The silent work force. (part two)

Two remoras hang from their suction-cup heads while Kamoka's silent work force happily nibbles away.

As the morning wore on and the piles of pipis, etc accumulated I noticed that when I went to fetch more cords of oysters from the temporary holding platform in front of the farm, they would be increasingly clean.  As a child I had always been mesmerized by fish and growing up I told myself that someday I would live where I could feed fish outside my door.  Now, I was watching fish feed every day which was (and still is) a huge delight.  The early years of the farm were all about hard work and we were fully committed to getting the job done, no matter how tired, stung or otherwise tortured.  So when I told suggested to my father Patrick that I thought we might not need to scrape the oysters at all, I wasn't surprised at his reaction of exasperation.  What had I learned in school in America and when would I start to work like a man?  I wasn't sure what I had learned in school either but I was pretty sure that the fish were ready to do our job for us.

It quickly became obvious to both of us that scraping oysters clean was a thing of the past.  My father designed several underwater platforms in shallow zones where fish were numerous and soon we were cleaning huge numbers of oysters by simply leaving them on the platforms for a day or two.

As time went on, it also became obvious that our fish populations were thriving.  Even more exciting was a strengthening of all the species across the board.  I visited a farm in Manihi once that had an unnaturally large population of Kotimu (Sergeant Majors).  They are an aggressive fish and their numbers had ballooned due to the habit the farmer had of throwing his oyster scrapings and table left-overs into the water.  Letting the fish clean the fouled oysters didn't have this effect because the surface area to be cleaned was just too vast for one species to dominate.  It also became clear that different fish were suited to eat different things.  The delicate butterfly fish could stick their pointy snouts into crevices and extract the anemones, the brutish parrotfish went straight for the pipis that they found a welcome change from the coral they usually grind,  the surgeon fish devoured any form of algae and on it went, every organism that had taken up residence on the oysters was dutifully removed by it's corresponding fish.

According to the account of early explorers, these desolate atolls had fish populations many times more robust than they are today.  I believe that Tahitian pearl farming done in the way we do it at Kamoka can help to restore fish stocks to their original states.  I believe this is one of many reasons that makes Kamoka tahitian pearls the most ecologically sound pearls in the world and makes them truly something that we can feel good about wearing.

The silent work force. (part one)

Farmers typically grow their oysters far off the lagoon floor so, much like a sailboat's hull that fouls up, they become homes to whatever finds them.  Our oyster, the Pinctada margaritifera, is a lover of clean water so it is typically farmed near the surface, in depths of normally 20-60 meters deep.

Just about everything in the ocean starts life so small that it has no choice but to drift with the current until it either develops it's own means of locomotion like fish or it finds a place to settle.  Pearl oysters provide such a place so if they are left alone they essentially begin to turn into living reefs, complete with corals, crabs, anemones, fish, sponges, you name it.  One of a pearl farmer's biggest and dirtiest jobs is removing these competing species so that the oysters can be healthier and thus create more beautiful pearls.  For years we did as the few other farms did, scrape endlessly only to scrape again a short time later.  Very much a marine version of Sisyphus and the rock he pushed up a hill.

Early one morning like all the other mornings, we had gone out to get strings of grafted (seeded) oysters that had young pearls growing in them for three months.  At the time of nucleation they had been perfectly clean and now just 90 days later they were unrecognizable with "bio-fouling."  Each string had ten oysters spaced out evenly over six feet of cord but only rarely could you even tell that an oyster was there.  The most aggressive of the real estate claimers is an oyster species called Pinctada maculata, locally known simply as "Pipi."  In some atolls, they grow abundantly in zones where fish are few and are well known for their prized natural pearls, "poe pipi" (poe = pearl in Tahitian).  To Tahitian pearl farmers they are a scourge though, competing for food and oxygen by carpeting the species farmers try to cultivate.

Anemones were spread throughout the pearling islands and atolls in the early to mid 90's by farmers buying oysters from neighboring islands where they were either cheaper or more readily available.  With no shell or exoskeleton to grow, they typically out-compete everything, growing shockingly fast in a matter of days only.  They sting the outer lip of the oyster they grow on, crippling it and severely affecting pearl quality.  Worse still is that they often detach or break into bits when we dive to move the oysters around.  Contact with the skin feels like middle ground between a mosquito and bee sting.  After a dive with anemones, swollen faces and stings on various body parts are often the case.

For part two, please tune in next week.

Running free.

Photo: Jasmine HUMBERT


When we moved to America from Tahiti last summer we packed up our house, put most of it in a container then flew off with just a few bags.  The most amazing part of the experience was living the three months with only a few items of clothing and some random things that didn't make it into the packing boxes.  When the container finally showed up, I half wanted to make a big bonfire and start this new adventure in our lives with less STUFF.  I've always prided myself on living outside of the habits of modern consumer society but here was a mountain of things that we didn't need.  An undeniable litmus strip of truth in the form of 57 boxes.

Back up three months from then and we had freshly arrived.  The departure from Tahiti had been a nightmare for me for many different reasons then just days before leaving, a dear friend who had been one of the pillars of the pearl farm in it's early years, passed away in the prime of his life, adding a dimension of difficulty I was totally unprepared for.

At an hour and half's distance from the ocean, I knew that my outlet and source of comfort that I had relied on for the last couple of decades was out of reach.  Sure I'd be able to get away to the coast every now and then but my daily fix would have to be closer.  In high school I was crazy into running cross-country so the choice was obvious that I would rekindle a love for running that had been sleeping for many years.

The Oregonian interviews me about running barefoot.

My running shoes however were boxed up in a container, cooking on a dock somewhere in the tropics.  Being too cheap to go out and buy new ones, I went to the trails anyway and discovered the magic of running without shoes.  I had run without shoes a few times back in high school but more as a lark than anything else.  The Nike waffle tread was all the rage and our cross-country team even built a ten foot long shoe every year affectionately named The Great Nike that (legend had it) would alight on the roof of the school gym the Friday before Halloween.

To my surprise running didn't make my body sore any more the way I remembered it.  Not long after starting I Googled barefoot running and my jaw dropped on seeing that there were weirdos online all over the world (but mostly in America) that were running un-shod and loving it like I was.

A Youtube frenzy followed and I learned how researchers have shown through treadmill impact tests that running with padding on your feet makes you come down dramatically harder on them than having no shoes at all.  Other videos showed slow motion images of how the arch of the foot is SUPPOSED to collapse with every foot strike.  In the running culture I used to be a part of in the late 80's this stuff would have gotten you hanged by your shoe laces.  The more I learned about how good it was to run without shoes the more it excited me.


How many other things do we take for granted as necessary that we could live very well without?

Pearl pirates, yarrr! (part two)

The sound of the approaching boat became louder, confirming our guess that it was our neighbor with his rowdy friends on their way home from a bender in the village on the other side of the atoll.

“We better go have a look,” my father said in French.  I knew he was right, but having never been in a fight in my life, the idea of confronting a boat of several big, probably drunk guys made me feel more than a little unsure.

We hurried to our aluminum boat, grabbing a fish gaff and a broom-length hardwood dowel heavy enough to knock out an elephant.  I really, really didn’t want to use either, but I wanted even less to be left with only my bare hands.

After firing up the outboard, we cast off from the dock into the moonless night while the wind whipped the chilly lagoon water at us.  After driving into the chop for 400 meters, we spotted the boat stopped where we had expected it to be.  I could feel my heart slamming in my chest.  We could barely make out several people in the darkness, including one getting back into our neighbor’s flimsy wooden boat.  My father threw a volley of insults at them to which we could just make out their replies over the roar of our motor and the white noise of the wind.  Much yelling followed but my fear dissipated as I realized that the only defense or offense we needed was our own v-bottomed aluminum boat.  If push had come to shove, it would have been very easy to sink their boat with ours.  They hurriedly got their motor started as we circled them again and again, and finally they puttered off into the night in the direction of their islet.

The next day a check on our oysters showed that the bandits didn’t have enough time to steal any.  Although relieved, I knew that the bandit situation would have to be resolved soon.  Our work was strenuous enough that we didn’t need the added strain and mental torment. 

A few days after the incident, a supply boat came with some of our gear, so we put work aside and boated the 6 km to the village where it docked.  At the time of this story (early nineties) there was no airport in Ahe yet; all supplies were delivered by cargo ships, whose rotations were notoriously irregular.  To locals, it always seemed like a small miracle when the cargo ships actually appeared. It was never all business when a supply boat came though: all the farmers whose homes and farms were spread out over the atoll would come together for some much needed socializing. 

We squeezed in between two boats and waited on the dock with some friends while people milled around.  I realized suddenly that Floresse was just a few meters away, on a path to walk by us, unaware of our presence.  My father saw him too and immediately jumped up to step in his path.  At my father’s height of 5’6”, Floresse could have almost stepped over him.  I jumped up as well and winced in anticipation as my father reached up to shove him in the shoulder, asking him angrily what it was going to take for him to leave us alone.  I saw Floresse stiffen and clench his hands but instead of taking a swing, he looked around at the crowd that had formed and to my surprise backed away.

The following week found us again at the village waiting for supplies.  This time we were sitting with our feet over the dock when Floresse approached.  Strangely, I hardly recognized him.  He hadn’t changed in any obvious way but just looked smaller.  He looked meek and embarrassed and smiled showing good will.  He explained in a tiny voice that he had come to excuse himself for the bad feelings and that it wasn’t his idea, it was the others that had pushed him to be that way. 

On a small island, the necessity of getting along with others is heightened in a way that is hard to understand for continent dwellers.  This was my first major lesson but far from my last or most adventurous.

To this day, twenty years later, we still have never had oysters disappear from our waters.  Pearls on the other hand are far easier to abscond with but that is a different story.