Spearfishing Woes

The boat Menkar had a father/adult son crew from France, and it turned out that the son, Sylvan, really liked to spearfish too. So, one day Tim, Sylvan, and Brenden went out hunting. I don’t remember what Tim and Brenden came back with, but Sylvan shot a snapper, and everything we had heard was that Rotuma has ciguatera, so in that case, snappers are not really the fish you want to eat. He ate it anyway, and sure enough ended up with ciguatera. Apparently, he had just recovered recently from a previous bout with it, so he already had quite a lot of toxins built up in his system, so there’s no telling if this fish itself was severe or not. But Sylvan ended up with a pretty severe case and was in and out of the hospital there in Rotuma and their departure to Tuvalu had to be delayed.

Also, when they came back from spearfishing the dinghy had a leak, and Tim was totally blaming Sylvan (privately, of course), and I believe Menkar loaned us some of the adhesive needed to apply a patch to the dinghy. Later, Tim figured out that it was his own spear tip on his own gun that had caused the offending abrasion, and even though he hadn’t blamed Sylvan directly, he did go over and let Sylvan know how it happened after all.