It’s Pronounced Conk!

Posted by Alexander Nov.1

Yesterday we got to go conching which is not pronounced with a ch sound but a hard k sound. We met some other Canadian boaters out in an uninhabited anchorage. Bruce and Val had found an awesome place to catch conch. We met up with them in our dingy and Bruce took us to the conch hot spot. It was very wavy so we anchored our dingy and mom and Katie stayed aboard. We followed Bruce through the tumultuous water until he spotted a little lump on the seafloor (which took about five seconds). I dove down to grab it by the shell and brought it back to the dingy. Mom was amazed at the size of it. Dad was right behind me paddling with one arm. He dumped another conch into the bucket. We went back out and within seconds were coming back with more conch.

Mom was in shock that we were bringing in so many that she failed to say stop! Katie expressed moms panic and we stopped. In two minutes we had brought in twelve conchs. That’s the trouble with conching. The hard part is finding them so when you already know where they are you’re as fast as a production line.
We kept ten conchs and went to the beach to clean them.

Bruce, ready to teach us how to clean a conch.

This is where things get gross. You chop at the shell behind the second line of ridges. Once you’ve bashed a good hole you run a knife in the hole to break the muscle holding in the conch.

Bashing the shell with a machete (using the dull side).

You then reach into the shell and grab the conch by a bone hard limb called the toe. Here’s the fun part! You pull the conch out of it’s shell bringing all the guts with it. It basically looks like something's innards. You cut off all the unnecessary organs, cut off the eyes and nose which look like tentacles, cut open the anal tract and clean that out and slice off the thing that produces all the mucus that the conch is covered in. Did I mention the mucus? Next you skin the conch and you have yourself a nice edible slice of slimy shellfish sea snail thing.

Pulling the conch out of the shell by the "toenail".

Gross fun fact. There is this little transparent noodley thing that some conchs had. I don’t know what it did for the conch, but Bruce said that some of the Bahamians just ate it! (They claim it makes them more viral). I wouldn’t eat that slimy noodle thing in a gazillion years.

Afterwards we went to Bruce and Val’s boat the Windrush. We hung out and saw their boat, Val told mom how to cook fried conch.

Windrush, a beautiful PDQ 36 out of Lunenburg

She even  gave mom a tenderizing hammer because Val had bought a newer bigger tenderizing hammer. Everybody talked for a bit and we found out they were going the same way as us and we’d probably see them again. Afterward we all said goodbye and headed back to our boat with our new conch. New adventures also lay close ahead. You can read about them in Katie’s blog on her epic Halloween party.

On our next blog....Halloween Pancakes!  Boo!