Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

   A few miles north, they stopped at Raft Island, whose "only inhabitants were an astonishing quantity of crows," Puget wrote. Today, as suburbs creep around the South Sound, the birds are supplanted by homes occupying virtually every square foot of waterfront.
   Further north, at Burley Lagoon, the Englishmen encountered a larger village - and a less-hospitable reception. Three Natives in a dugout canoe approached them, clearly gesturing their preference that "our departure would be more agreeable than our visit." Under strict orders to avoid conflicts, Puget sailed on to explore the opposite shore.
    Today we anchor the Velella offshore, probably within a few feet of that encounter. We take the dingy through the narrow cut under a low highway bridge and into Burley Lagoon, a 2-mile-long inlet nearly enclosed by a spit across the entrance. We tie up at a ramshackle dock alongside Western Oyster Co., which occupies a point of land behind a supermarket and strip mall in Purdy.
    Our arrival appears agreeable to Jerry Yamashita, the pioneer oysterman who runs Western Oyster. The wiry 75-year-old shuffles down the dock to meet us wearing a cotton work shirt, worn boots, snow-white hair tucked beneath a weathered baseball cap, and a warm grin. Excuse the mess, he says, shaking his head. He has long since moved his processing to Thurston County. All that's left here are a half-million oysters.
    He shepherds us onto a small, outboard-powered barge, which ferries us across the lagoon to a complex of wooden floats - horizontal rectangles constructed of heavy beams, spanned by narrow planks some 12 inches apart. This is Yamashita's farm. On the beach he appeared frail and tottering, but out here he steps sure-footedly from one plank to the next.
    He stoops, pulls a 3-foot-long cluster of oysters and seaweed from the water and plucks a 4-inch shell from the mass. A shucking knife appears magically in his other hand and the shell pops open like a spring-loaded pocket watch. Smiling, he hands over the prize.
    One sloshed oyster, and I know the flavor of Paradise. 

   Never mind chinook salmon. From Samish Bay up north to Eld Inlet near Olympia, Puget Sound is oyster country. While the salmon flounder, local oysters flourish, catering to a fast-growing, nationwide market for oysters on the half shell.
   In the wild, oysters begin life as drifting larvae that attach themselves to hard surfaces, preferably fellow oysters, in shallow water. Then they get on with the serious business of pumping water - some 40 gallons a day for mature oysters - in and out of their shells, filtering out the plankton along the way.
   Puget Sound being a natural plankton factory, it stands to reason it would favor plankton-gobbling oysters.
   Oysters are not only ravenous bivalves, they're also prolific. For the first year they are males, fertilizing the eggs of female oysters, explains Keith Benson, the Velella's skipper and my scientific mentor. Then they conveniently switch sexes. Eventually, each mature oyster will produce some 50 million eggs, most of which will be eaten by other creatures - a classic example of the scattergun strategy that feeds the world's oceans.
   "When things get tough, they switch back to males," Benson adds. "It takes far more energy to produce eggs than sperm."
   Puget Sound's native oyster is the Olympia. Vancouver, whose crew sampled the Olympias at Discovery Bay in 1792, found them mushy. ("Probably spawning," Yamashita speculates.)
   Half a century later, the miners of the California Gold Rush made no such complaint. They paid $20 a plate for Olympias shipped from Washington, spinning off a sort of "gray rush" in Puget Sound. By the Depression, the Olympias had been depleted.
   So along came Yamashita - not Jerry but his father, Masahide Yamashita, a first-generation Japanese immigrant. The elder Yamashita leased some tidelands on Samish Bay, near Bellingham, imported Pacific oyster seed from Yokohama, and the rest is history.
    "By the time it arrived, most of the seed was shot," recalls Jerry Yamashita as he pops another Pacific. "But they planted it anyway and, much to their surprise, it grew. And grew. And grew. "It was quite amazing. It had to be the water temperature, or the nutrients, or something."
   The larger, faster-growing Pacific oysters, now known under grower names such as Shoalwaters or Wescott Bays, soon dominated the Puget Sound market.
    Still, the Yamashitas encountered daunting obstacles. They challenged the Japanese seafood conglomerates for a piece of the Japanese market, and lost. Then came Pearl Harbor; the Yamashita company was "liquidated," and the family sent to an internment camp.
    After the war, they started over in South Puget Sound, eventually purchasing part of Burley Lagoon. "It's quite rich and there were no pulp mills," he says. "In Samish Bay, the Bellingham pulp mill was a big problem."
   The industry took off with new growing techniques - particularly the suspended culture that Yamashita employs. Discarded shells are suspended on strings a few inches apart, seeded with larvae, then hung from rafts in warm, shallow water - a sort of oyster condominium that allows hundreds of shellfish per square foot. With this technique, Pacifics reach maturity in 15 to 18 months, he says.
    To achieve this, though, shellfish need clean water. In the mid-1980s, scores of shellfish operations, including Yamashita's, were closed down. State health officials cited pollution, apparently from shoreside sewers or septic tanks. Yamashita moved his oysters elsewhere, which, he says, "took all the profit." That lasted 12 long years.
    Now they're back. Thanks to tougher pollution laws and sewage treatment, water quality has improved. Throughout the Sound, shellfish beds that had been closed for years are being re-opened. In 1995, Puget Sound growers produced 431,000 gallons of Pacific oysters (or 1.3 million dozen) worth $6.4 million - their best year since 1984. This year, Yamashita hopes to produce 20,000 gallons, most of which will be sold in California.
   Other shellfish - clams, geoducks, crab, shrimp - also appear to be prospering while salmon and other fin fish dwindle.
    Benson suggests several reasons nature might favor oysters and friends. Shellfish don't rely as  heavily on freshwater habitat, nor on conditions in the open ocean, he says. And they don't appear to be affected by the infamous El Nino weather; if anything, they may benefit from warmer water.
Still, Yamashita's problems are far from over. Health authorities warn that Burley Lagoon still has borderline pollution problems. Yamashita suspects some combination of Canada geese droppings and leaky septics beneath the houses that ring the lagoon. And Yamashita knows some neighbors consider his farm to be unsightly. They would like to see him take his oysters and go away.
   Back on shore, Benson and I walk up to the supermarket to restock our galley. The minimall is a rude interruption to our voyage. The store is busy; out on the highway afternoon commuters are backed up a half-mile toward Tacoma. Waiting in line, we overhear one woman ask her friend how she plans to celebrate the Fourth of July.
    "Maybe we'll burn down the oyster company," the other laughs.
    Benson shakes his head. "Jerry's oysters are their best friends," he says. Purdy's suburban sprawl, complete with leaky septic tanks, lawn fertilizers, animal feces and oily runoff from the supermarket parking lot, inevitably pollutes the lagoon. At 40 gallons a day, each of Yamashita's oysters is working round-the-clock, filtering the waters of Burley Lagoon, removing the plankton and anything else floating out there, Benson says. What Vancouver called "the industry of man" created the oyster farm, and now, once again, threatens to destroy it. Yamashita's farm is not the polluter; it's the pollutee.
    "You look down into those floats, and the water is perfectly clear," Benson says. "You couldn't ask for a cleaner organism than an oyster."
    We make it back to the Velella and pull anchor, suddenly imbued with a nagging suspicion that our departure would be more agreeable than a visit.