Raroia Pearl Farm Tour

Raroia Pearl Farm Tour (mostly by Steve from S/V Lady Carolina)

We had heard and read a lot about the black pearl industry in The Tuamotus before we got there and about how cruisers before us were able to buy pearls directly from the farms for very cheap, so we were excited when our friends on S/V The Beguine organized a tour of the pearl farm in Raroia for all of us.  Paul and Celeste had been there the day before and spoken with the owner, so it was all arranged.  There was a shanty dock that we all tied our dinghies to and some loud construction going on near the water.  On the dock, two guys were pulling strings of scallops out of the water and putting them in wheelbarrows.  Once full, they’d push the wheelbarrow into a large open warehouse type building, where most of the activity was going on.  So, one of the first things we learned was that the black pearls come from scallops, not oysters.

We didn’t meet the owner that day, because he was away in Tahiti, but we spoke to the forewoman, and met several of the workers.  They have quite an assembly line operation going on, even if on a small scale. 

Steve, from Lady Carolina, did a really good write up on the operation, so I’m just going to use that here instead of recreating my own:

There were about 12-16 people processing the shells in total and another 5 or so people working on the surrounding structures.
Some point form notes:

–    I thought that pearls come from oysters however the shells certainly looked like scallops, so I am not sure what they were
–    The black pearls that they extract are about 12-14mm in diameter.
–    When they seed the oyster, they use a (guess) 10-12mm white ?pearl? (actually, some other shell from the Mississippi). This means that the black pearl is not ALL black pearl ?it’?s a thin coating on top. I never would have guessed that. Kind of like learning about Santa Claus
–    It takes the oyster/scallop 1 year from seeding to retrieving pearl
–    They do not harm the shellfish when removing the pearl in fact it is quite an operation as follows:

a)    Divers retrieve large strings of oysters on a line. (15 or so on a ½? polypropylene line) that are submerged off on one of the many (argh!) buoys/lines that crisscross the atoll
b)    Oysters are brought to a temporary holding pen on the end of the dock of the processing plant. (In the water)
c)    Workers, as required, bring up strings of oysters, put them in a wheelbarrow and move them 75m to inside stage 1
d)    Stage 1: Workers cut off the monofilament lines that attach oysters to ½? line with machetes and then use machetes to clean off numerous other smaller shells that are attached to the outside of the oyster.
e)    These cleaned shells are put in a crate and the crate put in a large blue (4m? diameter, 1m depth) ?pool? that is cycling salt water.
f)    Another worker drills/redrills the holes in the shells for the monofilament line.
g)    Oysters back in the holding tub
h)    Another set of workers remove the oysters from the tub and use a special wedge tool to just open the shell a little bit and then a small plastic wedge is placed in the shell to keep it open.
i)    The shells are placed upright, wedges up, in the same orientation in a single layer in another plastic crate and put back in the water
j)    The pearl extractor (we were told they make 100kUSD/year) takes an oyster shell and puts a set of handheld spreaders into the shell where the wedge was and opens up the oyster a bit more. Jiggles the oyster around to the correct orientation and then places the shell in a holder.
k)    When in the holder he uses to long tools similar to dental probes to cut a small incision inside of one of the organs to retrieve the pearl. Examines the pearl. Good paerl in one bucket, bad pearl in another bucket. If a good pearl the oyster is reused and another seed pearl is put in, if the pearl was bad, the oyster is put into the discard bucket.
l)    The whole operation that the pearl ?surgeon? does takes about 30-45 seconds
m)    The good oysters get new monofilament put through them and they are tied to strings
n)    The strings are taken to the temporary holding pen at the end of the dock and eventually put back out in the bay.

Everyone is happy that is working there (or so it seems but it is really repetitive assembly line work) but what is totally staggering is the VOLUME of oysters that are moving through the line coupled with the knowledge that it takes a year to culture a pearl?there has to be 100,000?s of oysters strung up just in this atoll!!! (That is assuming that the operation runs year round?.not sure if that is the case, either way it is a lot of oysters all over the place)

It is actually nice to see that they have a 100% sustainable business that is managed quite well. There are many pearl farms in each atoll and many atolls that have pearl farms.

On a sad note, we were not allowed to purchase any of the pearls as the ?boss? was not there. There apparently is a HUGE tax on the pearls and it is monitored closely. We hope to find someone that will sell us a bag of them under the table in the next atoll.