Island Visit

In keeping with the island travel theme I offer these few words about a trip I took to an island:

I was in my mid to late twenties, living in South Korea. I had some very good friends with whom I went camping one weekend. They were a family of four- mother, father, and two daughters, and a fellow teacher who was about thirty I think. We went camping on a very small island off the southeastern coast, somewhere north of Pusan where the Sea of Japan meets the East China Sea. The entire island was composed of small smooth rocks, which made for lumpy substrate for the sleeping bag. We swam and fished and snorkeled and caught just about every kind of monovalve and bivalve that lives in the Pacific, including sea urchins, which you have to be careful about grabbing. The Pacific up around Korea is cold, and don't let anyone else tell you different. My friends were surprised I could swim in it right alongside them, but they didn't know that I was raised swimming at Marshfield and Duxbury, where the water is colder than Korea's. They taught me how to sneak up on limpets and scrape them off of their rocks while they filter-feed. If they are alerted to your presence then they clamp down on the rock and they are almost impossible to remove. We flicked them into an onion bag with an ROK marine bayonet and went back for urchins. We ate them raw, we ate everything raw. That weekend we ate limpets (which I would later learn were called "opihi" by the Hawaiians), sea urchins, a sea cucumber that the father caught, big clams or small quahogs (I couldn't figure out which) and the two little fish we caught with rod and reel. I don't think I could have choked it all down if it weren't for all of the beer.

I had a great time that I'll never forget, but the pictures are not digital. I have since returned to Korea but was unable to locate any of those people because I had traveled to live in different places in the interim and I believe the family may have emigrated. I miss how much fun we had together and I think of them every time I eat some raw sea animal. I guess that's the danger of traveling too much. You can't keep the best times except as memories.

Now, what were your memories of Charlotte Amelie?