Tortuga

June 14, 2011

Tortuga

The sail to Tortuga was in light winds and we had the motor on some time.(remember the price of diesel?)

Christelle’s spit on the lures was working again and by midday I had 2x 2.5kg and one 3kg mahi-mahi hanging from the back of the boat to bleed out.

We had it on the braai and even smoked some, very good.

A fisherman pirogue came past and showed two huge Conch and wanted to exchange for old diving equipment. I told him to come back the next morning to give me time to look for the diving mask with a broken bracket/strap.

We started looking thru recipes but could not find one that sounds good.

We got the conch the next day and with “The Cruisers’ Handbook of Fishing “(a book that I use almost every day and a present from good friends Johan and Dorette Opperman) next to me I did the step by step opening and cleaning of the conch.

It’s a messy affair, luckily I have a fish cleaning board on the swim platform close to water level and I can clean it and myself (that messy!) afterwards.

Once I had the animal out of the shell I realised that this is very close to the perlemoen (abalone) that I used to dive for in the Cape (when I should have been at lectures).

One of the good and easier recipes for perlemoen is to mince it and flash fry it with lots of garlic and butter this is what we tried. We had a small hand mincer on board , never been used.

It turned out delicious on a bed of rice! Don’t tell the Hermanus perlemoen mafia this please.

We realised that if the fishermen can get conch (botuto in Venezuela) we can do that as well. The next days we found them regularly on the grass beds and was ready with a” conch ala perlemoen” dish when Yapa finally arrived after 4 days. Hicham caught a 8kg mahi-mahi that weighed 7kg on my scale , so please add 1kg or 15% to all the fish that I have weighed so far!

We left the next evening for Los Roques, 85 Nm (158km) to the north west.