For the most of Sara’s life she has eaten out and hardly ever prepared meals at home. Cooking has always been this novel thing that one day she would learn how to do so she collected cookbooks. She has onboard almost 50 different styles of cookbooks. Her favorite cookbook is Julia Childs “The Way To Cook”. While reading the book she discovered that Julia actually cooks shark and has shark recipes. Six months ago she decided she wanted to catch and cook a shark using one of Julia’s recipes. Each place we’d visit she asked about eating shark and if it was safe to eat shark. Most said they didn’t and others just ignored the question. Here in Anaho Bay the locals eat shark, and it just so happened that their reef was plagued with about a dozen young black tip reef sharks. According to Julia she likes the Mako or Thrasher shark for steaks and that bigger sharks have tougher meat. In Marquesas the bigger the shark or reef fish the more of a chance of getting ciguaterra so eating a small and young shark would be the “safest”. So here we are in a bay where the locals eat shark with a plentiful amount of young sharks. Both Wade and Josh have superstitions about killing a shark, “If I don’t hurt them then they won’t hurt me”. Sara was determined and borrowed Josh’s spear and walked along the reef until she was surrounded by young sharks. She pulled back the spear so that it was tight and then snap. . . shot the shark. One of the prongs went clean through and held the shark. She pressed the spear into the reef allowing the shark to freak out on the spear and didn’t let it get away. Wade and Josh ran up and saying I can’t believe she actually got it. To ensure it was dead we ran the prongs through the head and then cut it’s neck. As soon as it all happened Sara burst into tears and was so sad because it was the first thing she had ever hunted and killed.
Wade took Sara back to the boat as she cried her eyes out and cleaned the shark. He had never cleaned a shark so he followed along the back of fish and cut very cleanly the filet. The locals said that they soak the shark in limes to kill the shark taste. Sara followed the Julia recipe with butter, onions, and white wine but very sadly the lime soaked shark did not blend well with the white wine. The shark tasted like biting into a lime. We learned that the locals soak the shark in lime and eat it with coconut raw but neither of us really wanted to eat it raw so very sadly the experiment tasted pretty terrible. Sara decided if something took that much to cover the natural taste it is not worth killing and eating.
Josh’s outboard had a leak and so he tried to take the bottom half off to investigate the problem, but one of the bolts had corroded so the bottom half of the motor would not come off. Josh was a little demoralized by his motor and almost thought about getting rid of it because he tried to hammer the bottom off and it would not budge. He has been so helpful and such good company Wade suggested bringing the motor over to our boat and resting it on several cushions using our winches to separate the bottom half from the top half. The motor looked like a medieval torture device with one line attached to the top half and another line attached to the bottom half of the motor and being stretch by the winches. After a half hour the motor finally separated and Josh was able to confirm that the lower crank shaft seal is broken, but he has a friend visiting in a few weeks that can bring the part to fix his motor.
After Wade and Josh had the motor all put back together and back on Josh’s boat they were ready to go goat hunting. We had been searching for a place to get permission to goat hunt and we found the Mecca. Generally when we’d octopus hunt we would see goats lining the cliffs at sea level, so we acquired a gun from a local and motored the dinghy up and down the cliff wall looking for mountain goats. We saw around a hundred goats but they were running at least a couple meters up the mountain. We figured that was because the locals had gone goat hunting early that morning and shot four from their small boat and the goats were moving to safer ground. Wade and Josh spotted a clear spot to jump on the reef and climb to the top of the mountain. Sara stayed in the dinghy because there was no place to leave the dinghy. They hiked up the steep cliff to the top of the mountain and disappeared around to the other side of the peninsula. An hour later they walked along the ridge and Josh was sporting a goat around his neck. The story goes that they followed the herd around the back side of the mountain and Josh took a shot and hit the leg of the goat and ran after it to put the goat out of its misery and once safely out of the way Wade took a shot at a goat and it went directly through the heart. Back at the boat they realized they hit the same goat because of the wounds.
We cooked up the tender parts of the goat like a steak, but we were very disappointed that it was so tough and chewy. Josh had an idea for an Afghanistan rice pilaf dish. Wade and Sara had moved to the neighboring rolly bay to connect to the internet shortly and searched for a few more recipes. We didn’t find the right Afghanistan recipe that Josh had in mind, but we did find “This Slow Cooker Goat recipe” from www.thismamacooks.com. After being so disappointed from the chewy goat steaks the evening before, we decided to pressure cook the goat for 65 minutes in the Slow Cooker Goat recipe sauce and it was so yummy and tender! The fatter bits we canned for 75 minutes so we’re hoping that tenderized the goat as well as when we pressured cooked it.
Dinghy update: The bolts did not hold in prop so we are limited to low speeds with dinghy.
iPhone and Kalo update: As we were moving to an uncharted bay anchorage (8° 48.406′ S, 140° 09.105′ W) we stopped in Hatiheu Bay to download the drone update so Kalo is ready to fly again.
Cheers,
Wade and Sara
Goat Hunting Anchor Location: 8° 49.301′ S, 140° 03.858′ W
