Day Six: The Black Pearl

I slept even worse last night than the night before. More tossing and turning and more rain in the middle of the night left me weary as I stumbled up to the deck. I was the first one up, so I tried to read a bit in "In the Company of Crows and Ravens", but soon found an on-deck nap to be a better option.

It was not long before I was joined by my hosts, bearing fruit, baguette, butter, jam, peanut butter and nutella. After breakfast I was finally given a task! Their Windows laptop has an erratic and odd driver error, and their Mac is generally jacked up with a default system date and inaccessible control panels. I worked on the PC for a bit and got a good understanding of what the problem is, but not certain how to fix it with no network connectivity. The Mac was a considerable challenge (it's a good six years old), but I eventually got it back up to snuff.

My labors were interrupted, however, my two adventures. The Phoenix, populated by the Coasties and the fledgling musical actor, was leaving that day, but was going to do a little "Spinner flying" first. They had been talking about this the night before, but I didn't know what is was and didn't realize that I was expected to participate.

Basically, this involves a racing sail that can be opened and closed from the deck via a lengthy tube sheath attached to a rope. This sail has three other lines attached to it. The boat is turned around and double anchored so that the wind is blowing away from the stern. One line, which is connected to the two corners of the sail, dangles down in the water. You sit (or stand, if you're insane) on the line, but not directly in the center for reasons that I barely understand on the theoretical level. They then begin to open the sail up, and up you go. I let Bill go first, but watching him dance all over the sky was not a reassuring vision.

See, there's no real way to control what happens once you're up in the air. By up in the air, I'm talking twenty feet or more. You can hang there like a glider, or you can find yourself spinning like a top, dipping and weaving madly. Note, there is no seat. You're just balancing yourself on a medium sized (but very strong) line. And yes, it hurts your butt.

Up I went, and the sea was VERY far beneath me. I was three stories in the air, with nothing holding me up but wind, sail, and cord. I was lucky in that I didn't go spinning out of control, but as they tried to close the sail and bring me down, I veered to the left so hard I was afraid I was going to lose my vice like grip on the line. "Don't look down" they yelled, but looking down wasn't the problem. I tried to look up, and felt my big heavy head tilt me backwards dangerously, the center of my weight shifting from the place I wanted it. Forget that, I'll look down. The wind had picked up and was much stronger than when they had begun, and getting me down was becoming much more difficult as the sheath was having a hard time closing the sail. Suddenly I dropped about ten feet, then was lifted up several feet as another gust caught me. Another savage tilt to the left that must have looked much less terrifying than it felt, and finally I came down to the sea in a somewhat controlled way.

Linda went up next, and they had a hard time getting her down as well. Finally, the captain of the Phoenix made one last go, and the wind was so violent by that point that a false landing and rising caught him so off guard that he was thrown off the cord, and caught it again with his knees. He hung there for a few minutes as his wife and daughter tried to close the sail and bring him down. They got his head about six feet or so from the sea and he released his knees and did a half gainer into the water.

We bid the Phoenix adieu. I opted to swim back to the Creola rather than take the dinghy back, as the current was with me and I had never attempted a ship to ship swim before. If I was going to do it, this was the time, since the salt water makes it very difficult to sink. I am not a strong swimmer by any means and have been able to stay in the water for 20 minutes without any real fatigue.

I went back to work on the machines until 1pm, when we started getting ready for the next excursion. One of the other boats had come by earlier to invite us along for a trip to a black pearl farm. Tahiti is the only place in the world to get black pearls, because the oysters here are the only ones that produce them. The pearls themselves are not completely black, but the name was coined by early sailors to differentiate them from standard pearls.

We all piled into the van and headed further down the atoll than I had been thus far. After disembarking, we got a tour of how pearls are produced now. Nowhere in the world are there naturally produced pearls anymore, as the ratio of pearls to oysters is utterly absurd. As it is, the treatment of the oysters is tightly regulated to prevent damage to the population. Once an oyster egg has hit the bottom of the sea, it cannot be touched by oyster farmers. Instead they place ropes into the sea that are highly frilled to catch as many fertilized oyster eggs as possible. These oysters are then taken to the farm to be raised for three years. Once that time has passed, they are checked to see if they are ready for surgery. If they are, they are left for another six months and then brought back up out of the water. They are only allowed out of the water for two hours. During this time, they are opened a few millimeters to relax the oyster, twenty minutes later, they are opened a few centimeters more and a small nucleus is placed inside the appendix of the oyster along with a piece of oyster with appropriate coloring. This piece of oyster's DNA gets absorbed by the host oyster, and combined with the nucleus, a perl begins to form. More months pass and the oyster is checked to see if it has died from the surgery, been eaten by predators, or rejected the nucleus. If none of these is true, the oyster is left alone for another eighteen months while the pearl is formed. If the oyster survived, but rejected the nucleus, it is left for six months to recover and they try again. Once the pearl is extracted, and if the pearl is perfectly round, a new nucleus, the size of the original pearl, is placed back into the appendix and the process starts over with a much larger pearl being the result eighteen months later. Some oysters produce a third generation pearl even larger, and very rare oysters will actually produce a fourth generation of enormous pearls that are worth several thousand dollars.

When an oyster can no longer be used, the shells are sent to a company in India that uses them to make buttons for nice shirts and the oyster itself is eaten by the employees.

I'm back at the boat now and have succeeded in fixing the Mac, although the PC will require a complete wipe and reinstall. The sky is growing dark and I suspect we'll have more rain tonight. Bill and Linda are making chicken curry and margaritas and I suspect we'll finally play this Farkle game he's been going on about all week.

I can only wonder what tomorrow will bring.