Catching Sandworms in Rawai

I am often lucky enough to catch a typical moment in Thai life quite by chance, today was one of those days. While I was waiting for my boat to leave for Bon Island a lady appeared on the beach with a plastic bottle containing bits of raw fish. At first I thought she had brought the fish down to the beach to wash them in sea water but this was not the case.

Having collected some water she mixed it with the fish and walked along the beach spraying handfuls of bloody water on the sand. When she saw the signs of a sandworm coming to the surface she took a piece of the fish meat and pressed it on the sand for a couple of seconds, on removing it she had caught her sandworm as it had come up to taste the fish. She carried on with the process but the next time she just poked her fingers in the sand and caught hold of the worm and pulled it out of the sand and placed it in the bottle hanging around her neck.

In a few minutes she had caught quite a few!

Rawai Beach is a great place for seeing the locals catching marine life. The tide goes right out at Rawai and leaves pools of shallow water making it a perfect place for catching small octopus, crabs and shellfish. The locals often place long fishing nets along the bay on sticks to catch small fish and I remember many years ago joining them to pull a long net into the water to encircle the fish. We pulled the circle in smaller and smaller until the fish had nowhere to go except into the net and eventually into the cooking pot to make a tasty spicy fish curry called 'Gaeng Som'. Makes me hungry just thinking about it!