In this tiny fishing village, a place where the black lava rock coastline gives way to a small stretch of white sandy beach, Otsambu Chin-dini is something of a celebrity.
Three years ago, in his 27th year as a fisherman, he caught one of the world's rarest fish - a 157-pound coelacanth, a fish with leglike fins that scientists call a living fossil.The species was assumed to have become extinct with the dinosaur about 70 million years ago. Then in 1938, one was hauled up in a net off the coast of South Africa.
Since then, fewer than 200 have been caught - virtually all of them in the deep waters off Grande Comore island and off Anjouan, a neighboring island in the Comoran archipelago. Some scientists estimate that there may be no more than 500 coelacanths (pronounced SEE-luh-kanths) still in existence.
Part of Chindini's celebrity certainly comes from the catch - no one else in his village has caught one of the 5-foot-long metallic blue fish with white spots.
But the other part of his fame, judging from the grins of his fellow fishermen, is that he did not recognize that he had a coelacanth and bludgeoned it to death. Chindini, who lives with his wife and seven children in a one-room house shaded by palm trees, grins about this too.
But he is willing to tell the story: how, as he was hoping for tuna or oilfish, he sandwiched the bait between two stones so it would sink far below the surface, and how because of a special loop he could release the stones with a small flick of the wrist, leaving the white bait exposed to catch any glimmer of light to be found 840 yards below the surface, and how suddenly his line was very heavy.
"I pulled very carefully," Chindini said, pantomiming the motions. He does not mind showing off the line he used, either. It looks like a large ball of knitting wool. Fishing is strictly by hand here.
At first Chindini was simply disappointed by his catch. But when he got back to the village, and learned its value, he wished he had not been so quick to bash in its skull.
Still, he got $217 for it from the former director of the island's fishing institute - a fortune for Chindini, who like most of the other fishermen on this remote Indian Ocean island barely ekes out a living.
The truth is, no coelacanth are living in captivity. They are slow-moving creatures that live at great depths. They absorb oxygen badly and there is less in the warm surface water than down at the depths where they live, so the fight to the surface, and the rapid decompression, leaves them so drained that they usually die in a day or two.
In 1938, the discovery of the coelacanth sent fish experts aflutter. Some believed that the modern coelacanth is a close relative of the line of fishes that gave rise to the first vertebrates to walk on land.
Fossils show that the fish once existed in great abundance.
But the fishermen of the Comoros mostly consider the coelacanth a nuisance. They are not particularly good to eat. They have value only when foreigners come around asking. In 1994, the Comoran government signed an international treaty agreeing not to trade in coelacanths. But there are no laws against landing them, and there is a black market.
In the past, aquariums have come asking, too. A Japanese aquarium came looking a few years ago, handing out free synthetic lines, which the fishermen around here most appreciated. The New York Aquarium wanted one, too.
But in both cases, they met with strong opposition from coelacanth experts and backed off. Many of the experts believe that if one aquarium manages to capture and show off "old four legs," as the fish is affectionately called, others will want one too - and the rush to collect the fish might lead to its extinction.
"Even though we believe we could quite easily do it, create a great sensation, and make a lot of money, we are not doing it," said Michael Bruton, the director of the Educational Trust at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa, and a leading authority on the fish. "In fact we are campaigning against anyone doing it."
Bruton supports another idea: putting cameras in the deep sea grottos where coelacanth rest during the day and broadcasting the images around the world to aquariums.