Oyster and clam aquaculture… (VA)

Today we the caravan had a big lunch at Don’s Restaurant and listened to a waterman (as they call their oyster and clam diggers) talk about shellfish aquaculture. It takes two years to raise an oyster to marketable size, and they have a short market window because oysters die naturally the next year. Clams present a different set of problems. Like all farming, there can be good years and bad years. There is federal farm insurance, but in bad years (large die-offs) it pays 2.5 cents a clam, which is only enough to cover the cost of the feed.

Clams and oysters are no longer economically harvestable in the wild, he said. He remarked on their ecological importance to Chesapeake Bay, where their volumes were capable of completely filtering the water in about three days; now it would take 20 years. (Probably as much a measure of increasing pollution as the decline in the filtering population.)

Tonight we attended our third GAM—“get acquainted meeting”. For an idea of the people we travel with, I’ll summarize the backgrounds of these couples. All four have grandkids and some great-grandkids. One is a widower retired Arthur Anderson CPA from Washington that has a home on Mercer Island in Seattle and a trailer at Lacey Washington (an Airstream-exclusive park owned by the local WBCCI unit), presumably the trailer that is on the caravan. His wife died a couple years ago of Alzheimer’s, and they spent her final five years traveling everywhere in the Airstream. Phil has done an incredible number of things, including sailing from Seattle to Hawaii, he flies, leads caravans, teaches, is involved in volunteer tax preparation, etc. Another man described himself as "living in sin" with his companion, a retired or underemployed ceramic engineer; as a woman, she said she has a hard time getting work as an engineer. He had a Navy carrier and airline maintenance career and Airstreamed everywhere until his wife’s death. His companion was long a single mother and had an Airstream. Another man is a retired chiropractor and past Airstream unit president (many of these caravaners seem to be former unit presidents). Our host was an air traffic controller during the Reagan showdown, and later trained new controllers for a couple years.

Tonight I’ve been suckered into a beginner bridge playing class with the guarantee that it will be nonthreatening. I got a break when a call from Andrew nicely interrupted the instruction.