Page 1 2 3 4 5

Summer 2006

Here on the gravel shore of Little Skookum Inlet, just south of Shelton, Brett Bishop shucks another native Olympia oyster and hands it to me. The Olympia is the Northwest’s only native oyster. It is also fabulously unprofitable.

“They’re exquisitely sensitive,” says Bishop. In fact, they’re downright wimpy when it comes to temperature extremes. Worse for the grower, if not the gourmand, they take forever to grow. While clams and other oysters reach market size in two years or less, the Olympia can take four to five years. Even then, they’re still quite small.

Olympia oysters are a very small part of Bishop’s family’s business, Little Skookum Shellfish. Clams are far more lucrative and make up 85 percent of their sales. From a business perspective, Olympia oysters are mainly a labor of love.

But boy, are they good. Save your frying or stewing or grilling for their introduced inferiors, the Pacifics and Kumomotos. And no Tabasco or lemon, please, nor anything to mask their amazing taste. Olympias should be eaten just as they are, raw from the shell with their liquor. And preferably right next to the water from which they came.

“They have an intense, complex flavor,” says Bishop. “Japanese oysters basically taste like what you cook them in.”

There’s an oniony taste toward the end, I notice.

“Yeah,” says Bishop, “and a nutty flavor, too.”

Yes sir, I have found heaven here on Little Skookum Inlet.

So has Bishop.

True, there’s a downside to raising shellfish. Puget Sound has two high and two low tides every day. Shellfish are generally harvested during the dominant low tide. But the dominant low tide in summer is during the day, and the dominant low tide in winter is at night.

“You can recognize a shellfish grower,” says Bishop. They’re dazed and confused, with large coffees in hand. “My family is just getting up when I’m going to bed.

“But it’s worth it. I’d suffer something twice as bad to do it. I love this place, I love this way of life. And I love growing food of this quality and sharing it with people.”

Bishop is a lucky man, in more ways than one.

The water in the Little Skookum Inlet of Puget Sound might well be cleaner than the last glass of water you drank. The quality standard as measured by fecal coliform count is more restrictive in Washington for shellfish-growing waters than they are for drinking water.

Shellfish themselves really don’t mind a little fecal coliform. They’re perfectly happy to ingest your waste. But shellfish that have been dining on such would not go down well with you. Shellfish are filter feeders. They feed continuously, sucking in water, filtering out the meaty stuff, then spurting it back out. A mature oyster can filter 50 to 60 gallons of water a day.

Unfortunately, Little Skookum is the exception, rather than the rule, on Puget Sound. The area has good zoning laws, says Bishop, restricting subdivision development to one unit per five acres. Also, much of the Little Skookum Creek watershed is timberland, owned largely by Port Blakely and Simpson timber companies. Port Blakely has determined it will not sell any of its land for development, except for schools or parks.

It’s development, of course, that threatens Puget Sound. The area’s 3.8 million population is expected to grow to 5.2 million within the next 15 years.

Even in his protected inlet, Bishop is well aware of a fundamental equation that will determine the fate of his livelihood and, ultimately, of Puget Sound. The variables include the number of people in the watershed, the number of acres of impervious surfaces versus absorbent soils, the ability of the marine environment to process pollutants and rejuvenate itself, and many other complex factors that a great number of scientists and public officials are puzzling over.

“Here in this bay,” says Bishop, “I’m optimistic that my children will be able to grow shellfish. Maybe another generation.”

But move out through Totten Inlet into the greater Puget Sound, and Bishop has grave concerns.

In testimony before the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy in 2002, Robin Downey, executive director of the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, said that since 1985 the western United States has lost 29 percent of shellfish-growing areas to non-point pollution—“from failing septic systems, increased impervious surfaces and road runoff, and agricultural wastes.”

So can anything be done, or should we just succumb to growth and forget about eating raw Olympias from the Puget Sound and wave goodbye to the orcas and steelhead and all the other critters affected by the increased human population pressure?

Bishop is surprisingly optimistic, and yes, he does know exactly what can be done.

“Two things,” he says. “Education and technology.”

Page 1 2 3 4 5

Continued