It was a gorgeous sunny and clear day, not too hot, and the tide was low at 1 pm.
The Brothers.
Looking south down the canal.
Judith, Sarah, Raquel, and Dave spent the day breaking apart bags of last year’s cultch and piling it on the barge. Later this week we’ll move the cultch to a grow-out area. (Cultch = semi-crushed oyster shell covered with naturally-recruited oyster seed).
Nearby, Dan and Dave were picking single oysters.
Upstream in the picnic area two boys, upon discovering that our landscaping isn’t quite level, turned one of the boards into a teeter-totter:
Later in the day a group from the Puget Sound Orca Network came by with Kitsap Tours and took a tour of the oyster farm. They were going to head south to Hoodsport Winery and then swing back up north to visit Finnriver Farm.
And after the tide work was done the crew gathered in the new plant to wish bon voyage to Dan R., who’s retiring from single picking after 17 (or 18, he couldn’t remember) years on the beach.
Dan has the black jacket slung over his shoulder. He’s standing between Teresa, who’s eating delicious cake and Olympic Mountain coconut ice cream, Jim, former HH manager, and Dave, who has picked singles alongside Dan for many a night tide.
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.
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.
Well, it’s that time of year again. Summertime. And the oysters are doing what they do: getting spawny. And you can no longer eat them raw because of naturally-occurring salt water bacteria. We’ve all been here before.
If you look really closely at the oyster in the foreground you’ll see vein-like patterns in the belly meat. Yes, this isn’t appetizing, and we probably shouldn’t show you. But it’s interesting and educational. This is what oysters look like just before they get really spawny. This oyster wasn’t milky, just soft.
And see the black specks on the oyster in the background? Oysters are strange creatures and they sometimes have black stuff on them. It happens all the time. But last month we came across this story about a man down south who saw black stuff on his oyster and claimed it was oil. Oil and oysters don’t mix very well, but we’re thinking his story was much ado about nothing.
There was a depressing story in today’s Seattle Times about ocean acidification and the future of Hood Canal’s oyster industry. Dr. Richard Feely put it all in perspective:
The pH levels we saw there [Hood Canal] were far lower than anything we’ve seen in the open ocean.
Last week we received a certified letter from the Highway Department telling us that our tree cookie sign is illegal. Even though it’s located on the same property as our store, it’s too far from the store to satisfy the scenic byway highway requirements.
To that we said boo.
But after brainstorming several creative responses to the situation we decided the best bet was to just remove the offensive object. The sign, cut from a 400 year old Douglas fir tree, had been up since 2008. And, truth be told: the wood wasn’t weathering very well. In its illegal and illicit location the sign had a lot of southern sun exposure, and now, two years later, it’s starting to crack up. Read about its construction here.
Terrible, just hideous.
In other news: our old barge is up and running. You can see it in the photo above, enjoying life back out on the water. So the earlier post (“Last Run of the HH Battleax”) was a little misleading. The Battleax lives!
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.
Today was a gorgeous day on the oyster farm: hot with the perfect hint of north breeze. It’s a welcome change after the gray, rainy and cold weather we’ve had the past couple of weeks. Just in time for the good weather: our barbecue/picnic area is now up and running. Hmm… who will be the first to use it???
These barbecues are way too clean.
UPDATE: This post was sadly lacking in useful information. The barbecues are first come first served and are free to use during store business hours (9:30 to 5:30). So, plan on having a lunch party, not a dinner party. Bring your own charcoal, lighter fluid, and grill utensils, because we don’t currently have any for sale in the store. Things that we do have: oysters, clams, and yummy fresh wild sockeye salmon to grill up for lunch. For more information give us a call 888-877-5844.
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.
