Oysters and Pearls in Raiatea

Today we are in Raiatea, a beautiful island in the Society Island chain.  We signed up for a Pearl Farm/Snorkeling excursion, so we met our group and boarded a mini van for the short drive to a beach.  Waiting for us at the beach was a boat with a small outboard engine.  We climbed aboard and made our way out to a shack structure perched over a reef.

I love pearls, always have, so learning how they are “made” was interesting.  It turns out that most pearls these days are “cultured” which means they insert a starter substance – in this case a round manufactured product made from shells found in the Mississippi River, into an oyster.  They pry open the oyster – just a little so they don’t tear the muscle, and look to find one with good colors/opulence in the mother-of-pearl area on the inside of the shell.   When they find a good one, they tear it open and slice off some of the outer meat and cut that into tiny pieces.  They do this so that they can take this “DNA” and add it to other oysters so they can try and get prettier colors on the resulting pearls.  This is sort of cheating, but it works!

Once they have some good DNA, they then open up other oysters, make a small incision and place both the DNA specimen and the starter into the oyster’s belly!  The oyster will then begin the process of coating the starter substance with, you guessed it, mother-of-pearl!  The interesting part of this process is that 18 months later, they take out the first pearl and re-insert another larger starter.  This means that the oyster again, will coat the starter but that the resulting pearl will be larger!  They can typically get 8 years of work out of an oyster – that’s about 5 pearls per oyster over their life span.

They suspend the oysters by drilling a hole through the oysters hinge (this doesn’t hurt them) and hang them on ropes at 20 feet or so below the surface.  They use big buoys that are anchored to the ocean floor to keep the oysters at the proper level.

Natural pearls do exist, but they are rare and typically not round.  Mikimoto developed this technique back in the 1890’s.

After the demonstration we were able to snorkel around the “farm” and see the operation from another perspective!  We also saw some beautiful coral, multiple colorful fish and even some blue-lipped clams.

Back on the ship we had a nice lunch and returned to our room for a nap.  But alas, a nap was not to be had…upon checking our email, we learned that our neighborhood back home was being evacuated due to a fast moving fire with 40 foot flames and 80 mile per hour winds!

We got our messages from the home phone and indeed did hear the automated message that said we needed to evacuate our home  due to a fast moving brush fire.  This fire has now taken off and is VERY serious.  Our neighbors had to evacuate their homes and stay in hotels until the fire passes.  We started making plans to fly home in case our home was involved in the fire…go home and clean up the mess and then fly back to meet the ship.  What else could we do?  The video on Fox about this fire didn’t help calm or fears!

It made for a very stressful evening as we waited to hear if our home would be OK.  Finally, at around 9:00 pm, we learned that the evacuation was lifted and it seems as though our home is safe.  There have been 25 or so homes that did burn and thousands of acres scorched.  Very sad.  Here’s the news we saw on our TV back in our room.

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