Videos from Tahiti

 

This is a short vid done by my friend Ryan Young, an accomplished videographer.  The music is written and performed by Marten Ten broek, a part of the extended Kamoka family.  Ryan and I did a photo shoot together for Transworld Surf and PADI Diving a few years ago.  Below is a trailer for the movie.

                                        

Back-packing Eastern Oregon.

This past week we set pearls and work aside, packed up the car and headed for the mountains.  Summer is fleeting here in the Pacific North West so we have been itching to get away from our home in Portland to enjoy it.  There's much to do here of course but having back-packed with our parents, Celeste and I were both keen to get our kids out to see what the higher elevations of Oregon had to offer.  We were familiar with the Sierras and Trinity Alps of California but neither of us had been in the back country of the Pacific Wonderland and after living here for a year now, we were way over-due.

Guided by our favorite wilderness author Douglas Lorain and his amazing book Backpacking in Oregon, we headed east for over five hours to the Wallowa Mountains.  I drove while Celeste and our good friend Sandra Bao (like Celeste, also a Lonely Planet guide book author) were in charge of piloting.  Sandra wrote the last Lonely Planet edition of Oregon so it was fortuitous and fun having her with us.


Our camp from below.

My pilots landed us in a very small town called Pondosa.  Technically it was wrong turn but a visit to the only store in town quickly reminded us that when traveling the voyage is often the destination.  The "store" was the home of a sweet elderly couple who were obviously glad for our unlikely visit.  They showed us pictures of the Pondosa they knew 30 years prior and the sawmill and buzz of activity that surrounded it.  Their home has 12 rooms upstairs that used to lodge two men in each room.  Now, the cobwebs and musty air are testament that all has been quiet for many years.  They proudly showed us t-shirts and newspaper articles that claimed Pondosa to be the geographical center of the United States (Hawaii and Alaska included).  A Google search would later contest it but we were glad to have journeyed to such a self-declared power center.  After a half an hour we waved goodbye to them and their numerous spooky cats and got on our way.

As we climbed in altitude the desert and rolling dry hills that we had been in for hours gave way to lush pines.  On arriving at the trail head we breathed in the thinner, pine heavy air and eagerly hoisted our heavy loads onto our backs.  I was barefoot and was immediately glad to be so.  I found that curving my feet and gripping my toes gave me considerably better traction than stiff-soled hiking boots.  Balance with the heavy pack was easy and walking through the  rushing streams was a joy instead of something to be avoided.  Celeste quickly became frustrated by her flip flops and abandoned them then our son Tevai's waterlogged skate shoes came off, soon followed by Jasmine's.

The trail climbed steadily and followed a stream, noisily plunging over giant granite boulders.  About a mile into the 4.1 mile hike we met a ranger on the way down.  Dennis was an affable mix of John Denver and Willie Nelson and was clearly in his element.  He was impressed by our lack of shoes and asked us if we had filled out the honor system visitor's permit at the trail head.  We had and after checking it with some spectacles hanging from his neck he explained that it was an important detail because it helped them track the number of visitors which in turn was helpful for their annual budget demand.  Funding for the work of the Oregon Parks and Wilderness has been getting slashed to the point of it being a struggle to do their job.


The noise of the stream became more distant as the trail climbed away from it then finally we entered a meadow where we were to make our camp.  Ranger Dennis was spot on when he said that we would be singing at the sight of it.  The meadow which was bright green and full of wild flowers was met by the harsh white of granite rubble mixed with pines making for a perfect alpine effect.  There was a small island and Tevai suggest we cross the stream to what looked like a campsite on the other side.  A campfire circle awaited us with several perfect places to pitch our tents.


Glorious Looking Glass Lake.

Tevai and I got busy answering the question of what we were going to have for dinner.  We could have literally and easily caught trout from our tents but we struck off to explore and found that the Brook trout were abundant and eager to gobble whatever we threw in the stream.  We ate trout every night and Tevai surprised us all by pulling 13 and 12 inch fish from gorgeous Looking Glass Lake the day after our arrival.  Brook trout over 11 inches are uncommon so the three plus mile hike to the spectacular lake was more than worth it.

The meadow on the other side of the creek from our campsite had veins of tiny streams cutting through it with freezing cold water rushing to meet the main stream.  In some places the streams were a foot wide and two feet deep but incredibly enough were full of trout.  The fine art of "trout tickling" quickly ensued and we had a beautiful specimen for dinner in no time.  To "tickle" a trout, you have to first flush them out with your hands and feet.  Once you locate them you have to murk up the water just upstream of where your trout is hiding.  You then put both hands under the bank and slowly find your trout.  If you are gentle enough, they will stay put as you close both hands around them.  There's something primal and deeply satisfying about it but most of all it's a great recipe for wet fun.  Back at the main stream Sandra caught her first trout on a rod and was instantly "hooked" on the craft of fishing in a small stream.




Nightfall was always an occasion to look forward to.  The moon was waxing and nearly full on our last night making for some fun night photography; making me glad I lugged my photo equipment up the mountain.  Despite the warm days, it got very chilly as the sun went down so a campfire at night was the routine.  This was cause to partake in the fine American tradition of melted marshmallows and chocolate on graham crackers ie: s'mores.



On the way home Sandra "steered" us to the cowboy town of Pendleton that boasts a massive rodeo called the Pendleton Round-up that has been going since 1910.  It's also the home and factory location for the wool clothing brand Pendleton but most of all it's a slice of American life that felt strangely foreign to us.  A big Dodge truck with an "Obama bin lyin' bumpersticker was a mirror to the Prius with the Palin/Sheen 2012 sticker we saw on the way out of Portland.


Getting to know some of the breath-taking scenery and wildlife as well as the long roads and endless horizons that are part of a road-trip in America, help me to feel like life in this country is something I can claim as my own.

Celeste wrote a post while I wrote this one so for a different perspective please check out her popular blog at http://www.coconutradio.blogspot.com/

Night photo.

 

This is a photo I took on my last trip to the farm.  The shine on the buoy is from a full moon that came up a little before the sun went down over the land.  The strings hanging are what we use to tie the oyster strings temporarily to the platform so that we can easily access them to work on.  I've never seen a starrier sky anywhere in the world.

Update.

Last weekend I joined friends in the pearl community for good times and pearl-related activities in LA.  The party was hosted by a good friend and retail pearl genius Jeremy Shepherd of Pearl Paradise.  I flew to the Bay Area then met up with another great friend Sarah Canizzaro of Kojima Pearl.  Sarah did a brilliant job of blogging about the weekend which can be found here on her website.

After the party, I had the opportunity to get in the water just north of Malibu and was pleasantly surprised to find some excellent spearfishing.  On the flight from LAX to Oakland I packed some fish into my carry-on and I couldn't believe it when the TSA agents didn't notice them in the x-rays.  I spent the rest of the week visiting with family and friends in Marin County.  Highlights were seeing old friends and getting some good surfing in with my soon-to-be brother-in-law.
The photo above is of the solar panels that provide our farm with the energy we need for our operation.  On the horizon you can just make out the far side of the atoll so it's easy to see how such "big sky country" is ideal for solar energy.

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?