A Pile of Faces.

We set the hook at the southeast corner of Kauehi (Cow-Ay) far from the small village on the opposite end of the atoll seeking a little bit of pristine solitude. That we got. Anchored in 15 feet of crystal clear water with nothing but a fresh breeze blowing across palm laden motus and over calm water, we stared for a while in disbelief. Then we donned snorkel and fins and plunged into the salty jacuzzi.

Inside the pass at Kauehi.

Though I continue in my old age to swim with a shameless pleasure that has accompanied me into the water since childhood, on this trip I've noticed a small change in perception as I splash about joyously. Gliding through the shallows, I enjoyed the simple serenity of being enveloped in the sea and I gazed closely at all the wonders of the underwater world; admittedly, though, as I snorkeled past beautiful coral heads and watched myriad fish of all shapes and colors, I brought with me a predatory notion. It can't be helped, really, for we live in an isolation that demands self-sufficiency. Of course, we could eat rice and beans for a long time and survive, but to add variety and substance to our meals requires a bit of foraging and predation. In the Tuamotus, though, there is little in the way of fruit; the coconuts on shore near our anchorage were harvested by locals who export copra. Furthermore, the vexing presence of poisonous ciguatera and the lack at that moment of a local of whom to ask for guidance on fish consumption meant we were pretty short on options. Pelagic fish- tuna in particular- do make it into these lagoons and would represent the top prize in the atolls, but as I careened carelessly through the beautiful water, I had in my mind's eye something slower, something spineless.

I cruised through the watery world staring wide-eyed at mountains of yellow-green brain coral specked with the colorful plumes of christmas-tree worms, craggy heads of pink, purple and orange branching corals housing infinitely complex societies of colonial ascidians, cowries, poisonous cone snails and other gastropods, bryozoans, small crabs and shrimp, octopi, limpets and chitons, Tridacna clams large and small of technicolor ti-dye, Diadema urchins with long, black, sinister spines, heart urchins, and sea-slugs two feet long... the marine invertebrates have been the center of my ecological fascination perhaps since the day an unsympathetic bivalve clamped down on my six-year-old toe in Chautauqua Lake. But on that day in Kauehi, aside from enjoying the spectacular views of those magnificent communities, I was on the hunt. I perused away from Ardea with spiny lobster on my mind; alas they were hidden in the depths during the day and I couldn't find any under the countless coral outcrops. It wasn't until I was meandering back to the boat that I noted the abundance of one potentially delicious invertebrate on the sandy bottom. These were the fighting conch, shells eight to ten inches in length with long, blunt spines branching to one side. With ease, moving no more than a hundred feet from the boat, we collected a dozen of the largest specimens and dropped them back to the sea floor directly beneath our swim ladder (a live-well need not walls when snails be your prey). As was their evolutionary course, they made up for their ease of capture by their most stubborn resistance to extraction from their ornate calcium carbonate homes.

Conch retrieval.

We consulted the Bible (The Cruiser's Handbook of Fishing, Scott and Wendy Bannerot): they discussed only the meatier queen conch, for which there was a simple method of extraction by way of breaking one of the whorls and cutting the adductor muscle, which is the very strong muscle that allows bivalves, like clams and mussels, to shut and univalves, like conch, to recede into the protection of their shell, the only exposed portion of the body being the hard, shell-like operculum. Unfortunately, on our fighting conch, the adductor muscle was not located in such a convenient place, so we were disposed to improvise. Our method, though effective with a little practice, was not quite so elegant.

One simply places the conch to be harvested on a hard surface, say a teflon cutting board in the cockpit of one's sailboat. Then, one retrieves from one's tool box the largest and heaviest bludgeoning device, say a good old-fashioned hammer. With the conch oriented in no particular way, one then begins to pound at the shell with reckless abandon. If one wishes to be fancy, one can wear some sort of eye protection to defend against the bits of calcium carbonate shrapnel that manage, instead of being driven into the cutting board or nearby teak, to fly all over said cockpit. Of course, the crew of Ardea prefers the old fashioned method of averting the eyes entirely sometime between hammer acceleration and hammer impact. This may not seem like a controlled, precision maneuver, but that's only because it's not one at all. Like I said before: reckless abandon.

Extraction.

Some shells could be breached in three or four hardy blows, others took a dozen. Nevertheless, we were extracting a conch every couple of minutes once we got the hang of it. Cleaning the biotic portion of the beast is simple, if brutal. The viscera are readily apparent if they need to be removed, though usually they're sheared by shrapnel and hammer before one has even picked up the fillet knife. Then there is simply to hold the fellow by his operculum and trim the edges of the foot and mantle muscle. Finally, one cannot avoid the step of cutting off the poor bastard's face. You know the cute little eyes out on long stalks with this funny but endearing proboscis sticking out? Right. Just place the knife at the base of that and slice. Then voila: you've got a pile of viscera, a pile of edible meat and a pile of faces. I think we systematically murdered about nine conch for dinner that night, fried them after breading and ate them with fresh lime. It was fantastic.

Tuerto on the beach in Kauehi.

The rest of our stay at Kauehi consisted of swimming, tide-pooling a bit on the fore-reef and a half-glorious atoll kite-boarding session. I say half-glorious because Chittick was the guinea pig for a breeze that was borderline even for our big kites. He left and began an hours long process of crashing his kite and re-launching as he slowly drifted to the more sheltered portion of the atoll. Seeing this, I went back to the boat and waited for about an hour before the wind filled a bit and I managed to have a pretty good time on the warmest, flattest water ever graced with 15 knots of pressure. We left feeling strongly that the Tuamotus are of the most wonderful places in the world; we're incredibly lucky to have been able to explore them on a sailboat, navigational challenges notwithstanding, as they're almost totally inaccessible otherwise. As if to spite this positivity, we were soon to be thrown a few curve balls in the midst of the aforementioned navigational difficulties.

Rainbow over the reef.

Motu!