Splash! Splash! The successive sounds woke me from my stupor. Still lounging on the deck, I glanced down at the calm water below. There they were - perhaps a dozen of them. A slew of dolphins. First one leaped. Then another. Then another.
My dolphin friends were probably tracking their dinner, most likely a school of sardines that had wandered into the Saco do Mamanguá. Until recently, such dolphin sightings would have been rare, if not unheard of, in this eight-kilometer long, one-kilometer wide “tropical fjord.”
Four years ago, I would have instead watched trawlers drag mesh nets through the waters, illegally but effectively scooping up those sardines and just generally disturbing the peace.
The catches may have been good, but the trawlers pushed their luck too far. Little did they realize that the Saco do Mamanguá had long exported manpower to augment the crews of the industrial fishing boats that troll the Brazilian coast from Pernambuco to Santa Catarina. Having worked on such boats, these experienced sailors knew precisely how to foil them. They invented a novel Trolleying Exclusion Device, as the technocrats would label it. The device consisted of a cement base of one square meter with a 30-centimeter spoke sticking out from the top. The spoke will catch and rip a dragnet as it is pulled horizontally along the ocean floor. But it will leave unscarred the small-scale nets that locals drop and pull up vertically.
So here I was, thanks to the ingeniousness of the local fishermen, surrounded by the rainforest, soaking in the dolphin festivities. In peace. And loving it. Even better I didn’t have to log in long hours of flight and boat time to get here. This wasn’t the Amazon; it wasn’t Fernando de Noronha. I was absconded just a few hours drive from São Paulo and less than an hour by boat from Paraty, a colonial town barely across the stateline in Rio de Janeiro state.
Beyond the damage they provoke to fisheries, big trawlers aren’t exactly Saco do Mamanguá’s style anyway. These caiçaras (caiçaras are the folks who inhabit forested stretches of the Brazilian coast) like their boats smaller – scaled down to 32 centimeters, even. That’s the length of some of the smaller miniatures produced by local artisans.
The handicraft business dates back about four decades to the formative years of a pair of brothers, João and Pedro Souza. As kids the Souza brothers constructed toy boats for their own diversion. Today about half of the 100-plus families that inhabit the Saco do Mamanguá owe their livelihoods to the miniature boats built in the Souza tradition and sold, mostly to tourists, in Paraty.
The artisans, many of them as young as the Souza brothers were when they started out, collect their raw material from just beyond the swamp - at the closed end of the fjord. There grow the caxeta trees, called Ambay pulpwood in English. Artisans cut tree branches and, to avoid carrying out excess weight, they carve out crude sections on the spot. Back in their workshops, they whittle down and smoke the waterlogged lumber before sanding and finishing.
In the Souza era they’d put the pieces together as if it were a store-bought model, and that would be it. The brothers and many of their immediate followers left the wood bare. But most of today’s artisans prefer to paint their boats in striking colors that resemble those adorning the small fishing boats that still frequent the coast astride Paraty. Thanks in part to this new twist, the local artisans netted an exposition in the federal government’s Edison Carneiro Folklore Museum in Rio de Janeiro last year.
If you’re the enterprising sort of visitor, the kind who likes to view such things up close, or if you just want to blow a few calories, you can row a kayak into the swamp and up almost to the trees use by the artisans.
By taking such a kayak trip, you will also embark on a journey into the site of an ongoing David vs. Goliath confrontation worthy of the MST’s best spin-doctors. You’ll be visiting an area envisioned by many of Brazil’s rich and famous as a parking lot for their yachts – and an estuary ecosystem that lots of other people want to protect.
The ins-and-outs of this coast are pretty intricate. As the Saw-billed Hermit flies, the Saco do Mamanguá sits pretty close to Larangeiras, a closed condominium whose part-time residents include many of Brazil’s most rich and famous. Without roadways, and there are none, the proximity never made much difference. Take the long way by boat; take the shortcut by foot. The Saco do Mamanguá was essentially protected because it was hard to get to.
At least it was until some of the Larangeiras crew bought up enough right-of-way and a piece of land at the end of the fjord. Their idea was to construct a marina and build an access road to it from their luxury accommodations. The Saco de Mamanguá would become a high class off ramp to the Atlantic Ocean. Paraty’s mayor liked the idea.
But many people in Saco do Mamanguá did not.
“The increased traffic would create wave patterns that would reduce the catch for fishers. Sediment from the floor would be suspended in the water and create problems for photosynthesis, and the oil from the boats would either end up at the end of the fjord or at the ocean bottom,” said biologist Paulo Nogara, who has been working with the local community for over a decade.
After a highly publicized campaign, marina opponents managed to stall the project. For now the scheme is tangled up in the Brazilian legal bureaucracy, but few doubt that the Empire will strike back later if not sooner.
While many locals are opposed to the project, a few actually favor it. Many of these are uneducated and underemployed people who understandably hope for unskilled jobs pumping gas or guarding yachts.
One alternative would be to encourage ecotourism. Instead of pumping gas, the same locals could act as guides for visitors. Besides the kayaking trip, excursions already available include a climb up to Sugerloaf, inevitably less imposing than its Rio namesake, but which nevertheless offers a view otherwise only possible from a helicopter. The energetic can trek to Paraty, several hours by foot, or take shorter trips along the routes used by locals for decades if not centuries.
Or you can just sit on the deck and watch the dolphins.
More on ecotourism in Saco do Mamanguá, Paraty
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