Perched on a slippery rock off Spain’s rough northwest coast, Nando keeps one eye on the breaking waves and one on his prey: Goose barnacles, a prized Christmas delicacy.
Diners pay handsomely to taste the iodine-tinged flesh of the grey-brown stalks that hold these crustaceans to the rocks, topped by white fingernail-shaped shells.
But getting hold of them here in the cold Atlantic shallows of the Costa de la Vela is no treat.
The danger is not so much the sea, as the jumping onto the rocks, says Nando full name Fernando Marino a big, vigorous man of 41 with pepper-and-salt hair.
He has been picking the barnacles for 19 years, dressed in a wetsuit with a small net tied to his waist to hold his catch one of 65 locals from the nearby town of Cangas licensed to do so.
He leaps from a dinghy at the foot of the cliffs as the tide goes out, leaving the rocks wave-lapped but exposed enough to reach the barnacles.
The skill of the good picker, he says, is in quickly identifying the biggest and best barnacles on the spot. As soon as the tide starts coming in, it is very dangerous.
Working against the clock in the two hours before the tide turns, he and other pickers slice the barnacles from the rocks with a wooden-handled, flat-bladed tool called a raspa.
You have to keep an eye out for everything the sea, your companions, in case anyone falls, says Marcos Golvanes, 27, who steers the dinghy.
None of the pickers can forget the story of Dec. 13 last year, when a woman picking barnacles died after falling into the sea off the nearby town of Oia.
We have had the odd scare here when the sea has been rough, said Monica Gonzalez, the Cangas picking team’s watchman, who stays in the boat. But we have been lucky.
Waiting on the boat, Gonzalez weighs the catch, checking it does not pass the legal quota: Five kilograms per person, per outing, in the run-up to Christmas and four kilograms the rest of the year.
Back on land, she takes the catch to the fish market at Cangas harbor where wholesalers examine the barnacles before bidding for them.
Arab News 2013