| Crabbing at Kawaihae:
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“We had crabs for breakfast and for lunch, with poi,” Lani recalls. “To catch the crabs, we had a little net, and you have to watch it, sometimes it buried itself in the sand. We have to scoop it up, but sometimes we used our feet to step on it. You got to be careful where to grab it, when you step your feet on it, though. You’ve got to be very careful, or it can grab your hand and bite you. But we were smart about that. “The crabs were right on the beach, right there. Big crabs, you know like about 8 inches, and sometimes the little ones, we take it all home and take off all the shells and then we fry it. But the big ones, we boil it. It’s good." “White crab, kahono crabs,” Lala says. “We’d catch aku, get aku heads with a stick on them. About 15, 20 minutes, you pick the thing up with a scoop net, you'd get like 10, 15 hanging on the aku head. We catch enough for eat and that’s it. There was so much around. Just pan fry it or eat it raw. I don’t see it any more. It’s over." “Every Friday night, my Dad would allow us to make a bonfire,” Pua remembers. “Every Saturday we used to get all the coconut leaves. We make a big huge pile through the week, and come Fridays we can light that at night. Right on the beach. And all of used to run down the beach. We used to go catch this white crab. Amazing. We have our own scoop net, our own bucket, we used to step on them and then catch them with our hands. Sometime we go home with a bucket full of white crab. And we heat up the frying pan and put oil inside, we’d throw the crab inside, let it get, change color. We put soy sauce inside. That was our meal. “Pelekane had white crabs,” Ku‘ulei says, ‘and they had ‘opae, red ‘opae because of all the freshwater springs. So we would go there in the evenings and we’d go with torch and catch crabs. And I mean, you’d take your bucket and you’d scoop net and my dad would come with the torch and we’d fish in the water. I was maybe like five, six years old. It was deep for me. It was shallow for daddy. But I would walk alongside my dad and you can feel the crabs on your feet, pinching. You feel them pinching. “You can feel the puhi [eel] when he comes, he comes to the light. When they see the light they want to see what’s going on so they come and the puhi would go through your legs. Eel. And they’re big you know. And so my daddy slaps the water and the puhi runs away. “Pelekane has always got sharks in there. So we don’t go swimming in there. But we go and catch crabs. We’d be like waist-deep. Sometimes shallower. Then my aunties there would catch alualu, which is the mantis shrimp. My aunties are really good at that. But it was a great place to go; that was all our gathering range.” “My children, I know, my children would love that,” Pua sighs. “ It’s the only other way I’d live. And I try to tell them, I say, ‘This life is not a life that I wanted you kids to live. I wanted you to have the life that I grew up with.’ That is so. Today, you got drugs, you got all this killing, you got all these stupid things, you know. But I said, ‘During my days, we get up early in the morning. We get our bucket, we get our crab net and everything and go down the beach and just walk in the water’.”
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