My wife can walk on water.

Inside the reef on Cousin Island

My wife can walk on water. Well, to be honest, it’s more like running on all fours, wearing flippers. But it’s true: I’ve seen it myself.

Hanna and I lived with our infant son on a tiny island in the Seychelles where life was practically idyllic but, being ex-pats, we had to complain about something, and that was mosquitoes. I know you have them where you live too, but are yours tough enough to bite giant tortoises and sea birds?

Our Crusoe-island looked like a wide-brimmed hat. It had a crown of granite and a flat brim composed of coral rubble cemented with guano. It turned up at the edge to form the beach crest which was higher than the land behind; useful because it captured sweet, life-sustaining rain-water for us, but after heavy rain the plateau became one large puddle; ideal for mosquitoes. Every evening we escaped them by trekking to our favourite swimming hole.

Nervous? Who, me?

Our tidal pool attracted a bewildering assortment of tropical fishes but they were small compared to those in deeper water. Most of them were reef-residents that we saw every day. They included a little convoy of Goat Fish with dangly beards; a few blue and white, immature Angel Fish; pairs of bandit-masked Raccoon Butterfly Fish; Convict Tangs in striped fatigues; Powder Blue Surgeon Fish; small, unsigned Picasso Trigger Fish, and dozens of young Wrasses and Parrot Fishes. Toothy Lizard-fish lurked motionless in the coral-heads and Cleaner Wrasses and Peppermint Shrimps set up shop around crevices where the bigger fish would come to be manicured.

Identifying all of the species was really tough because so many fish change shape, colour and pattern as they mature. An added complication was that they also changed colour at dusk. For example, male Red Fusiliers turned blue even before they went to bed and Green parrot-fish faded to grey as they sealed their hollows with mucous.

Predators from the open ocean took advantage of the twilight hour to grab a meal off the reef. Pug-nosed, plate-shaped “Karangs” eagerly swept in to have a go at the locals; much like sparrow hawks at a bird-table.

When I first witnessed Hanna’s remarkable talent, she simply lifted out of the water on all fours and wind-milled across the surface like a cartoon character. She succeeded in keeping almost every part of her body out of the water while still looking behind her. I guessed that she had seen a shark and that it must have been huge.

Ferrying tourists. Hammerheads sometimes popped by for a look. 

In fact she had met a White-tipped Reef Shark face to face. He was only 1.5 meters long (we argue about the decimal point), but his head was about the same size as hers, and most of his was teeth.

White tips are Requiem sharks:-mostly nocturnal, but they come out of hiding at dusk for a tasty crab. The poor crabs avoid being eaten in two ways; they either stay on land or learn to fly. Ghost Crabs are built like tanks and almost never go in the water except to breed, while the skinny Rock Crabs that clamber on the coral heads at low tide use the “Hanna method”. With tiny, light-weight claws and legs and bodies as thin as paper planes, they can leap out of the water and almost fly to escape a shark, or back again to escape an aerial predator such as a Frigate-bird.

We didn’t see our shark again until one evening when Hanna found a heart-shaped, woven fish trap or “kasye”, in the pool. Our poor shark was curled up inside without room to straighten out. I had read that sharks have to keep swimming to stay alive because their gill flaps are not designed to pump water like more modern fishes. He looked half dead so, feeling very confident, I put my hand into the trap and caught him by the tail, gently easing him backwards through the funnel. His harsh, abrasive shark-skin felt like sandpaper on my arm.

Once free of the trap, I expected to have to revive him in the surf but he threshed about like a ferret. He was quite a lot heavier than I anticipated so I’m not sure whether I let him go or he escaped. Anyway, he was gone in a flash.

We were so proud of our shark welfare work that we told the island manager about our exploits. He was not at all pleased at loosing the main ingredient for “rekin satiny”, Creole shark chutney!  He also told me that I was lucky to keep my fingers because, although most sharks need to swim to breathe, Requiem sharks do not.

Shark chutney is delicious, by the way, but we prefer to remember our particular shark in the turquoise water, not on a plate.