For ages I have been promising to take my father out on Drakes Estero in our Kevlar canoe. Dad was in The City (San Francisco) on Thursday, so he stopped to see me at work late in the evening. We drove to my place together in my car, had dinner together, and dad spent the night in the guest bedroom so we could get up early and go canoeing together. The alarm went off at 6:00 am, but we didn't get packed and ready to go until a little after 7:00 am. As a result, we did not get to Johnson's Oyster Company (where the canoe launch for Drakes Estero is located) until around 9:00 AM. We brought warm jackets gloves and scarves in anticipation of a cold winter morning. But the sun was out, there was no breeze, and the air was quite comfortable. This could have been a nice warm day in the middle of summer! Of course, the east coast is having the worst blizzard in decades this same week.
From my Tide Log, I knew that there would be a mild low tide this morning, but the water level would really not change very much until late in the afternoon. The tide was low enough that we had to wade out into the really gloppy mud to get into the canoe. Dad did this in bare feet, despite my warning about all the broken pieces of oyster shell hidden in the mud. But he has tough feet and didn't hurt himself. I wore my neoprene booties, and dragged them in the water after launch to wash off all the mud. We headed down the south side of the bay, the side that Marty and I avoided on our trip out here.
Dad was very interested to see one of Johnson's oyster racks, which he had read about for years and seen only from the shore. If you recall from my last story about Drakes Estero, oysters are grown on vertical wires hung from racks built over the water. We paddled up close to one and dad pulled one of the wires up out of the water to look at the string of oysters. I took some pictures, including some holding the camera under water and pointing it across the rows of oysters.
At the four corners of each oyster rack there was a tall pole. Most of these poles had a bird on top of them. The most common pole ornament was a cormorant but one of them had a kingfisher and another had an osprey. We also saw the heads of harbor seals in the water as they popped up to get a look at us.
As we continued down the south side of the bay, dad couldn't recall what the plan was. That's because we didn't have one! I was thinking it would be fun to paddle straight down the bay to the breakers and see the ocean. But we could also turn up one of the side bays and explore that instead. If we turned down the first bay to the south, Home Bay, then the early morning sun would not be in our eyes. Since dad had forgotten to bring a pair of sunglasses, this is what we did. I tried loaning my hat to him so he had some shade from the sun, but he wanted to "get some color".
Just inside this bay, we saw an unusual bird on the shore. It looked like a small goose or large duck, with dark feathers like a cormorant except for a white ring around its neck. Later, I saw this bird on the flier at Johnson's Oyster Company! It is a Black Brant, the "goose of the ocean", which spends summer in the Arctic, but winters as far south as Baha California. I had never seen one before.
At the end of the valley at the end of Home Bay, we could see some of the blackened hills from the forest fire Point Reyes National Seashore suffered last fall. We (dad and I) had both been relieved to hear that Johnson's Oyster Company had not been burned down by that fire. We could see a row of poles along the southern end of Home Bay, a man-made levee across one point with a gap and a bridge over the gap. Behind this bridge we could see an old farm house in the end of the valley with an old silo tower. All of the old ranch houses on Point Reyes are now historical monuments, part of the park. So although I don't know of any road or trail that currently goes to this ranch, I was pleased to see that it also survived the fire. There is a trail that runs a few kilometers down from a parking area which crosses over the bridge on the levee. Perhaps it has a side trail that goes to the ranch, but I did not see one on our map.
We thought that we could go to the end of the bay here and see the trail, maybe even go under the bridge. But long before we got there we started sliding over bumps and ridges in the mud. We got pretty stuck a few times and decided it would be best to head back. Dad suggested that we could try again one day at high tide, but I pointed out that there is the danger of being stranded in all that mud if the tide leaves before you do!
Going back down the other side of Home Bay, we found some strange oyster beds in the shallow water. Instead of having wooden racks to hang the wires of oysters from, the wires were just stuck upright in the mud. We paddled over to look at them, and found little mounds of oysters in the water nearby, all their wires tied together. Suddenly, we were surrounded by these little piles, with a breeze blowing us into them and scratching up the bottom of the canoe. We paddled like mad to find our way out before the paint job on the canoe got too messed up. We asked about these later, and were told that this was a common shallow water technique. The piles we scraped over are allowed to grow in a lump like that until the oysters get too big. Then on a low tide, in the middle of the night, they walk out into the mud, pull the piles apart and stand them farther apart.
I had recently read a wonderful book by Stan Sakai, an issue of "Usagi Yojimbo" that had some beautiful drawings of amazingly clever aquaculture techniques used by the Japanese for centuries. Stan Sakai was drawing pictures of kelp growing and harvesting techniques. The wooden oyster racks started to look very Japanese to me after seeing this. When I mentioned this to dad, he said "Of course, Mr. Johnson learned how to do this from his Japanese wife". It turns out that Mr. Johnson was the first to use this technique in the US. He was in Japan after World War II, met his wife there, and saw people in Japan growing oysters this way. He introduced the technique to California in the nineteen sixties. I grew up in the area thinking that everybody everywhere always grew oysters this way, was horrified to learn how they do it in the Chesapeake Bay, and didn't know until now how recently "our way" was introduced to us backwards Americans!
Last time I wrote about the way oysters were grown here, I mentioned that the oysters were started from "sets" that had to come from colder water. The water here never gets cold enough for the oysters to breed. The sets were started on scallop shells in colder water in Washington state or Japan. (I used to think they came from colder water on the east coast). Then they were shipped here to be hung in the warmer water to grow. We saw some of these sets out on one of the racks. We saw a rack full of shells that looked a lot cleaner and whiter than all the rest. We paddled closer to see what was different about these. At first we thought that all the shells were completely empty. But on closer inspection we saw little red/brown specks on the shells. These looked like little flakes of mud on the old shells, only a centimeter across and less than a millimeter thick. I often wondered if there was a way to start the oysters locally by refrigerating water for them to breed in. When we got to Johnson's this morning, we were surprised to find a bunch of oyster shells lying about with holes drilled in them, as if they were going to be used to start oyster sets. Out on the bay itself, all the oysters that we saw were growing on old oyster shells, not on scallop shells like the brochures used to say. Scallops are not a local shellfish, so I always assumed that they were local to wherever the oysters were started and were just a convenient material to start them on. I wondered now, how can it be cost effective to ship oyster shells to Washington just to start sets on them and ship them back? Wouldn't some local material (like scallop shells) be a better idea? Sure enough, when I got back to Johnson's, the brochure was not the same as the one I remembered! They do start the sets themselves now, just like I imagined they should!
As we headed back up to the canoe launch beach, another barge loaded two meters high with strings of oysters came by. We tried to race it back to the dock and watched them tie it up with three other barges already being unloaded. Now we have seen the beginning and the end of the cycle here in Drakes Estero.
