Francisco Meliton is the farm manager at Goose Point Oysters, where he’s been employed for 25 years.

“How long you been doing this?”

“All my life,” replied oysterman John Herrold. He didn’t skip a beat. He was in the thick of another harvest, wending a 30-foot truck, laden with a few thousand pounds of Pacific oysters, up the steep road from his swing dock in Chetlo Harbor, Washington, to the small plant where they are shucked, processed and packaged.

Herrold Fish and Oyster Co. takes its name from John’s granddad, Roy Herrold, who first fished and farmed oysters in the shadow of these forested hills and placid waterways of southwest Washington over a century ago.

Here, where the Naselle River spills its cool waters into the nutrient-rich, heaving, breathing tidal body of Willapa Bay — its churning mix of fresh and salty waters — are ideal conditions for farming oysters.

Of course, this is also incredibly hard work. Patience, physical strength, keen planning and dedication are required above all else.

Luckily, John has some help. On one day, beneath a gray mist and skies that seemed to threaten a downpour but never quite deliver, John’s daughter, Annie Herrold, deftly guided heaping totes of Pacific oysters onto a flatbed.

Her husband, Edgar Galvan, plucked the hand-shoveled totes with a crane from the docked dredge, pulling up, towards a truck perched improbably at the edge of an old wooden dock. She caught them in the sky, guided them down and locked them into place, like a jumbo game of oyster Tetris.

Nearby, their three children played, sometimes pausing to watch as their parents worked. The constant scooping sound of plastic scratching at the deck of the dredge filled the air as Armando Guzman and Luis Garcia Aceves, longtime deckhands, hand-shoveled thousands of pounds of oysters with scarcely a pause. It’s a remarkable choreography of motion.

Together, Willapa Bay and neighboring Grays Harbor make up the United States’ largest oyster-growing region. Much of that can be traced to locally-owned operations, many of which have been passed down through families.

Generations of people moving as one.

Stewards

For the Herrolds, this almost didn’t happen. During World War II, while Roy Herrold kept running the oyster farm, his son, Harlan Herrold, John’s dad, left to work in the busy Oakland shipyards.

When the war ended, Harlan was eager to come back and take over his aging father’s business but was shocked to discover that almost everything had been sold, barring just one small plot. It was barely enough to scratch out a living, but in 1946, Herrold Fish and Oyster Co. was born.

The late 19th century had seen the collapse of the native Olympia oyster industry. Once a booming trade that fed an insatiable market with train cars bursting with bivalves, this small, slow-growing species that once fed Indigenous people for thousands of years could not keep pace with the demand of a growing, industrialized West.

The Olympias were overharvested. Their foot-deep shell beds were reduced to almost nothing, and their habitat was altered and destroyed.

But blooming in their place would be the hardy Eastern oyster. They had gained a foothold — quite literally — and would essentially replace the native Olympia oyster.

But before long, those too would lose their viability, and Harlan would soon find himself importing seed from Japan, setting the stage for the dominance of the Pacific oyster cultivated today.

The old dock Harlan built, and his collection of stout wooden buildings, still dot the hillside property. Sixty-five years ago, high up on the hill, he built himself a house. John grew up there, and Annie did too. Like those first Pacific oysters, everything Harlan touched seemed to live on, like the Tokeland, a wooden dredge built in 1905 that he refurbished in the 1940s.

It was only a few years ago that it was finally retired, capping an unprecedented 120 years in service.

Does it make John happy to see his family taking on this business? “Sometimes,” he said. “It adds a whole different dynamic.”

He warmed slightly as he reflected. “She enjoys it. She really likes what she does.”

Things have been mostly steady year over year, John said. Lately, prices are up. Maybe a little too high, he thinks. The future worries him some.

“The big companies are getting bigger,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good for the industry. I think the industry is stronger if you have a lot of players.”

He sees shellfish farmers as a generally cagey type, preferring to stick to their responsibilities rather than muck about in someone else’s affairs. But, he said, “If there’s an issue that affects everybody, we’ll attack it as a group.”

By sticking together, John said growers have stopped several what he called “ill-advised developments” — a pulp mill and other heavy industries that would scarcely be compatible with the sensitive nature of the bay.

“Oyster growers have always been a steward of the land,” John said. “We have a vested interest in keeping the water quality as it is.”

But it’s the next generation that gives him the most hope. “The young people that are getting into this industry have their heart in the right place,” he said. “In a lot of ways, they’re smarter than the previous generation. More educated and more inquisitive.”

Annie has two older sisters. One is a schoolteacher and the other is a nurse. When Annie went off to Oregon State University, she had no intention of returning to the family business. Picking oysters and cutting open seed bags for five cents a pop was just something she did. Something she grew up with— not a career, not her future. But shortly after graduation, she found herself back on this vast, blue bay.

“Sometimes it takes walking away from something to realize what you had,” Annie said.

Right away, she had ideas for diversifying what the company could offer. The family had never shucked on-site before. She had a plan for a new wing of the business.

Chetlo Harbor Seafoods took shape, adding growth and another layer of security.

Annie estimated that about half of the 800 acres the farm owns are currently under production. Seed is imported from hatcheries off-site, and then nurtured in on-site tanks that provide optimal conditions for rapid growth. “It’s almost like a little jacuzzi for them,” Annie explained. “They put out their little foot and get set.”

The baby oysters, or spat, firmly set on reused oyster shells, are then moved to a seed bed, then on to the main growing bed and eventually to a fattening bed. A nuanced shuffling, informed by years of experience in and around these waters, guides the whole affair. The dance may take three or four years before an oyster is plump and ready for market.

Even though production has been steady and reliable for years, Annie warns that the shellfish industry always hangs within the balance of the greater ecosystem of the bay.

Presently, she said that invasive burrowing sand shrimp are a growing problem, and lamented a “lack of tools” growers have at their disposal in light of pesticide restrictions.

“The amount of beds I’ve seen where before there wasn’t a shrimp problem has skyrocketed,” Annie said.

Invasive European green crab are another issue, but so far, the farm has avoided significant impacts. Others have not been as lucky. “Basically, any area they’ve moved into has just been destroyed,” she said.

Despite the challenges ahead, Annie stands by an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” kind of mentality. That doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing. Problems are part of the profession and adaptability is necessary. But every once in a while, the upheaval is of the good kind. Like when Galvan turned up about 10 years ago — a quiet, hardworking deckhand that Annie noticed had a knack for “just getting it.”

She found herself falling for his consistent, cool nature. Marveling that he always met every obstacle as it came, in real-time, when others would have become frazzled, buckled or quit. “Luckily, he’s the most easygoing person ever, or I’d have probably driven him crazy by now,” Annie laughed.

Galvan had picked oysters as a teenager, working the muddy bottoms of the bay for Jolly Roger, another legacy oyster grower where his mom had worked for decades. So when he showed up at Chetlo Harbor, he wasn’t exactly a greenhorn.

Now, with three children between them, Annie sees her childhood in theirs. She embraces the hard-won but worthwhile lessons she thinks they’ll learn, at first playing, then likely working in the oyster beds.

“When you have a farm, you really can’t not involve the whole family,” Annie said. “They almost can’t help but learn to work hard, because they kind of have to.”

Challenges

Across Willapa Bay, Brian Sheldon, his wife, Marilyn, and their son, Jeb, were down at the Nahcotta marina tying up a skiff as their crew of workers unloaded a fresh catch onto the dock. A netted bag bulged with — not oysters — but invasive European green crab.

These won’t make their way to market, but instead will be collected by state authorities.

They’ll be counted, frozen and their harvest locations catalogued. A small reimbursement will be paid to the Sheldons’ Northern Oyster Co., but the main goal is to get them out of the bay.

Oysters already must dodge predation from otters, raccoons, birds and native crustaceans, like the Dungeness crab. But green crab have edged the natural balance toward a tipping point. Throw in burrowing shrimp and it’s like a one-two punch.

Shrimp churn up the bottoms, eventually smothering the oysters where they lay. Jeb Sheldon recently found out the hard way when he walked into an infested bed, only to sink in up to his hips.

A sturdy frame topped with a square face yet to be etched with worry lines and wrinkles, Jeb still needed a hand to be pulled from the muck. Yet despite the challenges, despite the uncertainties, he said he’s still hopeful about the future of oyster farming in Willapa Bay — the place where his great-grandfather first plucked an oyster from in the late 19th century.

“There’s always something that’s not going right, but that’s just part of the industry,” Jeb said.

Taking it in stride, rolling with the punches. Feint. Dodge. Counterpunch. Take one on the chin. Get back at it. That’s oyster farming, it seems.

Navigating invasive species, unpredictable harvests and unreliable labor markets all remain formidable obstacles. “It’s been tough sometimes,” Brian said. “We didn’t ship for three months because we didn’t have the crew.”

Managing their 1,000-plus acres requires a formidable team of dredge operators, farm managers and general laborers. While mechanical harvesting accounts for a portion of what Northern Oyster Co. does, the majority is still hand-picked, natural set oysters.

It’s been the preferred family method since the 1930s when Brian’s grandfather split from his partners in the salmon business to focus exclusively on oysters and his newly founded Northern Oyster Co. “I’m glad he did,” Brian said, “because salmon went south.”

After the construction of Jetty A in the 1930s, fish traps in the bay filled up with sand, among other challenges, but the oysters managed to hold on.

Over time, the farm grew, shrank, and then grew again, always seeking out the best beds for the natural set. Brian thinks the south part of the bay is most favorable for the natural set.

Still, he prefers to finish his oysters further up north, near Leadbetter Point, where the upwelling of cold waters flushes phytoplankton in from the ocean.

Northern Oyster Co. also farms Manila clams, which have an even longer crop cycle, anywhere from four to seven years. “Just looking that far down the road,” Brian said, “that’s a big challenge.”

Like others who have found themselves scratching out a livelihood from the bottoms of the bay, Brian didn’t expect to end up here. His parents encouraged him to get out, go to school and explore other options, and he did.

After earning a degree in engineering from Seattle University he worked for several industrial manufacturers, including Boeing. It was a good job with financial security, but something still drew him back.

His parents were getting older and running the farm was becoming something of a burden. It wasn’t exactly high-tech, Brian thought, but oyster farming was filled with little puzzles, in many ways just like the technical problems he liked solving as an engineer.

He even found a kind of romance to it all, at least a kind not found in the big city.

“You get out in the middle of that bay at night and it’s just very — I always found it kind of comforting,” Brian said. “That dark is sort of, you got your light on, you can’t see very far, but you can see the other guys you’re working near. And that’s what we’re doing this time of year because the lower tides are all at night.”

Taking comfort in the darkness. Having faith that the oyster will reseed. That the bay will be replanted with a bounty. A belief that it will and should all carry on.

“I don’t think when my grandfather got into this, he’d imagine how far it would go,” reflected Brian as the sun set, as the tide rose, as his wife and son worked nearby.

“I don’t even look at this like it’s my farm,” Brian said. “We’re taking care of it for a while, and maybe the next generation will take it up.”

Returning

It didn’t seem ironic to John Rowell to be starting a business near Oysterville some hundred-odd years after the boom and collapse of what was once a mighty shellfish empire. In fact, it felt like the perfect place to start over.

Rowell’s grandfather spent time crabbing and fishing these same waters in the early 20th century. His dad was born here, but work in engineering and business took him around the world.

“To him, this was always home, even though he was only here a very short time,” Rowell said. After traveling the world, he came back to this little strip of bay and built a home in the late 1970s. But by then, Rowell himself had caught the travel bug and would end up spending the next 40 years in Brazil.

It was a grand adventure that would lead him to his wife, Raquel, as well as a lifelong fascination with food production and quality management. It was there he ran several business ventures — restaurants, wholesale and even livestock.

“I have always worked with food,” John Rowell said.

Life was good, great even. But then, out of nowhere, he got a diagnosis of melanoma.

At that time, treatment options were scarce, and a doctor in Brazil strongly recommended staying out of the sun. He knew just where to go — Willapa Bay.

Raquel had never participated in any of her husband’s businesses but figured they could try something on a small scale that would complement their interests. Raquel wanted to do something that could express her love of cooking. John liked the angle of offering a product on an artisan scale. Together, the couple opened Willapa Artisan Kitchen.

In Raquel’s experience, American meals tended toward the sweet. She wanted to focus on the seafood and the savory dishes she missed from back home.

They built a full commercial kitchen but started small, just dialing in a local harvest clam chowder. They added smoked oysters, then fluffy panko crab cakes with celery and green onion.

Then, crab mac and cheese with mascarpone, which Raquel coaxes out a delicately rich flavor without it being overly heavy. Fresh oysters and clams are always available on-site.

The Rowells harvest what they can from their modest acreage — “just big enough to have a resident bear,” he said — and are proud to buy from other farms like Chetlo Harbor. Hot meals are offered on-site, but everything is also available frozen or cold-packed for overnight shipping.

Between online sales, word-of-mouth and faithful customers, they’re making it work.

“We’re not big oyster farmers,” John said. “We didn’t want to be. We’re much more tied into quality.”

Adapting

Several decades into the oyster game, things were positively humming for Dave Nisbet.

It was 2009, and he had grown the family-run Goose Point Oysters company from a tiny 5-acre lease into a behemoth of more than 1,000 lucrative acres.

“And then we hit a wall,” Nisbet said.

Hatcheries couldn’t produce larvae, at least not efficiently. Things suddenly looked bad.

Oyster growers got together. An oceanographer was hired to help them look into what was happening. What they found was that creeping ocean acidification was taking a toll on juvenile larvae. Shells were stunted, misshapen or not formed at all.

Calcium carbonate is used to form hard shells, but with excessive absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans, free carbonate ions are depleted. Additionally, aragonite — a substance that binds calcium and carbonate ions — dissolves in acidic conditions.

Nisbet adapted.

“I kind of went on a mission to figure out what we were going to do for seed,” he recalled. That journey finally ended in Hawaii, where Goose Point Oysters now operates a hatchery, producing millions of pounds of seed for themselves and other growers on the West Coast from Alaska to California.

Somewhere along the way, Dave also found time to get married. He had four daughters (each has an oyster dredge named after them), and all went off to college to pursue professional careers.

One came back.

Kathleen Nisbet Moncy has spent a good chunk of her life in the oyster beds, first as a toddler dangling in a basket off her dad’s back. Now, a mother of five herself, she is at the helm of this still-growing oyster empire.

She is now one of the bay’s most recognizable and fiercest defenders.

Nisbet Moncy has lobbied for more tools to manage the burrowing shrimp and invasive green crab. She has sought protections for the bay and called for contingency plans in case of an environmental emergency.

“In order to protect water quality, we need to maintain really high standards,” she said.

Her tenacious defense of the bay has been noticed by many, most recently U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Washington state Democrat who invited her to speak before the House Committee on Small Business.

She scarcely expected her march through the mudflats might one day lead to the marbled halls of Congress. Still, she never once balked at the opportunity.

She took the dance to warn of threats to the bay from oil spills and invasive species, ocean acidification and simple complacency. She spoke about the importance of the industry to her family and her community.

She was surprised that oil executives in attendance seemed shocked to learn that one of the most pristine and prolific oyster grounds in the world was lying so close to their proposed oil and gas projects. She saw influential eyes open.

“It was just a different perspective that they hadn’t heard before,” she said.

She recounts that before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the Gulf of Mexico was the largest producer of oysters in the United States. Now, Willapa Bay holds that title. But sometimes she wonders — for how long?

It would be easy to cash in, sell out, give up in the face of such threats. But the couple have no intention of doing so. There’s too much at stake. The shellfish industry is the largest private employer in Pacific County, a tight-knit community that accounts for millions in wages.

Without really trying, Nisbet Moncy learned to speak Spanish as a teenager. She grew up with the kids of her dad’s generation of workers, who in many cases became workers themselves.

“We were all just kind of raised together,” she recalled.

Francisco Meliton is their farm manager, and he’s been with Goose Point for 25 years. He is also part of three generations of workers in the industry. His father was an oysterman, and now his kids are even getting into the work.

That takes some getting used to. Meliton recalled how he recently had to warn his eldest boy, new to the workforce, that — “out here, I’m not your father, I’m your boss.”

Nisbet Moncy laughed, but she gets it too. The little Panga skiff that Meliton pilots backed out into the bay, the late afternoon sun having just fought through the clouds, warming his face, still penciled with a grin.

“As long as we’ve been in business, they’ve been with us,” she said, nodding toward Meliton. “It’s the families that work with us too. We’re like one big family together.”