On Rawai Beach, cockles can shoot at seafood barbeque shacks.

No joke. I saw it with my own eyes, it was the middle of the afternoon and I was as sober as can be — these cockles were so fresh that many of them were spurting 30cm streams of water. (Maybe they were helping the vendor keep the trays clean.)

So we got a free show before our beach meal, which was good, since it took some of us awhile to decide what we wanted to order. The hungriest sat right down on the mat and chose from the menu. Two men from the group put three tables together for the remaining 11 of us minus me.

I was standing alone in front of the grill, still trying to decide what to eat. On a tray in front of me sat oysters as big as the palms of my two hands together. (I'm not a basketball player, but still… ) These delicacies are usually served raw with salt, fresh garlic, chilli, crispy deep-fried shallots, lemon and kra-tin, a leafy green vegetable with a bitter-sweet aftertaste. (If you want to give the aftertaste a miss, the antidote is lots of spicy seafood sauce.)

Rather than the standard house seafood sauce, which is delicious, some shops serve red chilli sauce on the side. Nothing, however, is as delightful as a simple squeeze of lemon on a raw oyster followed by a bit of kra-tin.

"Have some oysters, and you'll hip-hop."

One of our party, a photographer named Daeng from Artasia Press, had coined this slang expression. It doesn't refer to some kind of Afro-American music; to him it means getting sexually frisky, and this has become common usage in our gang.

Scientifically speaking, he's correct: oysters have aphrodisiacal properties. They contain 10 times more zinc than other sources. And zinc helps fight infections; improves immunity; maintains healthy nails, skin and hair — tissue growth and repair in general; and is necessary for sexual development and reproduction.

Deciding not to hip-hop this day, I passed on to an examination of other shellfish. The mussels and hoy wan, or sweet clams with thick shells and tough meat, were both quiet, compared to the gunfighter cockles. Some of them were open, nevertheless, guaranteeing their freshness.

Shellfish harvested from a muddy sea-bottom usually have silt in them. The solution is easy, if a bit cruel: toss some crushed chillies in the bucket of water, shake it a little, and wait for the shells to open. Repeat this a couple of times, and you'll get clean seafood, free of grit.

I once forgot to use this trick when I was cooking hoy chuck-teen, the little light-brown conches. These "pull-feet" (chuck-teen) conches get their name from the fact that diners have to pull the tiny feet (actually the cover-muscle) to get the meat out. It's easier to use a toothpick, however, and then dip the morsels in spicy seafood sauce. We ordered three dishes of boiled hoy chuck-teen, the local favourite, and a dozen other kinds of food. We got it all — spicy salad, barbeque, soup and, the heart of a Thai meal, steamed rice. We also ordered sticky rice, since this went so well with som-tam, or spicy green papaya salad.

And this was no ordinary som-tam. It was som-tam poo ma, which included raw blue crabs. What makes this dish so popular is the dressing. Unlike Western dressings, which you pour over the salad, with som-tam you lightly crush everything in a mortar: garlic, chilli peppers, shredded green papaya, tomatoes, green beans, and dried shrimps, seasoning the lot with fish sauce, palm sugar and lemon juice. Our new editor, who's now hopelessly hooked on som-tam, was my latest victim.

And there's more than som-tam made with papaya. The same basic ingredients can also be combined with green mango (tam ma-muaang), cucumber (tam-tang-gua), carrot (som-tam-carrot) or green beans (tam- thua-fag-yao). Local people love to add pickled black crab, or poo dong, for its pungent taste and scent. Northeastern Thais prefer pla ra, or fermented fish, although I've discovered that some of my southern friends have also acquired an affection for the smell (stink, some would say), claiming that they find it mouth-watering. Most foreigners find poo dong and pla ra objectionable, however, so make sure the vendors understand that you want som-tam thai, or salad with dried shrimps and roasted peanuts. (Not that pickled crabs and fermented fish are not Thai, but it's believed that the habit of adding pla-ra to som-tam originated in Laos.)

The juice of these salads is very tasty with sticky rice. Use a clean hand to roll a bite-sized mouthful that you can dip in the juice. Thai table manners prescribe not leaving any of your own food in the communal plate, so make sure your rice balls stick firmly together.

Back at the table, the staff was enjoying the meal so much we temporarily forgot our surroundings, and I found myself recalling past times when we'd come back from photo trips at sea and the boss would take us to one of these 20 seafood shacks along Rawai Beach. But the view is worth appreciating. A few fishing boats full of nets and other equipment float at anchor. Several speedboats and longtails sit waiting ready to take customers out to other islands. This afternoon, I watched some kids playing with a beach dog, catching sand crabs. The shack was a Thai family hang-out, and, at the other end of the restaurant, a man and his young kid couldn't get enough of the sea. The wife, knowing her son was in safe hands, concentrated on enjoying the last bits of their seafood feast. Then, family restaurant or not, four girls arrived together in a group, and eight men from our table turned as one to stare at those young blossoms in their beach outfits. But the girls were purely focused on picking over the luscious crabs and barbecued chicken arrayed on the grill.

Meanwhile all our food had arrived, only to disappear within the hour. The barbequed mackerel and white snapper baked in salt were delicious even without sauce. (Naturally sweet meat is a good sign of freshness.) I missed out on some grilled, alien-looking crustaceans that I plan to try next time. Soon, everyone was pretty much full.