Never trust a marsh with a moustache...

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Every year Mrs K and I do the following:
We drive the car into town at low tide, park by the big pine tree and walk to the seashore with a bucket to harvest Pipi and Cockle. The beds there are plentiful. We have filled our bucket and feasted on Kaimoana for days. The secret, we found out the hard way, is to keep the bucket filled with SALT water. Our crazy idea was that you fill the bucket with fresh water to kill the seafood and clear them of sand.
Silly us.
Leave them in salt water and they spit out the sand, and furthermore they can be kept alive until you want to eat em’.
We have had them as fritters, in Fettucini Marinara with mussel and fresh fish and I have also made a Rick Stein dish which involves cream, wine and reduction.
Eating that dish involves eating, wine and expansion.
mmmmm..
The best way though, is steamed open in their shell and placed in fresh white bread with butter.
A true Kiwi classic.
So, we were very pleased when Chris Carter made his decision to veto the Marine development in Whangamata , because that’s where we go to get the seafood.
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eware of jet skis

It’s a great place and remarkably undisturbed. There are usually very few people there, even in the middle of summer.
We were there once with some Asians and they were SOOO excited that you could get free food.
The field of kaimoana is miraculously large, and I have long wondered how hard it is for a field of that sort to be established.
It seems to suit the people who support the development to call the area a “salt marsh” which sounds like something completely useless, somewhere Colonel Klink would have to go to in Hogan’s Heroes when he f**ked up. ..
“Klink you be shipped to the useless salt marsh in Whangamata!”
But what is the real story. Is the bed of seafood worthy?
I’m no marine biologist, but my friend Nicola is, so I rang her to throw her a few questions;
It’s Jimi Kumara here What do you know about cockles?
Nicola Rush . Bsc (and bar); ”They’re bloody nice”
she said. “ Tasty. With Sauvignon Blanc, delicious..”
Anything else?
”yes. They’d be great with a Chardonnay too..”
No. anything else about the cockles..
”They hurt your bloody hand when you pick them. Watch those shells!”
Are they rare?
”Not in my bucket.”
Her input was not exactly what I had in mind. I needed some dodgy old facts that suggested that cockles and pipis (alive alive-o!) are almost extinct. A concrete reason the marina needs to be stopped. I placed a call through to Jacques Cousteau, but he was a dead loss, so I decided to examine other sides of the debate.

The classic argument FOR the Marina is that by stopping the development the government are standing in the way of progress.
But progress towards WHAT exactly?
This?
”One day. . .. I hope that wherever there is an unspoilt scenic marine wonderland there will eventually be a Marina”
said my ficticious Marina Supporter from his four wheel drive.
”Imagine a marina at Piha or Wanaka. The Glory!”

oh yeah, and hopefully one day all the marina’s can link up and the coastline will be one big Wharf.

Also I don’t know about you but for me the word “Marina”conjures up some horrendous images (two words "SYLVANIA WATERS").
Images of fat men on a jet ski’s with a moustaches (how the jet ski got the moustache I’ll never know).
They will have gold chains inlaid on hairy chests.
In short, they will be w**kers.
Or muttony women in jeans two sizes too small tootering around on high heels talking in loud screechy voices. My fear is that the marina will place these people together in one place. One premix rum and coke will lead to another and eventually they will shag. (they’ll call it rooting).
Which really shouldn’t be encouraged.
Imagine their kids. Imagine boys in nappies on Jet skis with premix rum and cokes and moustaches.
The very, very new rich.
Yes. This is my irrational fear.
That the Marina will eliminate the humble cockle and promote the proliferation of these people.
That isn’t progress, it’s devolution.