No match for a moray

In the 1970s weapons of mass destruction rained down upon the marine ecosystem. Hoards of amateur assassins poured down to the shores of the Mediterranean, wrapped in neoprene body armour and armed with Saetta and Minisaetta spring-type spearguns or the very cutting-edge, compressed-air Stens with their grey metal barrels.

The professional killers, on the other hand, favoured cyanide or dynamite. The sounds of explosions rang out all day long in July and August. The shallow Calabrian Tyrrhenian, just off the Aeolians, is a rocky sea with very few sandbanks. A sea of groupers and morays. Safe in the knowledge that fish can neither scream nor complain, we amateur assassins fish any way we can any hour we can. But we are purists in our own particular way. No dynamite, no poisons. Just eyes, lungs and guns. Our favourite moment was at night when there was no risk we’d be bombed too. Night-time underwater fishing is terrifying. A torch illuminates a narrow strip of a few metres. The fish are blinded by its light making them easy prey and your imagination can run wild.

But what we saw on the night of the Feast of the Assumption in 1978, the year of the three popes, was not imagination. The monster circled a big pyramid shape mass. His brown head had big yellowish blotches on it. He was at least three metres long. We normally didn’t shoot morays. They’re virtually impossible to kill and if you just manage to wound them they’re so strong they’ll just bend your gun out of shape and you’ll never be able to use it again. They also taste disgusting. If they manage to get a bite at you, they cling on and hold you under until you drown. But there we had the trophy of a lifetime. All three of us fired, one after the other while the fourth blinded the monster with the torch. The moray retreated to its den bristling with a crown of spears. We didn’t know what to do. None of us had the courage to go near enough to it to finish it off with a knife.

We eventually tied a line to our 25 hp engine and set off. An hour later, the tank was almost empty and the moray was still fighting. We gave the engine one last go at full throttle and suddenly the inflatable shot forward before there was a terrible crunching sound, like it had gotten tangled in plastic. Our trophy had ended up tangled in the propeller which cut him into several pieces. Useless. For the rest of the summer, we only fished for sea urchins. In fact, we fished the place out of them and turned it into a desert.