I am NO Conch expert, but this is what I know. Conch are those large shells people (including myself) like to collect and sit around the house. What lives inside those shells is a large mollusk or in truth a snail. While you might find a conch just about anywhere, they like to live and feed in deep water with grassy bottoms. They, like all living creatures, have young and old, large and small. The small young ones are to be left alone so they can mature. The larger and older ones are for collecting and eating. Underwater they sometimes look like a rock with green fuzzy stuff growing on them. Algae, I guess. They have one claw foot that they drag themselves along the bottom with while feeding. They have a pair of eyes at the end of what looks like stems that stick out near the foot. When you see one that is of "legal" size all you have to do is dive down and pick it up. They put up no fight and they don't bite.

Richard does the diving, I do the cleaning. From the pointed end, I count down 3 or 4 rings and knock a small hole through the shell using a hammer. Then I use a small bladed knife (like a steak knife) and run it inside the shell laying it again the shell so as to cut the muscle loose from the shell. This take me a few tries sometimes before it is completely loose. Once it is loose, I grab the claw foot and the whole thing slips out of the shell....guts, juice and all! YUCK! Dick taught me what to cut away and throw over board. The guts first, then I like to get the eyes cut off quickly so it'll stop looking at me! The thing Dick called the booby is next and lastly the foot since I use the it as my grab hold. The whole thing is slimy and slippery till you get down to the clean white meat. A Bahamian can knock out and clean a conch in 5 minutes. It took me an hour to clean two conchs. I'll get better.

The meat is used in various recipes, most commonly, conch fritters, cracked conch, conch salad and conch stew.

It has taken Richard and I all three of our cruises to become accustomed to eating conch. Now we are finally to the point of collecting and cleaning our own. We have gone native!