sinking, sinking, black ink over the nose...

Or something like that. Anyone recognising the quote have 10 brownie points. Anyway, in this case I merely refer to my attempts to make ball sinkers (or egg sinkers as Quilly would call them). Lesson 1. heat the mould. lesson 2 - do not forget to pull out the wire. Lesson 3 - put on gloves. Lesson 4 - try for lots of patience. If I recall correctly doing this with my dad, he had a blowtorch and a pouring ladle - which could make life easier. The darn lead kept setting in the pouring hole (ergo, heat the mould). Anyway, I managed 8 sinkers in about 8 tries. Mr Efficiency, that's me (the mould makes 4 per time). It's a learning curve and it did use up some bigger damaged sinkers.

We took the dogs down to long point - Wednesday and Roly. Poor Puggles had to stay behind and he cried. I did some thrownetting and caught a goby. Go me. We also collected some of the little ribbed mussels (which are small) and grow in huge beds on the sand. Taste Okay, just a lot of them to very little meat. I also turned over rocks and collected little crabs (and I mean little - 2-3 inches across) which i have made into a crab bisque, with some fennel, leeks, garlic, onions, tomato, parsley and thyme and a carrot (did I use everything that was available and pretend I planned it that way? Hmm. You're close. But I didn't put in broad beans, snow peas, brocolli, beets silverbeet, or lettuce. Or sage or marjoram. Or Rhubarb.)

I took Puggles (and his cruciate) for a very short walk on the nearby beach. Poor boy, He did so enjoy it, and he was OK on the leash. It's easier when the others aren't there.

Our dog-tucker roo supplier brought us more roo (wallaby) and showed me how to debone them. It'll take me a bit of practice... at the moment there is way too much meat left on the bones for me to approve.

Oh and I managed 1000 words worth of a short story, which may even be saleable one day for our writers group. So there is the black ink.

Crab soup

So far the only crabs I have been able to catch are about an inch long - I gathered a bunch of them at lunch time (low water)in about 10 minutes and some tiny ribbed mussels, along with some little mantis shrimp and some burrowing shrimp (my experience with the latter two says 'bait'). These are the little hoon pea-crabs I've mentioned before - and catching them was a matter of finding a bunch of them pigging out on a clam and swooping in from behind (nippers in front).

I've been looking for a way to deal with our most common rock-fish - wrasse. So I thought I'd try a mix between Tal-Grottli bisque (grottily?) from IIRC Malta and Bouillabaisse - cook the crabs whole and then toss the mix into a blender, sieve the shell out, and at least get the crab flavour. So I did this, along with some of Inge's tomatoes, Lisa's red onions and garlic and a red jalapeno chili. Some sherry stuff we'd been given and Tasmanian pepper - not a single bought ingredient, outside of the olive oil I softened the onion in. The soup was then brought to a rolling boil and I added the wrasse (chopped into boneless inch-wide squares, and some abalone just after. The fish had about 3 minutes and the abalone maybe 2 before I took it off the heat. I added the pre-cooked mussels and some of my chopped parsley. Served with fresh pao rolls (made with flour and some potato - the way they did Mozambique to save flour) it was superb - and near as dammit all free or foraged food. I could feel self-righteous and thrifty for nearly half a bowl - which was as long as took me start feeling a little unwell. I need a stronger liver.... it's RICH. Still, you can eat wrasse like that and really enjoy it.

John-boy popped in to lend us a couple of paddle-skis - one kid-size, the other a real fishing sit on kayak I can definitely set crab-traps from. Work presses so I need to get the wordcount up before I go and try this. Thank heavens the weather is set lousy for the next few days. It makes resisting temptation so much easier.