In the most recent of her interviews about Cortes History, Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, traces one of the Island’s foremost industries from its pre-contact beginnings up until recent times.  

Lynne Jordan: “ The First Nations cultivated clam gardens on this coast for 3,000 to 5,000 years, maybe even longer. One on Quadra Island was recently dated at being around 3,500 years old.”

“In her book ‘Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast,’ Judith Williams  describes how natives would choose a small, bay/beach area and increase the amount of sand on that beach by collecting all the rocks off the beach and taking them down at low tide to the bottom of the beach and throwing them into the water. You do that for enough years and thousands of years, the rock wall builds up and gets bigger and bigger. As the rock wall grows, more sand gets trapped behind the rock wall, which increases the beach size, and that’s how they cultivated and grew their clams on the beach.”

“Clams were very important because First Nations were mostly gatherers, and you could find them all year long. When other foods that they would normally gather weren’t growing in the forest or the meadows, they would eat a lot of clams.”

“There are alot of those gardens around Howe Sound area, but also all around the Desolation Sound.”  

“Gorge Harbour, on Cortes Island, has a number of old clam gardens around the outer edge of the beaches. If you go down to the wharf at the bottom of Robertson Road and you’re on the dock, look to your left. There used to be a clam garden along the beach. It’s identified mainly by what they call clam hash, broken little bits of shell that mixed with the sand. The beach is quite soft. If you look to your right, towards the Gorge Harbour Marina, you can actually see where the clam garden continued along that way too.”

“The marina has disrupted what was left of the clam garden. If you stand at the end of the wharf at a low tide and look down on that right side, you will see a rock wall there. The dock was built overtop of a clam garden.”

“That’s the easiest one to pick out, but once you know what to look for, you start seeing clam gardens in many places around Cortes Island.” 

Continuing on to after the settlers arrived, calms and oysters were cutivated in Squirrel Cove during the 1920s. Quadra Island’s Heriot Bay Inn had a lease. 

In 1938 Harry and Teresa Daniels were cultivating oysters near the head of Von Donop Inlet. 

Lynne Jordan: “They started with seed from Japan, which is a larger oyster than the native variety.”

The Daniels “were the first to have a beach lease there, and they actually had it marked off on the beach with cement edging. It had a curb all around it. They don’t do that nowadays.”

“In the 1940s Alf Layton also had a beach lease at the upper end of Von Donnop Inlet.”

“Shellfish sustained a lot of Cortes islanders  for many years,  particularly through the depression years. You could harvest  oysters, clams, scallops,  mussels, you name it. If you had a boat, you could also add in crabs, prawns, but you’d need the boat and traps to catch them, whereas the beach was open to anybody.”

Up until recently, Jordan lived at Manson’s Lagoon. 

Lynne Jordan: “ looking across to the beach, there’d be a lot more people collecting clams and oysters during the last four or five days of the month. People that were on pensions, or whatever, and didn’t have the money coming in yet to buy groceries.”

“There are beach leases all around Marina Island. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Oyster Man, that’s Brent Petkau. He sells oysters all across Canada. He used to live on Cortes, now he lives up near Nelson, but he still has a beach lease on the west side of Marina Island. He markets directly to restaurants and oyster bars. If you go into an oyster bar, in say Toronto, Cortes oysters are highly valued and often requested. Petkau delivers to all those areas. I think he’s been one of the ones that’s made Cortes oysters quite ‘out there’ in the market.”

“Gorge Harbour has always been good for growing shellfish because of its narrow entrance, which inhibits the tidal flushing. The water isn’t flushed out, so more of the water sits there in the harbour. It is warmer than outside the harbour. Oysters do not spawn in cold water. That narrow entrance makes Gorge Harbour very conducive to spawning oysters.”

“That’s one of the reasons a lot  people collect the oyster spawn up in areas in the back of Desolation Sound. The water in Pendrell Sound, in particular, gets so warm It’s up into the high 50’s in the summer.  You can take your empty shells up there to lay them down on a beach at low tide and leave them for a few days, or weeks. You can collect the wild spawn so you don’t have to pay big bucks to receive spawn from areas that are incubating them.” 

“In the early days, back in the 50’s to the 70’s, any spawn you received for your oyster growing came from the Puget Sound area in Washington. There was a big hatchery down there.” 

“There aren’t many beach leases in Gorge Harbour. There are some, but mostly it’s rafts with ropes hanging down 25 feet or so underneath them.” 

“Whaletown Bay has a beach lease. You can see the black plastic trays that they’re growing baby oysters in. That protects them from predators because when you have a beach lease, you have to worry about predators like raccoons and sea birds. Sea stars in particular, they can open oysters.” 

“You may think that growing oysters would be easy on a beach. You just put them babies there and they grow. Not so, there’s quite a business to actually getting the babies set onto empty oyster shells, which you would’ve left in mesh bags on the beach for crabs and other animals to clean up for you, and then you get your spawn.”

There is a kiosk dedicated to oysters in Squirrel Cove, next to the Craft Store. Some of the pictures depict the growth of oysters, frm the beginning to end. 

Lynne Jordan: “If your oysters are on rafts, you have to regularly pull up their ropes, check for predators and get rid of them. You clean off your clusters of growing oysters, and then you drop it back down for them to grow.” 

“If you have a beach lease, the oysters are really only feeding half the time because the rest of the time the tide’s out and they can’t feed.  They have to close up tightly to survive. When the tide comes in, they start opening up again to feed.” 

“But oysters under the rafts are always in the water all the time, so they’re feeding all the time. Their shells are open all the time.  When you harvest them,  you don’t want all that moisture inside them to run out while they’re being shipped, especially if they’re going for raw oysters on the half shell in a restaurant. You need to  harvest them off the rafts. The clusters are broken up, so the shells are individual.  They’re put into a mesh bag and that mesh bag is then set on a beach.  All the oysters in the bags are exposed to the tide going in and out, and  very quickly learn how to close their shells very tightly so that the moisture doesn’t leak out. That takes probably about three months on the beach for them to learn that.  You can then ship them to market and they will stay fresh because they’ve learned how to close tightly when the tide is out.” 

Oysters grown on the beach can take up to five years to reach marketable size because they cannot feed when the tide is out. Some growers prefer selling them as small oysters in their third year.  

The turnover is faster for raft grown oysters, who can be harvested in 2-3 years.

There is also a difference in maintenance. Raft grown oysters can be lifted out of the water and cleaned at the grower’s convenience. Beach grown oysters are more tide dependent. When the low tides are after midnight, in the wintertime, growers need to protect their crop against racoons,seabirds and other predators that creep up the beach to feed. 

 Oysters were not as common back the 1940s. In 1942, Frank Tooker and Harry Huck were horsing around on a little islet in Coulter Bay, which is not too far south of Von Donnop and Harry said, ‘my God, here’s an oyster!’ They found a few oysters attached to the rocks. They were probably spawn coming out of Von Donnop Inlet.

Lynne Jordan: “Since then oysters, mussels, scallops, and clams have been grown for commercial harvest.” 

“There was a time when you could harvest them on the rocks at the entrance into Gorge Harbour.” 

“You could also add abalone to that list, but abalone have been overharvested over the years and they were almost annihilated. They’re now starting to come back a little bit.There’s some native concerns with aquaculture for abalone just north of Campbell River, I think it is,but there aren’t marketable numbers just yet.” 

“The other thing with Gorge Harbour is that area has high salinity, higher than most areas because it is enclosed with a narrow entrance. The open ocean has 33 parts per thousand, but Gorge Harbour has 28 parts per thousand, which is fairly close and way more than an open bay would have for growing oysters.” 

“Around 1966, oysters were growing more openly in all the beaches around Cortes. It was a busy time. The market was good, the prices were high, and families would be out collecting at low tides, whether it was daytime or nighttime.  Even young children were out making some pocket money digging clams and collecting oysters.” 

In 1967, the SS Torrey Canyon ran aground on the south west coast of England. It was the first really bad environmental oil spill. She lost 31 million gallons of crude oil. And if you multiply that by approximately four and a half, you come up with a number of liters and it’s like an unreal number. The way the tides and currents were working it damaged some of the beaches along the southern coast of England, but most of it was swept over towards France, Portugal, and even as far down as Spain. Hundreds of miles of coastline where damaged.”

“The environmental disaster wasn’t just from the oil, it was also from what they used for cleaning up the beaches and it took years.”

“In her book Clam Gardens, Judith Williams explained how the year after that Fisheries Canada worked with European countries to supply over 200 tons of pristine stalks of shellfish.” 

“Workers on Cortes spent many busy weeks and months working low tides to create an advanced supply picked from the beaches. They used Manson’s Landing as the headquarters for this operation, with the beach being so accessible for people and vehicles.” 

Lynne’s future husband, Joe Jordan, came to Cortes island as a fisherman in the early seventies.

Lynne Jordan: “He remembers seeing the tables. They were, big tables without a solid top. They had a screen top. That’s where oysters were cleaned so that there was not a single speck of another living creature on any shell that they cleaned, so that they could be packed and then shipped out to France.”

“They were packed first of all in mesh bags and then burlap sacks. Each burlap sack weighed 70 pounds. This made it easy to calculate air freight, how many pounds for each shipment. There were 70 tons flying out at a time.”

“The employment opportunity for locals went on for a few years: for pickers, cleaners, haulers and sorters.  Of course, the oysters that were growing on the rafts had to be put on beaches for up to three months to learn how to close so they could be shipped to Europe.

“When they were shipped there was usually a biologist – sometimes from France, sometimes Canadian, sometimes both – accompanying each load.”

“One rather interesting fact noticed by the fisheries biologist was how tides influenced the oysters even on the air flights. Moons influenced tides. As they were flying towards France, wherever the moon happened to be, the oysters would open and close along the way if it was tide in or tide out.  But because they were going backwards to the way the moon was coming, they opened and closed fairly quickly. The tides were very short, in other words.” 

“How do they know where the moon is and what it’s doing? Do they have a brain? I don’t know.” 

“Near the end, In 1972 I think it was, some officials  from the fisheries in France placed a double order of 78 tons of oysters to be shipped that week to Bordeaux. That was supposed to be the last load. The French government requested and received a further approval for an extra 77,000 pounds from Gorge Harbour.  Of course the people on Cortes  hadn’t been planning on that. There was a lot of scurrying around,  some extra hard work and many long hours, sometimes through the night by work workers to fill this order and place it on a  barge to be shipped to Vancouver for air freighting out to France.”

“This big order got people thinking.The group of people who were growing oysters at that time in Gorge Harbour,  got together to form a Cortes cooperative for the purpose of dealing in and farming of shellfish byproducts and any other associated services. There were a number of meetings at different halls and this new locally controlled group intended to provide a basic industry for residents, giving many people the opportunity for eight to 10 months of  annual employment.” 

“They also formed to protect the Cortes shellfish beds from being raped by outside interests. Members in this co-op had to be bonafide residents and homeowners in the Cortes electoral area. At the original meeting there were 63 members who joined up and it very soon increased to 70 locals.”  

“At their next general meeting, they came up with a name, Cortes Island Shellfish Cooperative, which is still existing today. They run the co-op that’s in Gorge Harbour.” 

“Terms were negotiated by a special committee that included reps. from the Department of Fisheries, Lands and Forests and the local MLA at the time, Dan Campbell.”

“At a packed meeting in March 1972, the government’s assessment of the new shellfish co-op was ‘a good buy in bivalves!’( A bivalve is a marine animal of two shells.) To keep outside interest at bay, they called for a three year oyster moratorium for Cortes and Marina Islands, which was included in the Cortes Electoral District.”

“The government cooperated and included manpower assistance and funding for beach oyster bed preparation. They were as eager as the locals to see success of this innovative progressive operation.”

“If it was to fail, then outside oyster interest could move into this area. Then everyone, including visitors and locals alike would be restricted from picking even one oyster from Cortes or Marina beaches. So this was very important because now you can go down and pick oysters if you have a license, as long as you’re not picking on somebody’s beach lease.”

“A number of local residents were incensed at that time by seven or eight off Islanders who were picking oysters after tthe moratorium had come into effect, but they had a permit issued before the 24th of March. They were allowed to finish their picking.“

“All the oysters on Cortes beaches were protected for local inhabitants.  There was such an interest in the shellfish business that people off island and even out of province wrote to this group requesting membership, but they stuck to their guns and said membership had to be local, somebody living within the electoral district.”

Cortes Currents: It seems like all the shellfish rafts in Gorge Habour belong to members of the Bee Islets Growers Corporation, when did that start up?  

Lynne Jordan: “There had been some rafts before that, in the 1950s.” 

“Bee Islets started in the late seventies. My future husband Joe Jordan and his wife, at that time, were very involved in that organization. They had rafts there as well as beach leases inside and outside of Gorge Harbour”.

“There was a complaint not too many years ago, I think in the 1990s, early 2000s. Some Gorge Harbour residents complained about the noise from some of the oyster rafts. One of the Americans that lived there hired a group of biologists to do some research in Gorge Harbour. Much to his chagrin, not to mention his pocketbook, they found that the oysters growing there don’t pollute, the waters in the Gorge were actually being cleaned up.” 

“The only pollution came from some ropes and some plastic things from the farms that ended up in the water, particularly after storms. The rafts sometimes need resetting because they are on a water lease and they have to stay within their parameters of that water lease. So if they’re blown outside the edges after storms, they have to be replaced where they should be.” 

“There’s a lot of constant work going on, it’s not an easy job. That’s most of what I had to say about oysters.” 

Top image credit: Japanese Oysters are introduced to Cortes Island by Harry and Teresa Daniels in 1938. – image courtesy Cortes Island Museum

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