Mon, Dec 18th – “Bwile en eedem!”

I didn’t have any big plans for today in Georgetown, Grand Cayman. I definitely wanted to get off the ship for a while, so I wandered on down to the Olde English Bakery. On the way, I ran into Robert, our new piano player, walking by himself, so I invited him to come along. I couldn’t decide between the strawberry cheesecake and the walnut/almond-honey bar, so I got one of each. Robert played along and bought a sugar cookie in the shape of a red Santa hat, but as it turns out, he’s not a big fan of sweets, so left me to devour most all of it. (Which was heaven at the time, but I later regretted with a huge stomachache.)

So we decided to wander on down the beach front. I know of a gas station down the way with really good fruit smoothies, so I set out at a good pace. But, it was sweltering hot, and he had made the mistake of wearing all black. So when we spotted a little pier leading out to a dried coral reef, we took a little detour.

The dried reef is so remarkable. You know at one point it was large underwater bushes, brightly colored and teeming with tiny amazingly unique fish and other sea creatures. But now it looks like just jagged grey rocks with pools of clear water in the crevices…. Until you stop long enough to look closer.

Soon we spotted little sea urchins, spiny and poisonous, leeched in the crevices of jagged dead coral. And pea-sized hermit crabs or soldier crabs, hustling along edges until a wave would catch them and pull them back in to the sea.

A boy was sitting fishing off the side of the pier with a simple line with a hook on the end. Sitting so close to the shore, I passed him by, thinking he’d never catch anything. And we saw his mother and little sister down at the end, stepping carefully over the jagged coral, seemingly searching for something. The little girl had a bucket and was standing at the edge of the pier, while her mother prodded the edges of the coral with a stick. We asked what they were searching for and she looked up and grinned, “Wilks!”


She showed us a few that she had in the bucket – wilks are little nautilus shells, green and purple on the fungus-covered outside, and with a spiral shaped mollusk inside. They attach themselves to the outer banks of the coral and feed off the plankton that washed through. The mother was using the stick to pry them off and every once in a while would bring back another handful to her daughter’s bucket at the pier.


So Robert decided to help her out looking for more wilks, while I stayed on the pier and played with Christina and we used sticks to poke at all the little sea creatures I only noticed after looking more closely. She showed me how to spot little wilks, but said we must put them back, because they’re too small for good eating, and we should wait til they got bigger. Meantime, Robert was getting educated on how to smell and throw back wilks that are too big, because when they get that big, they’re too tough to eat once cooked.

I asked Christina what they would do with the collection once they got it home. She looked at me like I should know better and said very matter-of-factly in her thick Caymanian accent, “Bwile en eedem!” (Boil and eat them.) She explained that they would boil them first, which would loosen the meat out of the shells. Then they’d clean them off, slice them thin, and fry them up in a flat pancake-like batter. This is a Sunday-dinner, she explained, a delicacy they only enjoy once in a while. Still, for someone like me who’s never cooked anything she didn’t buy directly from a grocery store, I was quite impressed!

Once they’d filled the bucket, which the mother explained would be enough to feed six people, we all returned over to where the little boy had just caught another fish. The silver skin was glinting in the sunlight, the fish was about five inches long. It was flopping around on the pier, and mother and son were chasing it around with a Styrofoam cup until it slipped through the cracks and back into the water, at which they just sighed, laughed, and watched through the waves as it swam back out into the water at the side of the pier, almost as if it was laughing back at them.

I couldn’t believe that he was really catching fish this close to the shore! But sure enough, he would cut a bit of squid, put it on the end of his hook and toss it no more than five feet off the pier into the water below. No pole, no fancy weights and flashy lures – just a plain bare line with a simple hook and some squid. Then, through the clear water, I was amazed to see three or four fish swim right up to his hook! He waited, watching patiently to see which one would go for it. As soon as one did, he tugged! Five out of six times, the fish got away with the bait, but ten minutes later, he’d caught two more silver fish and one yellow one he called a “grunt.”


Of course, Robert couldn’t resist trying it a few times. It’s a bit like gambling, if you ask me. It looks like it should be so common sense, so easy. But the more you miss, the more determined you get to try just one more time…

Finally, it was time to get back to the ship to get ready for the sailaway set. We blessed each other and wished them Happy Holidays. And the family invited us to come back and join them in a couple of weeks, when Veendam returns to Georgetown to help them out some more. I’m looking forward to it!