Abalone, blue swimmer crabs and fish: bounty from the sea

We hobble gingerly over hot coastal rocks to the cool, blue sea. It’s not one of those cliches; the water really was aquamarine.

Then there was a rather splendid crab pasta one night made with blue swimmers.

Down a goat track we hobbled gingerly over hot coastal rocks and primitive red boulders to the cool, blue sea. It’s not one of those trot-it-out journalistic cliches; the water really was a deep aquamarine.

On with the snorkelling gear, another splash of sunscreen, and into the purest, salty water, one eye on the quarry, the other over our collective shoulder. This was, after all, Western Australia and sharks aren’t exactly unknown down south. However, the little rocky lagoon seemed a fair risk and, besides, this wasn’t just about a swim. It was about dinner.

Down there, a friend had assured us, we’d find abalone, a mollusc that had a strange effect on people. Particularly people who like to eat. The little lagoon, with its insistent, pulsing sea-surge, hermit crabs, curious fish of many species and submarine forests of seaweed, was indeed a journey that almost made the destination unimportant. Almost.

But by the time we’d pulled our 20 legally sized Roe’s abalone from the water the afternoon had morphed from a lovely aquatic adventure into a first-class bit of hunting and gathering.

Summer is a great time to pull food from the water in Western Australia, the unspeakable in pursuit of the highly eatable, to bastardise Wilde. Fortunately for the local marine species I miss about 99.9 per cent of what I target. Yet, miraculously, there are catches. This means the use of gadgets.

To the existing arsenal of rods, reel and tackle, and trusty spear gun, this year was added a fleet of five crab nets and a very cool device for catching lobsters, with a kind of telescopic stainless steel handle that retracted a loop around the creatures. Pity I’ve never seen a real, live lobster in the water.

On the advice of a friend, I also fabricated two octopus traps that looked good on paper (they were drawn on a napkin after several bottles of wine at dinner, so I might have got something wrong) and which, alas, failed to attract one of the intended creatures, ever. Epic fail.

Still, we were given one that turned up in a crab net (never did find out if baited with venison spleen, chicken wing or both) … and mucked it up by simmering the thing too long. Then there was a rather splendid crab pasta one night made with blue swimmers we’d caught and a supplementary packet of the rather excellent Fraser Isle Spanner Crabs meat, from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Yes, it’s cheating, but I’m new to crabbing.

And on several occasions there were fish I’d shot with the speargun. This is by far my preferred form of angling, even if it does mean the ever-present spectre of sharks (unlikely) and flapping rays the size of a large dinner table (very likely, but harmless unless you’re stupid enough to interfere with them). On one occasion local bream became a sort of pasta with fish; on another, a local cod went on the barbecue with a kind of Asian accent (fish sauce and soy quick marinade).

By far, however, summer’s greatest edible return came using a simple paint scraper, tough rubber gloves and snorkelling kit. On several occasions we gathered enough abs to make a wonderful meal, and certainly enough to amortise the $40 licence fee.

The first was at a beach ominously titled Shark Alley; apparently there’s a seal colony nearby and seals are to sharks what abalone are to us, only cuter. We faffed around for about an hour and got eight. My preferred abalone treatment on that occasion was thinly sliced, marinated in a whole lot of Asian stuff (ginger, garlic, chilli, soy and so on), then stir-fried in a wok with noodles and vegetables.

On the day we discovered the lagoon, with its abundance of the little fellers, the dive master insisted on her own childhood memory of abs: panko-crumbed and deep fried, with that oh-so-fashionable Japanese mayo.

She was happy. So was I. It was, after all, a meal no amount of money could buy.