The Conch

For the last week, Daddy was in California, meeting with the current Head of the Midland School. While he was figuring out his job, Mama, Porter, and I have been cruising here in the USVI. Without Daddy, Porter and I have been doing things we usually leave to him.

A few days ago, in a harbor called Great Lameshur, Porter and I pulled up a conch, processed it and prepared it all by ourselves. A conch is a sort of sea creature that lives in a large shell. The shell is pointed on the outside, smooth and spiral on the inside, and has spikes at the top. They are usually beautiful shells of pink and orange on the inside.

The first step of the process we went through was hauling up the conch. The good ones were in eight meters of water, a difficult depth for us to dive. I can hold my breath for a longer period of time but Porter is a better free diver. That said, I was tasked with swimming down and grabbing the conch shell, checking to see if there was a conch in the shell, then floating up. I am more buoyant that Porter so I float up faster. Porter, being a good swimmer, would dive down and go beneath me, grab me by the waist and shove me and the inhabited shell toward the surface. This was surprisingly helpful as I was rocketed upward. When we broke the surface, we swam back to the boat and measured the shell. The conch had to be a specific length or longer, so Porter and I had to pull up four that were too small before the fifth met the mandatory length.

The next step was to get out the meat. Porter has a fishing guide, called The Cruisers Handbook to Fishing, a really great book that told us all we needed to know. We hammered a hole in the top of the shell then stabbed the muscle that held the conch in the shell, ending its misery. The next thing we did was laughable. I took a pair of pliers and struggled to wedge them in the shell at a point where I could use them to grab the limp meat. Finally, after several minutes of prying and attempts at pinching, the conch slid out.

Porter took responsibility for taking off the skin. The author of the fishing book recommends peeling of the skin with your teeth. After Porter tried, he was left spitting and spluttering until he washed out his mouth. After a lot of cutting and pulling, Porter had a pile of cut and peeled meat. The conch is a very tough meat so to soften it, Porter soaked the chunks in lemon juice overnight. The next day, he served it for lunch with celery and onions. Delicious!

This conch experience was fun, figuring out all the steps and working through them one by one. Porter says the skin peeling was difficult and Mama said it builds character. Porter then replied from the conch alone he has a lifetime of character. I know he is joking, because we had lots of fun processing it and eating it, supported by the fact that it feels nice to do something by ourselves. Even though this cruising is fun, I was excited to have Daddy back. We all missed him. Well, in the mornings Mama did not because she had a whole pot of coffee to herself.-JackRabbit
Ed. Note: we will add photos when we have better wifi