Oyster Blog — News from Here

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.

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...

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 by the family up until the 1980s....

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.