The Mast-Head: Successful Harvests

Everybody else, it seemed, had the same idea. On Sunday, with an afternoon low tide and the temperature forecast to be in the mid-50s, it was time to scallop. The harbor a friend and I checked after lunch was dotted with figures wading around waist-deep. Pickup trucks backed close to the water were lined up side-by-side. At the road access where the sand trail meets the pavement, a couple of people were transferring their haul from plastic bushel baskets into regulation, red-mesh shellfish bags.

Thing is, with shucked scallops at a cheap $15 a pound if you know the right people, they didn’t seem worth bothering with. We instead decided to look for oysters at a place where I had noticed them a couple of months earlier.

The oystering was good, and we gathered about as many as we could responsibly use relatively quickly. Many of them, I assumed, were from the town’s shellfish hatchery. Perfect examples not attached to rocks or other substrates, they were probably spawned in the lab and introduced to their culch there. Unlike mussels, which can grow new byssus filaments as demand arises, oysters become permanently bound just once, while they are in a larval stage, to the surface where they will live their entire lives.

As we waded around in the shallows, we noticed a good sign: smaller oysters self-cemented to rocks and other surfaces. Oyster larvae like their own kind, testing various things they encounter on the bay bottom before making a commitment. Tiny ones attached to larger ones suggest that the wild spawn is at least partially successful.

It is a bit difficult to reconcile the bad news about East Hampton’s waters with the prolific shellfish catches here these days. Toxic algae eruptions have been found here and there, and a consultant’s report describes a dire situation, to be sure. Perhaps there is a connection, perhaps not.

I don’t worry much about contamination at this time of year. Few of the waterfront houses are occupied where shellfish were being gathered on Sunday, so failing septic systems are less likely to be a threat. November’s strong tides and storms stir things up as well.

The oysters, fat after a summer’s ample feeding, were delicious.