So fresh, it’s still flapping

It set me dreaming about other special food moments on the water.

It's delicate. Briny, yet sweet. Creamy. Laden with what the Japanese call umami, the so-called fifth basic flavour. And it comes from inside a primitive eating-machine you'll never forget if you happen to stand on one when you're wading in the shallows.

I was out the back of a boat eating lobes of sea urchin roe - what the Japanese call uni - straight from the shell, a huge privilege, and it occurred to me that, over the years, I've experienced some remarkably fortunate moments involving food and boats. Mix a cocktail of two things I love and there's a certain inevitability about that. Memories that last.

The urchins were coming from the water about 200 at a time, hauled up by two professional divers in relatively shallow waters off Point Cook, on Victoria's Port Phillip Bay. Every so often one of the divers, Keith Browne, would bob up, hand one over and say, "Try this." Keith would just know, from where the urchin had been taken, whether it was going to be something special. Urchin whisperer. I figured: when is it going to get any better than this?

With a special device that penetrates then dissects the shell, I cracked open quite a few urchins that day, carefully separating the gutsy muck from the five lobes of terracotta-coloured roe and wolfing it down on the spot. Just wonderful.

It's a memory that I suspect will stick for a long time. It set me daydreaming about the other special food moments that have happened over the years on the water in floating craft.

Eating raw blue swimmer crab from pots lifted a few kilometres off Carnarvon, in WA - to date the best crab ever. Did it help that a pod of humpbacks came along and began to breach? Probably. But raw crab straight from the sea is a revelation.

Buying beautiful squid and banana prawns from a Thai fishing boat last year and motoring back to our rent-a-yacht to plan an insane floating dinner that involved a truck load of chilli, lime and coriander.

Dredging for surf clams at the top of New Zealand's North Island, an experience memorable for both the little critters, all sweet and springy and rather lovely raw, and for the innovative, environmentally benign technology developed by the Cloudy Bay Clams guys.

A long, long night spent on a scallop boat dragging the ocean floor off the east coast of Tasmania, the sun coming up next morning off Maria Island, and cracking open the freshest scallops I'll ever taste.

Motoring down the Gippsland Lakes to the rock groins at Lakes Entrance at low tide when black mussels are there for the taking if you're prepared to hop around the boulders like a mountain goat.

Prawning on the sand flats at midnight, not far away. Pulling a dhufish - a boring fish to catch but a sublime thing to eat - from the water off Gracetown in WA. Pulling a crab net from the shallows in Geographe Bay, WA and finding an octopus, destined for the pot.

Why am I daydreaming? It's been a long, cold winter and I'm thinking about getting on the water over summer. About Bali - pulling a long line from behind a sailpowered jukung and landing 100 mackerel, a few of which end up on a plate with sambal and rice, a dining experience greater than the sum of its parts. About ...  the things that matter.

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