Great Fish Kill

For the past two days an unprecedented number of fish have been washing up on Playa La Ropa. They seem to be mostly a single species. The reasons behind this phenomenon are varied according to those walking the beach on a daily basis: a trawler dumping unwanted catch, a parasite, a lack of oxygen, or some other unexplained event. All I know is that our lovely bay is covered with dead, floating anchovies, which end up by the hundreds on the 3/4 mile stretch of our usually pristine sand. To help combat this issue, the many vendors who normally ply their wares up and down the beach have taken to gathering the carcasses and burying them in deep pits dug in the sand about every 100 meters. Even a few of us gringos got off our beach chairs to help out. It was a never ending process, however, and despite everyone's best efforts the beach was still covered with dead fish when we left.