Spearhunting

While staying with some new found friends in Takaroa I got the opportunity to try spear fishing. Under the watchful eye of Jeanlou and his patient instruction I slowly bumbled my way around the many coral heads of the inner atoll. I always thought that fish were sort of stupid pea-brained sized animals. After all, I thought, what kind of animal would try to eat some of the ridiculous lures I've seen or even a bare hook as Alan has been able to catch them.

When snorkeling around the atoll the fish surround you. Gliding along lazily it almost seems as if I could reach out, grab them, and swim them over to the boat. It turns out that they only play dumb. As soon as you have a spear gun in your hand they start to keep their distance. When a fish or two break from the bubble of fish that is eerily exactly outside your spear gun range and heads slowly towards you they will glide at their usual pace until you train your gun on them. Then, BOOSH, they dart away right when you were about to pull the trigger.

We were hunting parrot fish, these are supposed to be some of the easiest fish to spear because of their slower movement and larger bodies. They also look really dumb which made me want to kill them even more every time I missed.

Lucky for everyone involved, the evening meal was not relying totally on my efforts. Ruo was a master of spear fishing. Diving down under the fish to shoot, he would emerge from the water with a fish on his spear almost every time. Holding the spear over his head he would let out a loud "Yipee!" signaling Alan to row the boat over so Rou could dump the fish and go down for another one. In a couple hours he caught 19 fish, enough to feed everyone for two nights.

After quite a few misses Jean Lou decided that I had scared all the fish away from that side of the coral and we should proceed to the other side before we started to scare Rou's fish as well. Walking over the top of the coral head in my giant flippers holding a spear gun trying to be very quiet so as not to spook the fish I felt like Elmer Fudd. I don't think he ever shot anything either.

Getting to the other side of the reef. I received new instruction from Jean Lou. I should use the coral to hide behind, dive down to the bottom and stay still if possible and not look the fish in the eyes or they will run away. At least I thought those were the instructions since we were communicating in a mixture of broken french and charades.

After swimming around a bit, I spotted a school of 5 parrot fish. It was the most I had seen together all day and they were swimming by a man sized piece of coral growing out of the sandy bottom. I took a deep breath and swam down to the bottom crouching behind the coral. My heart was beating quickly and I was running out of oxygen. Slowly I crept around the corner of the coral to see a parrot fish right in front of me. I took aim and ZZAC! fired. I felt a tug and pumped my fist to the surface. I hit something! But when the sand cleared all that was left was my spear lying on the bottom.

I kept trying till the sun got low in the sky but never managed to get anything. The only other highlight I think I should mention is creeping around a corner of coral to come face to face with a giant brown round puffer-fish about the size of a basketball. He looked like something out of a cartoon and when he saw me his eyes got large and his mouth fell open. I can imagine that we were thinking the same thing "Dang, that's a big fish." He was surprisingly fast for his size and quickly turned around and darted over the reef before I could even think about lifting my spear gun.

Later eating dinner over a delicious plate of steamed parrot fish. Ruo and Jeanlou told us that it was possible to shoot fish from a boat with a flare gun. It sounds like deer hunting with a bazooka and totally illegal but its probably more my speed.

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A Man, a Can, a Plan

In college my roommate received a cookbook from his parents called "A Man, a Can, a Plan." It was a bachelors guide to cooking that used a can of food as the basis for every meal. This is pretty much our approach to cooking on the boat. Except with three dudes on the boat, we have to use a couple of cans and generally don't have a plan except trying to use what we have a lot of. Most of this time this means canned beans. We have an entire cubby hole under a bench devoted entirely to canned beans.

Lately however some of our cans have been rusting. Most of the time these are cans that are left over from the original provisioning in Virginia. The reason they are left over is that no one wants to eat them. Our solution to this problem is to eat them all at once which leads to some weird combinations such as spinach-sauerkraut-olives-tuna-chili. One of the worst cans to eat is the Great Value Salmon in a can. (I'm calling you out Wal-Mart.) Every time I eat it I can picture the scene of the canning factory in my head. Some burly Alaskan dude with a beard puts an aluminum ring around a salmon, cuts off the head and tail and puts the caps on. The salmon is canned with scales, bones and all. It's pretty gross.

The other thing about cooking on the boat is that when we make something, we make a lot of it. This means we eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner and maybe breakfast again if we are not done. It's only hot once. If the cooking is a failed experiment of dubious food combination, well, you get to taste that experiment more than a couple of times just to make sure you don't like it.

Before I came on the boat I didn't really enjoy soup or stew. I didn't understand how someone could take a perfectly good cut of meat which could be fried, pan seared, grilled, broiled, or baked and decide to put it in boiling water instead. It just seemed wrong to me somehow. Well I can now honestly say that I've warmed to the concept. Some of our best meals on the boat have started with a can of clam chowder. I can't yet say I'm a total fan but that is mostly because of the difficulty of eating soup in 20ft swells on deck with a moonless night. I think I ate more seawater than soup.

Eating the same thing over and over on the boat gets old quickly so we take every chance we can get to try new food at the places we visit. We have met some very generous people here in the Marquesas who we have had dinner with as well as buying food from vendors.

Some of the highlights have been:

Poisson Cru- This is raw fish served polynesian style with a coconut sauce. It doesn't look very appetizing when you first see it but looks are deceiving because it is delicious with a slightly salty/sweet balance.

Goat meat- These high islands are teeming with goats. Some are tame and owned by people but most are wild and live up in the mountains. Goat reminds me a lot of mutton and you would expect it to be a little tough, but the Marqueseans seem to cook it low and slow with a lot of spices. Think of dry rub ribs where the meat falls off the bone. Thats what this is like.

Baguettes with meat and french fries - I was floored when we first had these on Hiva Oa. They seemed to be everything you could ask for after a long sea voyage. Fresh french baguette? check. Copius amount of french fries? check. Large tender slices of grilled pork sausage? check. Top that off with mayo and BBQ sauce and you have a meal I would have been dreaming about on the way here if I knew it had existed.

Besides these highlights, there is plenty of great french wine, cheese and bread as well as fresh fruits, juice, and fresh fish. I haven't had a dish yet I didn't like but I'm already looking forward to the other islands. We've heard that on Tahiti there is a hot dog van that serves T-bone steak. I guess thats what I'll be dreaming about from here to there.

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Things I Wish I Could Photograph

At night when there is no moon we can still see the trail of our boat via the bioluminescent properties of the tiny critters in the water. As our boat creates waves it stimulates these critters into producing light. This is pretty cool by itself and I've spent a long time on watch looking at the effects they create. What is even cooler than this is when a pod of dolphins joins us to play in our bow waves on a moonless night. They too disturb the water and cause it to luminese. This creates a dolphin shaped tunnel of light right below the surface. As many dolphins criss cross each other jumping in and out of the water it creates a natural fireworks show unlike anything I have ever seen before. I must have spent an hour lying over the foredeck rail watching this. When the boat is moving at a fast clip it can feel like you are flying among comets in outer space. Unfortunately as much as I tried I couldn't photograph this show. The light is just too dim. Later on in the voyage a flying fish landed on board with a belly full of these creates. It took a 30 second exposure at my cameras highest sensitivity to even register his glowing stomach in an image.

Flying fish are difficult to photograph. They are unpredictable and jump out of nowhere. I was not able to get a decent picture of a flying fish in flight. As if to add injury to insult I was hit by two large flying fish on back to back days. I love watching them fly. The little ones are usually not very graceful and tend to get blown by the wind as soon as they leave the water. It is easy to see why so many of them end up on our deck. The larger ones however are a joy to watch. Whether it is their greater mass or skill learned over a longer life these guys can really fly. When they jump out of the water they look like mini cruise missles as they flit less than a foot above the waves. The follow the contours of these swells perfectly, flying up and down as far as 100ft.

Another animal which I was unable to get a good picture of are the swallows that we see out in the middle of the ocean. These birds are tiny and it seems like they never land. It's amazing to see these creatures over 1,500 miles from shore. It's easy to see why swallows were a favorite tattoo of sailors. Since they never seem to land in the water they were a symbol of something that always returned to land. Having a swallow tattoo was good luck for finding your way back to your home port.

The last thing I wish I could photograph from the passage is the only one that is not an animal. In the middle of the ocean we would encounter huge swells. The largest we saw were over 20ft. The problem with photographing these waves is that they are so massive they completely fill the screen. It looks as if you had pointed the camera down at the water when what is actually happening the water has tilted the whole horizon. Initially as we say larger and larger swells I wondered how we would ever get over them. Somehow we would float two stories high and then back down again. Eventually it became second nature until you actually tried to take it all in.

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