Making the conch horn

First you find a conch shell - which is rather easy to do. They don’t put empties back in the ocean so there are lots of them wherever someone cooks them or makes a salad from them. They don’t look all glossy and colorful like at the shell shops. The back of the shell is brown and dirty with some type of growth on it while the inside has lots of dried sand and glop. Ours was found near a beach bar and liberated. We soaked it in a bleach solution for several days using a small pocket knife and an old toothbrush to help get off the brown growth on the outside and most of the sand in the inside. These conch shells have a two-inch hole near the top which is made to help get the critter out. This hole needs to be filled and a new one, closer to the top, made with a hacksaw for a mouthpiece. It is amazing how hard that shell is! The sawed hole is about the size of a trumpet mouthpiece and needs some of the insides drilled out. We then put marine toilet paper into the first hole and covered it and the hole with 5200, a very tough sealant which takes 24 hours to really cure. Of course some of the 5200 was absorbed into the hole and a second coat applied. Then the shell is soaked again to get the toilet paper to disintegrate, clearing a path for the horn to be blown. Voila! A week later you have a horn which gets blown as if it were a trumpet. The sound is quite loud and is best described, in Florrie’s words, as “the sound of a dying moose.” It gets played at sunset. We greeted the sunset at Allen Cay and were answered by at least two neighboring boats with their hand-made horns. It is quite a connection among strangers who never see each other.