometime after my wife and I and our son first lived here. It was harmless, welcomed by the locals. It made the holidaymakers feel they were part of something ancient and primitive, the dying of a day they would not find in Berlin or London, or even in Lanzarote or Tenerife.