The cooler back on the beach was packed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit and cold beer, plus a Tupperware filled with my mother’s famous chocolate brownies. But instead of enjoying a relaxing, alfresco picnic lunch on the sand, I was paddling through rocky crevices on the far side of the bay. It was the late 1980s, and I was home from college exploring one of the small islands that dot Venezuela’s Morrocoy National Park. My vessel? An inflatable two-person raft with the name “Sea Hawk” emblazoned on its side. The midday sun pressed down without mercy. I had a hat on, but I knew my pale shoulders would pay the price.
“There are oysters here, somewhere,” my boyfriend said. We peered into the crystal-clear water, scanning the half-submerged rocks for the elusive bivalves, but all I saw were schools of rainbow-colored fish zipping by.
“You sure?” I asked, my doubt rising like the tide. We’d been on several sea-foraging adventures already and always returned empty-handed. Just then, my stomach grumbled, and those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches back on the beach started to sound like fine dining.
“Yes, I’m sure. This is the spot,” he insisted, leaning so far over the edge of the raft that I thought we might tip.
We were in a chain of 50 cays, accessible by narrow, rickety motorboats — or lanchas, as they are called in Venezuela. The one with our picnic lunch was remote, which was exactly its charm. That quiet seclusion came with a trade-off: no seaside shacks selling fried snapper pulled from the sea minutes before. On busier cays, you could sink into a beach chair, gaze at the glittering Caribbean and enjoy pescadito frito with coleslaw, rice and golden plantains. The toughest choice was whether to have a Polar or a Solera, the two most popular beers at the time.
“There!” my partner shouted, with the enthusiasm of Columbus spotting dry land.
Before I could confirm the sighting, he paddled furiously toward a rock jutting from the water. I felt a rush of excitement, imagining the briny-sweet oysters we were about to collect, and cursed under my breath for forgetting the limes in the beach cooler.
Then came the sound — a loud pop, sharp and strange. I looked up, searching for the source, then heard the unmistakable hiss of air escaping. The “Sea Hawk” was going down — fast.
“Oops,” said the brains behind this brilliant operation.
Within seconds, our plastic steed gave out, its sagging stern fatally wounded by a rock that, to add insult to injury, yielded no oysters.
I could have been angry, but the scene was too comical, the water too inviting. Instead, I laughed the whole way back. It turns out, swimming half a mile under the blazing sun builds up an appetite — and nothing hits quite like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an ice-cold beer.
Happy Reading!
Alona Abbady Martinez
alona@bocaratonobserver.com