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Pardon me for saying so but what stories do ya got, embellished or not? I went out back and shot something?

Anyhoo.... I seen the Southern Cross from a 7ft wide dugout maybe 25ft long with a crew of ragged Africans and no life jackets maybe 40 miles off the coast of West Africa.

Surprises me now when I got the invite (no cigs involved) I just went without hardly a care, youth and all that. On our way back we passed another dugout way out there, musta had engine trouble, two guys just standing on it looking at us. The guys I was with just motored on by, didn’t even look at them.

It may be the stranded guy’s friends’d come out looking I dunno. The boat and motor alone in that setting was prob’ly worth a fortune. From the top of a swell you could see quite a ways, including sometimes another dugout off on the horizon.

The part I didn’t see was prob’ly the local mafia or whatever. Seems like being a fisherman was a pretty sweet gig, relatively speaking.

Inland, animal protein was always in short supply. Got so bad thatby my third year Peace Corps would supply us with 18 cans of tuna a month. These I would hide and eat one every other day, tossing the cans at different places in the bush so know one would know I had them.

See, the locals in my village were so forthcoming to me they woulda thought less of me for not sharing, but I was already skinny as a rail and I didn’t go there to get sick.

But these fishermen were all bulked up and built, all that protein, they had stuff too like radios and vehicles. It had to be a cutthroat business to get into, providing a commodity always in short supply.

As best I can recall they told me they went out maybe three times a week, the off days spent maintaining and repairing the equipment.

I only ever saw one new dugout, it was being shipped to the coast on the back of a semi. They were carved from a single tree trunk. Seems like there were still a lot of big trees where I lived but I dunno the whole country.

Most of the dugouts looked pretty to really old. Seems like the ones that took on water like the one I was in they hauled up the beach on rollers as would shortly happen with that one.

Old dugouts, and ancient shacks down clear to the waters edge: I don’t thing tropical systems hit the coast of West Africa very often, depressions start there and build up on their wat west towards the Americas. So I don’t know how many fishermen there get lost at sea.