(Her: Joanna)
When people talk about
Croatia, the beautiful sea view and how gorgeous is the water usually comes
up. But the first thing that pops
into my mind was sea urchins. Not
that I stepped on one when I was there.
It was far better.
When we were at Croatia, we
went to the Korcula Island. We hit
the beach with a few backpackers we met at Dragon’s Den hostel. It was hard to find a nice sandy beach
at Croatia but there are a few pitches on Korcula Island. As anywhere else at Croatia, the water was
drop-dead gorgeous. It would have
been perfect if they were sandy beaches versus rock beach. There weren’t much to see close by the
beach when we snorkel around but we discovered plenty of sea urchin even in
shallow water (it was actually quite dangerous if you didn’t know as we
encountered a few people stepped on sea urchin hanging out at the beach that
day). Sea urchins are very
sensitive organisms. You can only
find their presence in places with very clean water. Again, physically proven how great the water in
Croatia is. It is so weird to find so
many sea urchin just lying around.
If Japanese and Chinese discover this, I’m pretty sure they will be gone
in no time.
Being Chinese as we are, we
picked a couple up and use our swiss army nice to crack the shell up at the
beach. We butchered our first 2
sea urchins not knowing how to cut it open. It took us a good 15-20 min to crack our first one up and we
only get this tiny bit of meat from each sea urchin. It must be a pretty huge ass sea urchin for those we ate at
the sushi bars.
We threw a few
pieces of sea urchin meat into our mouth with caution. They are so fresh and delicious. It was hard work to get half a teaspoon of sea urchin. No wonder they are so expensive.
We figured if we go
somewhere deeper and less people, there will be much bigger and more abundant
sea urchin we can catch for free. So
we Youtube “how to cut open a sea urchin” that night and hired a kayak the next
day taking our snorkeling gear, soy sauce, a swiss army knife and a spork with
us paddling to some small island on a mission to find sea urchins. As bizarre as it may sound, it was one
of the best days I remembered. It
was like any other gorgeous day at Croatia. Looking into the water from the kayak, the water was so
clear that you can see things underneath the water. The sun was warm but gentle. Deeping my hand into the cool
but not chilly water in the middle of the sea with some breeze blowing into my
face while I leaned my head back being lazy and letting the warmth of the sun
engulfed me was worth a million buck.
We found an island in the
middle of nowhere full of pebbles and with a few shrubs here and there to park
our kayak. The water gradually deepens as we struggled walking toward the sea with
the seabed made out of piles of huge but slimy rocks. Charlie was having a much easier time than me walking on
those rocks. The barnacles on the rock hurt my feet. Charlie signaled me to stay close to shore while he went
deeper into water and dive down.
After a few minutes, he came back up with a sea urchin at least twice as
big as those we picked up from the beach yesterday. With the spikes, he can only pick one up at a time. Charlie picked up 6 sea
urchins with a few trips. We wished we have diving
gears as Charlie spotted a few real big ones but was too deep for him to free
dive down to get.
We walked bare foot back to the kayak with the sea urchins
fighting the hot peddles wishing we have bought the flip flops closer to where
we entered the water. But it was all
worth it! After learning from the Youtube
video last night, we were much more efficient in opening the sea urchin today. Every bit was that much more delicious enhanced
by the soy sauce we bought. All
the hard work was worth it. I totally
didn’t’ expect to have sea urchin sashimi fresh from the sea at an Eastern
European country caught by ourselves!
There is a saying that
“Chinese eat anything with legs on the ground and the back facing the sky” (I
think French comes into a close second).
I, then, realized how true that is.
