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Tuna
jerky, anyone??
On the day he returned to Oriental and completed his circumnavigation
of the globe, Bernie Harberts reached in to the storage area
behind the settee on Sea Bird, and pulled out a plastic container
half filled with yellowy-brown strips.
This is what remained of the yellow-fin tuna he caught several
weeks earlier north of St. Thomas.
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Bernie shows off his Tuna Jerky supply
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“I
live off of rice and rain.” Bernie says, “and whatever
I can catch with beer cans and ramen noodle wrappers. But I
don’t have a fridge, so I dry it and make yellowtail jerky
or dolphin jerky.”
How to Make Tuna Jerky
First, Get A Fender Board
Once he catches dolphin or tuna, Bernie filets it on a fender
board, and cuts it in to strips a foot long, an inch wide, and
a half inch thick. Then, he laps it over a line on deck, and
dries it for a day or two in the sun.
“I eat it off the line. It’s great!”
Bernie is equally enthusiastic about re-hydrating the yellowtail
jerky with rice in a pressure cooker. “It’s neat
cooking yellowtail jerky on a Primus stove,” which he
does on the floor of his boat. “You’ve gotta simplify
these things,” he says, “cos no one else is cooking.”
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The Primus stove
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Not
As Spartan As It May Seem
Pass the Wasabi
"Thonk-thonk-thonk."
Bernie removes one of the strips of tuna jerky, taps it against
the edge of the container and considers the other meals he had
from the same fish.
“It was sushi,” he notes, “This stuff was
absolute prime! So soft when you sliced it.”
“God knows what it would have been worth in New York!
I could have financed five circumnavigations when I caught it!”
Instead, he ate it.
“I carry a little thing of wasabi, so if I catch it at
lunch, I’ll eat raw fish that evening and then cook up
a few big steaks to last for days. And I’ll dry the rest.”
Two things separate Bernie from those who fish for sport. “I
don’t try to catch big fish cos it’s kind of a waste.”
Five to twenty pounders suit him.
Nor does he use fancy lures. The fish now in the plastic container
on board Sea Bird met its end by way of a fatal curiosity about
a KitKat candy bar wrapper. Bernie explains that a KitKat wrapper
is ideal as a lure because it’s ‘really shiny on
the inside and red on the outside.’ He says he cuts it
so it has fringes, then “wraps it around “this plastic
thing. You just chuck it over the side. And that’s dinner.”
Savoring A Good Book With the
Jerky
Talk with Bernie Harberts for a while and that idea of simplifying
life comes up often. But there were luxuries too. There was
more than sushi – and jerky – to savor.
“I learned to read on this trip. ” As he says this,
he is sitting across the cabin from a stuffed bookshelf that
he had to build during the voyage. He says he set out with a
lot of CD’s and tapes (U2, The Clash, Doc Watson, Library
of Congress Bluegrass Recordings, Sara McLaughlin.) “Over
time, though, books replaced music and I just enjoyed the silences
in between.”
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Pondering reading, the ships fruit supply overhead.
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“I
guess it came late in life,” he says of books. “I
was the guy who read stuff that had to be read only when I couldn’t
get the Cliff notes.” Over the past four and a half years,
he’s been catching up. Traveling alone on the boat has
allowed that. “That’s luxury. Just to be able to
read."
“You need time to read. You need time to get the flavor
of a sentence, and then say, ‘Ooh, I liked the way that
tasted. I’m gonna read that again,’ and put the
book down and just maybe lie there a little while and read it
again. Sounds a little weird these days, I know, cos we’re
all racing around with books on tape,”
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the story continues on Page 4
