By E.C. PHILLIPS

   By day, local fishermen and divers take to the water in the Arab style dhow sailboats, divers using equipment that might have been typical in the rest of the world eighty years earlier. Though I was hesitant to get into one of these small boats after having been stranded in one for 26 hours the week before, I decided to brave the trip in order to go spear fishing.

One of the men instructed me to be at the harbor by six am. Even at that early hour, the area was busy with women selling food to fisherman, and young boys getting nets ready to use for the days catch.

   Swimming with the local spearfishermen, I saw parrotfish and snapper, tuna and lionfish. While I wasn’t fortunate enough to catch anything, one of the men caught a huge tuna, leaving trails of blood in the water all about him. I only found out afterwards that the sea here is heavily populated with sharks. Whale sharks and Humpback whales also inhabit the area, and dolphins are a common sight on this wild stretch of coast.

   And on this remote island, I met a fascinating array of characters. At a bar one night, I happened upon a couple of underwater archeologists who were excavating a wreck off the coast. They had been on Ilha de Mocambique for eight months diving for artifacts from a Portuguese shipwreck that they believed had sunk in 1608. They said that countless other wrecks lay in the bay around the island, many untouched for centuries.

    Rumor had it that treasure hunters had been working in the area on another wreck a few months earlier, looting the ship of its silver and gold coins and all of the boat’s artifacts of any value.  The archeologists, whose group is called Arqueonautas, took me along on a dive of the wreck. Old musketballs and bits of porcelain lay scattered amongst the remains of the boat, which was all but buried by sand and encroaching reef. Besides the shipwrecks, there are also numerous reefs to dive along the coast here, many of the boats and reefs hardly explored until now.

   Ilha de Mocambique has a long, distinguished history- once the capital of Mozambique and before that a great, trading empire ruled by a sultan in an ornate oriental style. In her days as a trading port, Ilha de Mocambique was exposed to Hindu, Arab, Chinese and Portuguese influences. The remnants of that time are still apparent in the architecture of the island and in the faces of the locals whose features reflect the multiethnic culture that once thrived here.