Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

By Annie

There’s a 325 acre wildfire burning in the Olympics just above the Hamma Hamma drainage, and it’s making things really smokey down here on the salt water. Here’s a night time photo from Cliff Mass’ weather blog showing the plume of smoke coming off the Olympic Peninsula (and another one on the southern end of Vancouver Island).

The fire was started by lightning on August 5th and smoldered for a few weeks until the weather got hot and dry. The Park Service is monitoring the fire and, so far, letting it burn. If you’ve done much hiking up the Hamma Hamma Recreational Road (in the Lena/Hagen Lakes/Mt. Stone area) you’ll be interested in the map on the incident website.

River project, the wide view.

Ron Gold Forestry is assembling the log jam, and they are working super fast in order to complete the project before the salmon start running in mid-August. This morning they piled all the ecology blocks into the river.

In the photo below you can see where the river is eroding the salt marsh.

Yesterday work began in earnest on the creation of an artificial log jam in the Hama Hama River. The log jam, a project of the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group, is designed to protect a salt water marsh from erosion.

In the first phase of the project, an excavator created a giant berm that will divert the river into a single channel so that the log jam can be assembled on the dry southern half of the riverbed.

Above: the pile of logs and ecology blocks that they’ll use to assemble the engineered log jam.

The salt marsh they’re trying to protect.

It really pays to do business with girl scouts.

We love cookies.

Last week a group of girls from Camp Robbinswold came down to tour the oyster farm and exclaim over the geoduck. This week we received the thank you card and box of Samoa cookies.

Robbinswold is a beautiful, 400+ acre camp north of us on the Canal that is named after our matriarch Helena Robbins. Helena and her husband Harry (then president of Hama Hama) helped create the camp in the 1920s when they arranged for the company to sell the land to the Scouts and then funded the sale themselves. (At that point they weren’t the sole owners of Hama Hama, so they couldn’t just donate the land directly.) It’s a beautifully & wonderfully maintained property and girls have a ton of fun while at camp.

One of the Robbinswold lodges:

According to the Kitsap Sun this might be a tough year for Hood Canal sea creatures. Every winter and spring a salt water intrusion flushes the canal with oxygen-rich sea water, but this year the intrusion was very weak. Now oxygen levels below 150 feet are at their lowest recorded levels since record keeping began in the 1950s.

The low-oxygen doesn’t hurt shellfish or intertidal species, but  it’s very bad for the ecosystem as a whole. In the late summer of 2006 thousands of bottom fish and deep water species washed up dead on area beaches, suffocated by anoxic water. Scientists aren’t sure if the current low oxygen levels will lead to another major fish kill… but starting out with an oxygen deficit certainly makes the situation more precarious.

Hopefully this won’t be a summer of major south winds, because a strong south wind can roll oxygen-rich water off the surface and bring up low-oxygen water from the deep.

Read the article, and the entertaining comment thread that accompanies it, here.

Gary (see earlier post) also shared these two photos of our own oyster shucking operation in the 1960s… back then we had a conveyor belt to move oyster shell around.

Now we use a forklift and dumptruck, and our shell pile is a lot bigger.

Our neighbor and fellow oyster farmer Gary M. heard about our oyster shack documentation project and stopped by the other day with a collection of old photos to share.

The oyster shack pictured below stands at the mouth of the Waketikeh Creek, the drainage immediately north of the Hamma Hamma. It’s an old CCC cabin that was dragged down to the waterfront in the early 1940s. Between 1943 and 1945 several additions were built onto the building, as you can see in the photos below. The building was used as a shucking shack up until the 1980s, when Gary, who owns the property, decided not to upgrade it to meet changes in State health code.

Joe Leonard Oyster, 1943 (above) and 1945 (below)

Joe Leonard oyster house today:

Our tour of Hood Canal oyster shacks continues with a stop in downtown Lilliwaup. According to John, who grew up in Lilliwaup proper and now shucks oysters for Hama Hama, when this shed was in use back in the 50s and 60s oyster farmers used to anchor big barges full of oysters out front for processing.

Now there’s not a whole lot going on in Lilliwaup bay, and the shellfish beds in the bay itself aren’t farmed anymore because of pollution from a failing septic system upstream.

We often get questions about the purpose of the pilings at Jorstad Creek, which is the drainage south of the Hamma Hamma and two corners south of our farm on 101. The pilings have nothing to do with aquaculture… they’re the remains of an old log dump. The Buckhorn Mountain Logging Company (now defunct?) operated the site from the 1950s until about 1975. Logs were dumped into the Canal and then towed in a boom to mills in Puget Sound. Lee Rentz took these photos of the pilings and we just love them. Thanks Lee!

And here’s a photo of a log boom: