Examiner The Whidbey
First-place winner, 2014 WNPA General Excellence
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Penn Cove MusselFest guide Inside
www.whidbeyexaminer.com
Thursday, March 5, 2015
VOL. 20, NO. 30
Festival brings out tasty competition By Megan Hansen Co-Editor
Megan Hansen photo
June Blouin processes more than 100 pounds of mussels for her chowder this year.
Every March, Coupeville restaurants step up to the plate, or rather the chowder bowl. They painstakingly spend hours cleaning, cooking and shelling pounds of mussels in preparation for the annual Penn Cove MusselFest chowder contest. It’s a labor of love for some business owners, offering a day of community spirit and
fun. It’s important to make it fun or it’s not worth all the work, said June Blouin, owner of Coupeville Coffee and Bistro. “Normally, I try to do it myself or an employee volunteers to help.” Blouin is preparing for her fourth chowder contest. She’s also the 2012 and 2014 winner. This year, the coffee shop owner stepped up even more and volunteered to double her offering after another restaurant had to bow out.
Each restaurant prepares 500 samples of chowder for each day. MusselFest sells three different tickets with five tastings per ticket. The businesses put a lot into participating, said Vickie Chambers, executive director of the Coupeville Historic Waterfront Association. Blouin will process the 50 pounds of mussels each participant is given by the Coupeville
See Chowder, page 12
Ron Newberry photos
Acres of mussel rafts from Penn Cove Shellfish dot the waters of Penn Cove as the sun sets on Mount Baker on a recent evening. The shellfish company has been a Coupeville staple since 1975.
40 years of farming Penn Cove By Ron Newberry Staff reporter
On a recent Sunday, Rawle Jefferds is sitting in a spacious office, reminiscing about the early days of Penn Cove Shellfish. The room is intimately familiar to him as is the filtered view of Penn Cove through large windows. Years ago, the place Jefferds is sitting was his parents’ living room. Now, it serves as a business office with desks, computers and chairs. Down the hall is a private office that holds a big desk and large fish tank featuring three imposing Oscars. This is the office of Ian Jefferds, Rawle’s business partner and older brother. “Ian’s office is my old bedroom,” Rawle said, cracking into a smile. It’s hard for Rawle Jefferds to fathom just how far the family’s shellfish operation has come over the years. Started by Peter Jefferds in 1975, the mussel
farm was sold to his eldest and youngest sons in 1986 and has grown into a thriving, diverse shellfish operation that has put Penn Cove on the map in places thousands of miles from Whidbey Island. Approximately 2 million pounds of mussels are grown and sold nationally each year by the company, which now also offers a wide assortment of oysters and clams raised elsewhere in Puget Sound. “It started out in the back of my mom’s station wagon,” Rawle said. “It’s come a long ways.” And for two brothers from Coupeville High School’s classes of 1976 and ‘81, the journey and growth can seem like a blur. Depending on the day. “Some days when I look how far we’ve gone, it seems like a long time,” Ian said. Both were still in school when their father combed the waters of North Puget Sound seeking an ideal spot to launch an unorthodox business idea he developed overseas during his military service in the Army.
Intrigued by consumers’ healthy appetite for mussels in parts of Europe and Asia, he hatched a plan to create a market in North America and came across Coupeville as a site while gassing up his boat at the wharf one evening and noticing pilings covered with mussels on the return home to Seattle from the San Juan islands. The San Juans were the original target, but more research after the chance encounter led to Penn Cove as being an ideal location. Still, there was still one major underlying problem.
See Mussels, page 12
Rawle Jefferds is co-owner of Penn Cove Shellfish but also likes to deliver to Seattle.