Originally posted on December 21, 2014, by cruisingrunner
My husband is a pretty handy guy to have around. He can fix pretty much anything (except Brenden’s iPad, but the Apple geniuses couldn’t fix that either). He’s creative and meticulous, meaning if one of the boys has a school project or science experiment that needs to be improvised because we never have all the right materials on board, he’s the man for the job. And he’s often recognized as one of the people you’d most like to be around in the event of a zombie apocalypse. He’s all that and more, but today, I would like to give tribute to my husband, the hunter.
Provisioning isn’t easy for a family of four. And we’ve been in locations where the meat selection was, well to be blunt, unidentifiable. If we had to rely solely on store purchases for our protein intake there would have been times we would have lived on ground beef, hot dogs, and bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces parts. And it’s not like Tim augments with just the quality of food we would have been used to at home. No, now we eat like kings. Grouper, parrot fish, dorado (mahi mahi), clams, lobsters, scallops, yellowtail, yellowfin tuna, red snapper, dog tooth tuna, more lobsters, more scallops, OK, you get the idea. We have been known to stuff ourselves silly with, for example, sashimi or lobster tails, which would be totally unthinkable if purchasing at a store or restaurant. When a friend recently checked-in on Facebook from a sushi restaurant, my response was, “Was it caught today? No? No thanks.” I’m not sure how we’ll ever go back; we are so spoiled.
Tim will spend hours in the water each day and tolerate back compressing upwind dinghy rides to find the best spear fishing spots. It’s not always easy. He’s gone night diving and reef walking for lobsters and more than once he’s had to fight with a shark for his catch. Usually, the shark wins, but recently he brought back an almaco jack with a huge bite out of it, so the shark may have got a little snack that day, but we still had a huge meal. And the challenge has just been ratcheted up a notch since we arrived in New Zealand, where the water is, well, let’s just say we clearly aren’t in the tropics anymore. Tim has risen to this cold water challenge by donning two wetsuits, wearing a hood, and taking a thermos of hot water with him to pre-fill his wetsuit before splashing down. I am so glad he has, because I had forgotten how good yellowtail sashimi is. The other night we made spicy hamachi rolls, and they were sickeningly good. Brenden ate four, and to put that in perspective, the rest of us ate just one. They were huge.
When Tim gets back from hunting, he then does a meticulous job cleaning his catch, that is, unless he can bribe one of the boys with skittles or chocolate to do it for him. Recently, we’ve been having a lot of scallops, and he has perfected his cleaning technique to be able to process 2 scallops per minute. Yes, I timed him. Sometimes his work doesn’t even end there, because he is a master fish barbequer and cooks the best grilled dorado ever and he’s also perfected the technique of beer battered grouper, using just the right amount of oil for fluffy batter that doesn’t fall off or get soggy.
Our travels have taken us to many interesting places, and there are so many cultural and environmental highlights. But one of the main highlights HAS to be the tremendous amount of amazing seafood we get to consume in gluttonous quantities. And for that I thank my husband, the hunter.
-D.
Gresham Family Exodus 