CAUTION: SUCCULENT WHEN WET
I made a sea food pasta dish for dinner last night which featured clams and shrimp. It is amazing how the seafood industry can go out and harvest the critters in the sea, marshes, and mud and come up with stuff which is almost identical in size.
I suppose that the clams we buy in the super markets or fish stores are all farm raised. There is generally not a fraction of an inch in size amongst them all. To a lesser extent the shrimp where at least you get a particular count per pound depending upon size. Must not be farm raised. I know that the shrimping industry is large and thriving off the coast of South Carolina because when we come back from the beach all the locals are on the roads selling shrimp. Must be a Forest Gump thing.
Over a hundred years ago oysters were plentiful in the Chesapeake bay and Watermen (that's the name for commercial fishermen on the bay) were restricted to hand tonging for the succulent critters. Hand tonging is tedious and hard work. Long lengths of wood (poles actually) are hinged about three feet from the ends on which have two opposing baskets of fingers are mounted. The waterman lowers the head of the tongs into the water, sometimes up to 25 feet, scrabbles around with the head by opening and closing the poles until the basket is full. The tongs are then pulled from the water and dumped on a culling board and the whole process starts all over again. Most tongers have the arms and shoulders of an Olympic weightlifter and the waist of a female ballet dancer.
As the 1800's waned the oystering in New England was giving out, the fishermen up there were looking for a new and fertile ground upon which to fish. Their methods were more commercial if you will than those of the tongers in the Chesapeake region. They employed "Skipjacks", or boats from which long metal lines held a metal and netting scrape affair. Of course their boats were sailing vessels that needed to provide a stable platform for their work. In fact, their boats were built one third wide as they were long. Thus, if it was a 45 foot boat, it was 15 feet wide with a flat bottom enabling shallow water dredging. By the late 1800's the invasion of the Chesapeake oyster beds was on. Arguments, fights, battles, and even wars ensued as the time old method of tonging slowly disappeared and the dredgers increased in numbers. The catch of oysters also increased and the argument was made that the natural supply of oysters could not keep up with these new methods of scraping up entire oyster bars. That fear soon proved to be a prophecy as the numbers of oysters in the Chesapeake have, a hundred ten years later, dwindled from millions of bushels a year to around a hundred thousand.
This is a long way around to tell you about the first oyster I ever ate. It was probably twenty years ago and we were on a skipjack, the Elsworth, out of Rock Hall, MD to dredge for oysters and photograph the lifestyle of the independent men called watermen. We dredged, the called it drudged because of the hard work, about a half bushel and the captain set about shucking a few for an on board oyster stew. As I remember it was February and about forty degrees. It was cold! And a bowl of what I thought was going to be warm milk sounded good. Asked if I ever had raw errsters (spelling correct and pronunciation as spelled). To which I replied something like "ugh" as it brought back memories of the strange things I had to eat during college fraternity pledge years.
Long story short! I loved it. Yeah it was slimy. Slid right down, but even with some homemade cocktail sauce I got the very simple taste of the meat as well as the fresh sea water. It was colder than the ambient temperature and it was truly a delicacy.
The boats are called Skipjacks. They are unique to the bay and five years ago there were only a few, like under ten, still working on the bay. Most of them are now outfitted to take tourists on short day trips around the bay. The demise of the boat was dependent upon a number of things like over fishing, lack of oysters, competition from new methods of fishing, and just a general declining water resource.
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