I’d rather be under the sea in a Moy Wai’s Garden in the shade

One of the Thap Tawan village elders Seewai invited us to go octopus fishing one day. I had no idea how to catch an octopus (moy wai in Thai) and the night before I had visions of heading out to sea in a longtail boat and snorkeling down with spearguns and fighting huge octopus. So morning comes along and a couple of us collected at the road to wait for Adam who told us he’d be by before 5:45 in the morning. 6AM goes by and we haven’t seen him yet. With my motor bike I rode down the way to see if there were anyone else waiting and ran into Josh and Jen who were still waiting also, I rode to Adam’s and found the truck still there which meant he was still asleep. Scrambling when woken up he yells at me that it’s only 4 in the morning. After pointing out to him that the the sun is up and since we are so close to the equator the sun usually rises around 6 in the morning. He then mutters something about his phone being wrong and throws on some shorts and runs outside. Well, on the way. Then we get out there late and Seewai was waiting for us. He took us out to the beach where there was no boat waiting, no spearguns for us, no snorkels. ”

What were we going to do?” I thought as Seewai just kept walking out to the water which was pretty well receded as it was low tide. So everyone just followed him. We walked out to the offshore reef and saw some really cool things on our way out we saw plenty of sea slugs (which apparently you can jerk off and they will cum all over your hand… Nice), we saw about 5 puffer fish that were just chilling out in the reef and puffing up when we sloshed by, lot’s of crabs, in fact we caught those as bait for the octopus.

This is how we learned to catch an octopus: You take a piece of crab meat and stick it on the end of a string or piece of seagrass. Then you look for small holes in the sand in the reef areas and stick the crabmeat in the hole. Wait until the octopus comes out and then you stick it with a long metal prong. Then string them up and take them home to cook them up. One of the girls, Koi, had her own unorthodox way of catching them; She let them catch her. We walked up to her and an octopus had wrapped itself around her leg!!!

It was a fascinating day out on the reef. The morning light gave way to the harsh mid-day sun, and we made our way back to shore.