Arabian Seas
The old fisherman sat on a scrap of carpet in a thatched shelter by the sea.
His face was like a walnut shell, and his eyes squinted with a lifetime of gazing into the white-hot glare of Arabia. The shamal was blowing off the sea in scorching gusts, making even the date palms droop. "It is the western wind," the man said in a raspy voice. "I feel its warmth."
Behind him, the village of Film, notched into the mountains of Oman's Musandam Peninsula, shimmered like a brazier. Goats panted in the shade cast by upturned boats and the walls of a mosque. Just breathing made me feel as if my nostrils might burst into flame. Sami Alhaj, my Yemeni dive partner, said: "Underwater, with the corals, we get a little piece of heaven. Above water, with this wind, we get a little piece of hell."
We soon fled the inferno and descended into paradise once more. Color marked our passage between worlds as vividly as temperature did. Where the colors of land were those of the spice suq—pepper, cinnamon, mustard, mace—the undersea world was drenched in the sumptuous hues of a sultan's palace. Long, waving indigo arms of soft corals mingled with pomegranate fronds of feather stars. Speckled-gray moray eels, whose gaping mouths reveal a startling burst of yellow, leered out of crevices, while butterflyfish flitted past in tangerine flashes.
Had the legendary Scheherazade known the richness of these seas, she would have had stories for another thousand and one Arabian nights. She might have piqued the king's curiosity with the riddle of the reefs of Dhofar, in southern Oman; they flourish as coral gardens in winter and seaweed forests in summer. The trigger for this ecological shift—found nowhere else—is the onset of the khareef, the southwesterly monsoon, which bathes the coast in an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water. Seaweed, dormant in the warm months, responds to the cooler conditions with a burst of luxuriant growth, carpeting the reefs with green, red, and golden fronds.
Landing Nets Saltwater - News
Of all the insults to Arabia's marine life, none is more grotesque than the mountains of shark carcasses that arrive every evening in the Deira Fish Market in Dubai, trucked from landing sites around Oman and the United Arab Emirates, from there to
On isolated salt flats along the river channel, fishermen and their families converge to launch open skiffs, called pangas, to deploy gill nets to grab as many corvinas as possible. The once-a-year haul is shipped fresh to urban areas,
"I would say that redfish is one of Florida's most significant saltwater success stories," said Jessica McCauley, the marine fisheries management division director at the wildlife commission. Not everyone agrees with the commissions' decision, though.
In late 1972, the O'Neals landed in Imbaseni, Tanzania, and bought four acres to start a life. O'Neale, like many other Panthers, thought his time in Tanzania would be temporary, but as the Revolution died in the United States, Tanzania became