Ties to our local waterways Rachel Hansen | BIGHT Editor
When our family moved to Mason County, we came for the space, the water and for the tides. With two small energetic boys in tow, we were excited about the opportunities for recreation. Little did we know how much our lives would be controlled by those very tides. This January I was asked to be a speaker at local aquaculture conference. It was a great honor – in January. By March when I realized the speaking date was just days away, it was terrifying! My topic was “Integrating Tourism into Aquaculture.” Yes, that’s a real topic. I began to prepare my presentation with a cursory glance at tourism – attractions, lodging, transportation and access. I compiled my statistics a pattern began to form. A formula that was beginning to prove that Mason County’s untapped assets could be likened to unmined gold, proving – as always – what is common to one is a treasure to others.
I knew more than I thought I did. Raised in a remote coastal fishing lodge off British Columbia I have been tied to tourism and aquaculture since my beginnings. As a teenager digging clams meant cold fingers, wet boots and soaking knees as mud ran up your rainpants. Oysters represented winter tides with the cold wet blackness pierced by the Coleman lantern’s glowing fragile mantle. I disliked those hours on the beach. I feigned sleep in my warm bed as my sister tried to shake me awake to keep my daytime promises of helping her dig or gather.
Decades later the joke is on me. The very oysters I resisted are laughing at me from the beach in front of our house on Hammersly Inlet. As we fill our weekly orders of 500 dozen, I have come to realize that we actually searched out this way of life out. What does this have to do with tourism? Imagine the coldest night in November – at low tide. To the shores of Totten Inlet, Taylor Shellfish delivers a sold out busload from as far afield as Portland. The crowd eagerly dons rubber boots and raingear for the “ultimate oyster-eating experience, one by which all others will be judged.”
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The event is best described by their online ticket listing: “The “picnic” takes place by lantern and/or moon light on Taylor’s Totten Inlet oyster bed at night in the middle of the winter. An icy gust of wind off the bay might invigorate the experience. Plump, sweet, perky oysters, just rousted from their beds and opened on the spot and award-wining “oyster wines” served in Reidel stemware close at hand. When the tide starts coming in, there is a bonfire and a cup of Xinh Dwelley’s hot oyster stew before getting back on the bus.” continued next page
BIGHT Shelton Mason County Chamber