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While in Fakarava, we all took a tour of a pearl farm. There are many through out Polynesia, and several on Fakarava. Pearls are a huge industry here and you can get reasonably priced pearls where they are grown and lots of them available in Papeete. You can buy them raw (as is) or drilled or already made into jewelry.

Our host was Gunther, who was a German man that spoke, German, French and English (lucky for us!). He retired here, and married a local gal and has been doing quite well as a pearl farmer.

We went out to the shack over the water, as a fellow cruiser was sailing by on their boat. As with many of the places we have seen, they hoist the local boats using big wheels to bring it out of the water into a boat house. This way the boat is kept safe and no bottom paint is required. Next to the boat they have several planks which have baskets at the end of lines hanging down into the water. These are the older oysters and they use them mostly for tours when they are pulled from the water.

The younger oysters are placed in long skinny tubes of chain-link (like a fence) to grow the oysters. But first they are inseminated with a nucleus, which is a small round piece of plastic which the pearl grows around. This is a very scientific job, as the nucleus has to be placed inside of the gonad of the oyster (ouch for the oyster!). Then a graft of mother of pearl must be made to touch that nucleus so that the oyster will roll it around inside of himself and form the pearl around the outside of the nucleus with this graft. For Polynesian pearls, the pearl coating must be at least 8mm thick. Gunther told us that the pearls from SE Asia only have to be half as thick, which is why Polynesian pearls are worth more. This process takes 18 months!!, so time is a major investment!

Gunther opened one of the oysters from a plastic bin, to show us how they remove the pearl and where it is placed inside the oyster. An oyster can be used up to 4 times to make a pearl, but each time the nucleus has to be the same size as the whole pearl that was removed.

Old oyster shells are discarded everywhere. The ones that still have mother of pearl in their shells are hung in mesh boxes and displayed for decoration. The farm we went to had a nice picnic table under a cover and many unused floats that were used to mark the chain-link tubes that held the working oysters out in the lagoon.

Pearls are classified by not only size and shape, but by shininess and how many surface defects it has. They are graded A, AB, B, BC, C, CD, D etc, depending on all of those classifications added up.

Once the tour is over, they take you to their sales room and you can pick from many pearls, plain or already set. The photos here show Scotty getting the ones he chose to be drilled to put on a bracelet or necklaces and the tools they used. Looked like a mini drill press! We all bought pearls, knowing they would be more once we got to Tahiti. Mike bought me a lovely pair of earrings and a matching necklace pendant, all a shade of green about 10mm. Some of the pearls were very black and others were shades from black purple to blue green. It all depended on which part of the mother of pearl was touching the nucleus as it was rolled around in his gonads!!

Now you know how pearls are made! Creepy huh! But they sure are pretty!