By the time you read this I’ll be in Patagonia or Peru or Perth, somewhere far from my murderous mates who’ve sworn revenge if I tell this tale, but pride must take a back seat to truth. So here’s what transpired.
Two years ago, in this space, I wrote about the founding and first year of the Joe King’s Oyster Cooperative, which secured the state’s first nonprofit recreational aquaculture license.
The co-op, an offshoot of the Joe King’s basketball team sponsored by the downtown shoe store for nearly 40 years, grew out of a bar conversation after the last game my knees let me play.
We started with one inappropriate V-hulled aluminum boat and soon upgraded to the Arthur S. Ellison, a 1950s pontoon boat named for a saintly teammate. Our farm is one acre of leased paradise in Little Bay. It’s just over Durham’s famous Wagon Hill and a bit to the south, off a small uninhabited conservation island.
Oysters in New England’s cold waters take three years to grow from the size of a squished pea to the three-inch cocktail oysters served on the half-shell.
Early in their life their shells are unable to resist the attack of crabs, oyster drills and other predators, so they are protected by mesh bags inside racks that look like flattened lobster pots with separate slots for each 30-inch bag.
All manner of marine life likes to attach to the bags to make use of the flow of nutrients on a good oyster farm site.
The work of farming entails raising the bags, usually with a small crane and winch on a pontoon boat, swapping fouled bags for clean ones, or scrubbing away the seaweed, algae and other freeloaders. It’s dirty work.
Then the oysters must be sorted and the “gapers” cast overboard. Mortality is in the 50 percent range.
That was the work we four were doing on that cool, gray day in early June, a day with rain in the forecast, when we made what’s been, so far, our biggest mistake.
Countless equipment failures, objects lost overboard, rope-fouled props and other errors, of course, preceded that day but, to the wonderment of the bay’s dozen or so other oyster farmers, we survive, give them a steady source of amusement, laugh constantly at ourselves, have a great time and persevere.
We’ve now put 70,000 oysters in the bay, which they’re busily cleaning. Oysters shut down for the winter, biding their time until the water warms. This outing was the first time we’d seen them since fall.
The racks and bags were a mess, thick with mud, seaweed and other marine growth. It took most of a tide cycle to hoist and clean just three of our four racks. The last, however, was beautiful. It was filled with our biggest oysters. Almost all had survived and some were nearly market size.
We joked, scrubbed and lost track of time until, with a groan, Tom, the Arthur’s owner, noticed that we had beached ourselves on our uninhabited island. Efforts to raise the prop from the mud or lever the boat back to sea with logs were fruitless. We were marooned.
It was frustrating, amusing and embarrassing. None of us are exactly old salts, but collectively we have spent a quarter-millennium on the planet and the tide is pretty predictable. We had, it being the first trip of the season, no food or water and one beer, which no one, once the temperature dropped, wanted to drink.
We had one cell phone with a low battery. Its owner, Ken, called his wife and quickly hung up. “She couldn’t stop laughing long enough to listen,” he said. We all called our spouses and tried to convince them that a rogue wave had cast us ashore. Not one of them bought it.
We had been on the water since 9:30 and now it was nearly eight. Light was fading and it grew cold. I, as the Eagle Scout and supposedly prepared guy, rummaged in my dry bag and found a plastic match safe full of stick matches. At least we could have a fire.
Firewood and kindling were plentiful, and we quickly laid a fire on the beach in the lee of a hill and prepared to light it. I opened the match safe, only to find that the matches, which may have been in there since my Boy Scout days, crumbled but wouldn’t light.
Not all was lost, I thought. We had a can of spray start aboard. Incendiary stuff. All we had to do was make sparks with the hammer and wrench in our tool bag and we’d be cheery and warm. Thousands of sparks later, nothing.
We settled in, sang as many songs as we could remember – the Gilligan’s Island theme and such – talked and took to the boat in silence to get as comfortable as we could.
The night grew colder and we grew hungrier. It was quickly decided, much too quickly for my taste, that if it came to it, I, as the oldest, would be the first to be eaten. The vote was 3-1.
The sky cleared and it grew colder still. We were all wet, and I was in shorts. I borrowed some thin rain pants from our box of gear but kept shivering. I rummaged in the dry bag again and found a cheap, emergency Mylar space blanket. Unfolding it made noise, like the loud crinkly noise of a potato chip bag opened in a theater during the most dramatic moments on the screen. “More noise like that and we throw you overboard,” a drowsy shipmate said. They are a hard lot.
It was too cold to sleep. We were too tired to talk, but as the hours passed the moon rose over the bay, a full moon. It was spectacular. We had wondered whether, with our one small flashlight, we could make it back to our mooring a mile away in the dark, but every buoy shone in the moonlight, every ripple in the water sparkled.
The Arthur S. floated free and our irascible motor started.
We towed the rack back to its spot offshore and dropped it, and with ease motored back to our mooring and shore. It had been a long day, a beautiful night.
There have been many trips to the island since, and we’ve begun eating the biggest of our oysters at special gatherings.
Next year, we should have more than we can eat and finally need to deal with being oyster farmers, the smallest farm in the bay, but oystermen just the same.
If, that is, my vengeful mates are merciful.
(Ralph Jimenez is a Monitor editorial writer.)