Day 44: Takaka and Rangihaeta, Pipi Hunting

One thing that Sarah mentioned to us when we first arrived in Takaka is that Pipi hunting is awesome.

What's a pipi?  It's a mollusc.  A very tasty one, and one that all the beaches around here are teeming with.  So we went to Rangihaeta Beach in search of them.

You have to go about an hour before lowest tide, and dig around in the tidal pools for them.  It's not hard at all, once you find a bed.  Once you find one, you're likely to find a lot.  The trick, of course, is to find the first one.

Which Molly did in no time at all.

I was not so lucky, a first.

In addition to pipis, there are also cockles.  Just as edible, but not nearly as tasty, so we were told.  I found plenty of them, but pipis eluded me for the first half hour.

But then, success.  I found a great bed of them.  Collecting them was as easy as dipping your hand into the sand and scooping.  With every scoop, came a delicious shellfish.  We ended up filling both of our containers with a combination of clam sized cockles and pips, which we then strapped to the back of Molly's bike.

We left just in time, as a afternoon cloud rolled in and the temperature dropped quite a bit.  Not the best for wading around in cold tidal pools.

Back at the house:

And here's our take.   The rounder ones with little ribs on the shells are cockles, and the longer flat ones are pipis.

So you can't eat them right away, though.  They live in sand, so they are full of sand when you first harvest them.  First we posed with our food:

Second we cleaned the outside of all the shells, as they were sandy, and crusted with various barnacles:

Then we seperated them out and left them in salty water.  The cockles typically take only a few hours to purge themselves of sand when they are left in clean water, and the pipis take a day or so.  We planned out having the cockles that night, and saving the pipis for pasta dinner on Thursday.

You can see the little vents on the side of the cockle taking in and spitting out water.

#Hipstergrace

And of course, Molly being cute.  The cockles are very fishy tasting, much like clams mixed with mussels.  We had these as an appetizer for dinner out on the deck.  Carol doesn't care for them very much, but she was in Nelson for the evening, so Wendy, Molly and I enjoyed our free seafood.  This was only half of our cockles, so we'll have even more tomorrow.