The Tribune

THEY call him ‘Yella’, though not even he remembers why. Someone just did, and it stuck.

If they really wanted to give him a name that fit what he is and what he does, it would be Conch Man.

Few outside family know it, but his real name is Carson Culmer. He’s 54 and a fixture on the Montagu foreshore. With a business that rests on a long wooden table under a makeshift roof, he gathers, opens, skins, and chops more conch a day than just about anyone in The Bahamas. It’s hard to say who loves it more, visitors fascinated by the stories he tells of the life of the conch or locals who just want to get down to the taste and devour the fresh conch salad in that cup he hands them.

Yella, whose wife Barbara works alongside him, figures he’s done close to a million conch salads since he started more than 35 years ago. He was just a kid then, fresh from Tarpon Bay, Eleuthera, when he came to Nassau to find work. He got a job on his uncle’s fishing boat, a 35-foot Bertram.

“When I got off in the evening, I didn’t have much to do so I just started making salad,” he recalls, assuming that when he says salad you know he means the kind with conch.

The salad itself is pretty basic. Once the conch is opened and skinned and parts you don’t want cast aside, just take the big knife to the sweet white meat in a steady staccato motion, slice and chop tomato and onion really fine, mash it all together and chop, chop some more.

Next, chop up bird or goat pepper really fine, cut the lime, hold it up high and squeeze over it till the stack of conch, tomato and onion below is soaked. Add sour orange, salt, the local peppers and - voila, the delicacy.

Like most things, conch salad has gotten a lot fancier over the years with touches like cucumber or celery. There’s even a tropical variety with pineapple and coconut but for purists, it’s hard to move past the basic scorch or salad. For those not so familiar, scorch is anything but what it sounds like. There’s no cooking involved. Scorch is probably short (or long) for score ‘cause all you really do is score the conch in bigger chunks than for salad, add the other ingredients and you’re good to go.

Back in the day when Yella first started, you could buy a conch salad for $5. Today, a large can run up to $25 but the demand only increases.

On this day at the Montagu foreshore, there are locals like Carl Glinton, an aviation engineer who looks after some of the largest international aircraft that serve The Bahamas and next to him a crowd of visitors from Washington, DC, who are about to be in for a treat and the photos that will remind them of an authentic Bahamian experience.

Yella’s business has changed over the years, too. He started out with a cooler and a piece of formica over it to cut the conch on. Before the Montagu foreshore makeover on the eastern side of New Providence, conch vendors and other fishermen were crowded table by table on a single ramp. There was no running water. Sometimes there were so many flies you could hardly see the fish beneath. That changed when “the ramp” expanded to the foreshore, fishermen got fresh water, larger spaces, parking for customers. Tourist buses began pulling up. The latest – visitors boarding boats at the dock immediately to the west and riding up to the seawall to watch the conch ritual and enjoy the taste as they motor down the harbour.

Yella’s business has grown with the times – his long wooden table now holds fresh, homemade bread, conch jewellery, woven straw bags, a few pepper products, even a plate made from a conch shell. He seems to be there every day, all day, from sunup to sundown, this fixture of the true Bahamian experience.

How many days a week do you work? I ask. “Eight days a week,” he says with a grin that seems too big for his narrow face, a smile that is as much a part of Yella’s demeanor as the cap that neatly covers his plaits.

He shuffles between telling the story of the conch, explaining that to preserve the species, you only take the adult conch with the lip turned, not the juvenile. His hands never stop moving, skinning, slicing, chopping as he explains the difference between male and female conch and juggles a rare complaint from a regular customer, ‘“Dis ‘ain’t got no bite to it”, satisfying his quest for “bite” by adding more goat pepper.

On this weekday, Yella will probably do 40 to 50 conch salads. On a busy weekend, the number could reach 100. Is he worried we are depleting the conch population and one day there just won’t be any more?

“No, we just have to stop the poachers and stop exporting because they take all the little ones and throw ‘em in the bags with the adult conch,” he said. “If people want to eat conch, let them come to The Bahamas and eat conch and we’ll be fine.”