Day 77 - 21/2/14 – Streaky Bay -> Haslam SA

Sam had to go to the toilet at 6am so I got up to go along with him. As I stepped out of the van I was greeted bya beautiful sunrise. It wasn’t the oranges and reds that I have seen before but everything was so still and gentle I had to grab the camera and capture it!

We packed up and headed a kilometre down the road to catch some Razor Fish. Now I have heard of these things a few times since we left Adelaide and had seen plenty of evindence that they are around but was yet to see one in the water. A lady had pointed the area out to me yesterday from the caravan park saying that while it looked like seaweed it was actually razor fish.

I was amazed as we hit the beach to see this massive area, three or four hundred meters wide going out 100 or 150 meters into the water, covered by these razor fish a very large school indeeed. So what is a razor fish? When I was first told about them I imagined my Gillette Mak 3  hanging on the end of a line with Roger Federer hanging onto it. However it is quite different and by my description I would call it an extremely over sized sea shell. They are kind of shaped like an elongated tear drop with the pointy end cylindrical sitting in the sand and the wide end flattened down sticking up out of the san 10 or 15cm. Now catching these fish is really quite easy if you have the right equipment. Hands, check, a bucket to put them in, check, Gloves, check, wet shoes (the kind made from wetsuit material) errr.....Jack has some and I’ll just try my thongs out and see how I go. 

The “Razor” part of this ‘fish’s’ name comes from the very sharp edge that the fan edge of it has, sharp enough to very easily do some damage. Everybody kept telling me you need the wet shoes and about 30m away from the school my thongs sucked into the mud and became almost impossible to remove. We backed out and we wondered over to a nice old couple who were on a different edge of the school ‘filleting’ their catch. After a quick lesson I tippy toed, as this way I could keep my thongs on mostly, to the edge of the school and simply started pulling them out. Jacko was into it as was I and in about 45 seconds we had about 25 in a bucket. The bag limit per person is 25 so we were doing well until me in my thong laden feet, carrying a bucket, tried to walk the 5m back to where De and Sam were waiting. After about 5 minutes and a couple of falls, luckily none on any razor fish, we had made it and the cleaning process started.

As we were taking the low hanging fruit they were the small ones everybody else had left behind and were only about 20 or 30 cms long. You whack the round end off by using the blunt side of the knife and then insert the blade into the now open end and slice the muscle as close to the shell as possible. The shell spurts its water out and can now easily be opened up. You slice the other side of the muscle off the shell leaving you with a 1.5 – 3cm morsel that resembles a scallop that you then extract from a large blob of very unpalatable goo encasing it. My hat doubled up as a Tupperware container as Sam attempted to keep count of our catch. Now thoroughly covered in sand and guts the boys and I went crabbing until lunch while De cleaned the mess up! We managed to get another 4 crabs that we cooked and froze for the other side of the Nullarbor!

We rolled up the highway to a tiny village Haslam where we set up camp, had a game of cricket where I was peppered by some chin music from Jacko taking one on the cheek and another on my top hand trying to fend it off. All he now is a moe!

To finish off our time in SA I cooked up super surf and turf with oysters, el natural, razor fish in a burnt butter and lemon sauce, blue swimmer crab claws, char grilled steak and exploding potato bake. It was bloody delicious and we had great fun making lollipops out of the crab claws! As for the potato bake, De was cooking it in a glass pyrex dish in the webber. When she opened the lid the dish exploded, we think from temperature shock, into a thousand pieces.

For a change the wind was blowing about 30 knots but I was very happy and wanted it to stay that same as it was coming from the south east and tomorrow we are starting our trip across the Nullarbor and any tail wind is welcomed!