Tag: Gulf of Mexico

Young Salt

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” — Isak Dineson

It is just grainy light outside and Trey King is trundling his cart across an empty stretch of beach toward the water. In the cart are several five-gallon buckets that he will carry into the Gulf to harvest sea water, for the purpose of making salt. It is cold on this January morning and the beach is quiet. A few birds that look like sandpipers are milling about in the foreshore and a snowbird or two lurks in the distance. Reports of a great white shark moving through the area surfaced days ago but, for now, the twelve-foot tourist is nowhere to be seen.

On this raw winter morning King is decked out in waders and ball cap and he looks like a man ready to work. For the past year he has come to this spot in Gulf Shores twice a month to collect the raw materials for his trade. In the next hour will make a few trips from the water to his trailer, which is hitched to his truck in a lot at the intersection of 59 and 182, next to The Hangout. When he started this gig in late 2024, King would haul the buckets back by hand — but he quickly learned he was making a rookie mistake. King is in his early 30s with a rangy, athletic build but even the fittest of sorts needs wheels for this gig — those buckets get heavy.

By the time he enters the Gulf it is lighter out and the joinery between sea and sky does not show. The muted greens and blues are bordered by the whites of clouds and beach, and the calming hues resemble a painted scene from a dentist office. The party-vibes this stretch of beach is known for are nil at this hour.

Before heading into the water, King is careful to make sure it’s light enough to see. He has a family and will not abide any safety risks. On this morning the Gulf looks tranquil, but as someone who grew up on the Eastern Shore, he knows about the subtleties of rip tides and the need to respect the authority of the sea.

“Sometimes I go out there and it’s pretty sketchy,” he says. “But I got kids. I gotta be careful.”

This is an ideal time to harvest, he says, because there are no swimmers at this hour. That is important because even the faintest trace of oil-based sunscreen can taint a sample and render the water unusable. King also doesn’t harvest after rainstorms, which can yield runoff and create a host of problems.

“There have been times I’ve gone into the Gulf and the water looks like bottled water,” he says. “There have been other times when it is not that clean. That is where environmental stewardship comes in. I put a lot of credence and faith into the Gulf, but there is also the saying ‘trust but verify.’ I need to make sure I’m providing a consistent product. And part of that consistency comes with making sure my source is as reliable as possible.”

Read more at MobileBaykeeper.org.

In the shadow of the spill

It’s been fifteen years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig suffered a blowout and spilled five million barrels of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The 87 days that followed the explosion on April 20, 2010 — forty miles off the coast of Louisiana — left residents gripped in a white-knuckle, teeth-grinding frenzy, as the slick continued to grow and approach the coast like some kind of atavistic, sci-fi horror show.

By the time The Great Blob was finally contained, it had affected 70,000 square miles of the Gulf, roughly the size of Oklahoma. It was the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history by volume. To this day, the extent of ecological damage is unknown.

At the time it went down, the explosion and its ensuing spill wasn’t nearly as surprising as BP’s seeming inability to stop it. Three months is a long time to watch Anderson Cooper report on scenes of sheer devastation coming out of your own backyard. Less than two months after the explosion, BP, who had leased the rig from drilling contractor Transocean, had even stooped to soliciting suggestions on its website for ways to stop the flow. 

For anyone who loved the Gulf and called it home, or had even enjoyed a Bushwhacker at the Flora-Bama during a Spring Break in the long ago, the spill was a major wake-up call. There was a period in those three months where Life As We Knew It on the Gulf Coast might conceivably be over. 

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Fifteen years later, we are more vigilant about threats to our waters, and, in many ways, ecological efforts are more robust. The 2012 RESTORE Act helped lead remediation efforts, and NOAA has been stalwart in their efforts at restoration. Safety standards have reportedly improved at rigs since the Deepwater Horizon. But are we truly protected from another major spill — who knows? 

Ninety-seven percent of offshore oil and gas drilling in the U.S. happens in the Gulf, and, currently, only a fifth of the Gulf’s 2,200 active leases are in operation, due to a large production supply and the high costs of drilling, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal agency that manages offshore drilling. 

It’s clear that drilling in the Gulf will be around for some time. Let’s hope the regulatory framework remains intact as well. We have too much to lose.

— from CURRENTS (SPRING 2005)

The Bay Is Your Oyster

If you ask any first-class gourmand where to find the best oysters in the world, they will tell you to look in the claires of France or along the western coast of Ireland. Certainly in the shallow waters around Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or in Wellfleet Harbor, Cape Cod. Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico? Not a chance. 

If they are really savvy, they will tell you about Mali Ston Bay, an oyster utopia on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast where a variety of European flat oyster can be found that is so precious Roman emperors once funded commercial farms there, and still, two millennia later, Austrian emperor Franz Joseph was insisting that his monthly shipments to Vienna come from Mali Ston alone. In Franz Josef’s day, five hundred miles by train would be about the same as shipping overnight on a 747. In logistical terms, halfway around the world. 

Such is the love for this strange and wonderful bivalve and the lengths we will go to get them — nowhere is too far to send for the best. So whether you take them by the dozen on the half-shell or fried on a po-boy, with a bottle of France’s sparkliest or with an icy schooner of what made Milwaukee famous, the humble and posh oyster inspires a love that runs deep into the heart of many cultures and culinary traditions. 

The Gulf, however, has not enjoyed the same reputation for quality as these other fabled appellations. Even before the concerns brought by the BP oil spill, there was the long-held conception that the Gulf waters are too warm and turbid, and that the coastal beds where our oysters develop their unique flavor profile are not briny enough. 

So what we always lacked in quality, we made up for in quantity. At least we did until BP, an event that wiped out somewhere between 4 to 8 billion oysters — a loss that has taken the mollusk three generations to replenish. 

As recently as 2019, the U.S. Department of Commerce designated Alabama as one of several Gulf states whose seafood had been greatly endangered. 

Hard numbers and the effects of the spill aside, such conceptions about the Gulf’s fitness for growing world-class oysters are not the whole truth. The key to growing a world-class oyster is not in a body as large as the Gulf or even as small as a single bay. And as bad as the spill was, is, the waters are healing. In beds that may be only as large as a few acres, the perfect conditions can and do exist. If only you know where to look. 

I visited the Admiral farm in early December. The morning had brought a low tide. Through the slash pines and saw palmetto at the farm’s approach, which sits just off Fort Morgan Road near the marina, you can already see it. The water is clear; so clear you feel as if you’re glimpsing the sandy bottom through a fish tank. 

Nearby, about 300 yards from Fort Morgan, the remnants of the Tecumseh, the Union warship that capsized after striking a mine during the Battle of Mobile Bay, is buried beneath the Bay. The farm works with the state to ensure the site remains undisturbed. Thus the name, Admiral Shellfish Company, replete with its “damn the torpedoes” ethos. 

This is Mobile Bay, I have known it my whole life, and while the water is typically less turbid during the winter months, this locale seems by contrast a different waterbody altogether from the caramel hues of the river-fed upper Bay. Here, the diurnal tide ushers in full-strength ocean water, and there is no siltation. On the hottest day of the year, the waters might reach 84 degrees, only slightly warmer than the near 80 degrees seen in Mali Ston. 

As a general rule, the perpetually brackish Mobile Bay averages 10 to 20 parts per thousand (PPT) for salinity. Because of the diurnal tide, however, the coveted 20 to 24 PPT salinity level is a near constant at the farm. On the day of my visit the salinity level is at 23. Scarce rain in October and November meant the farm never went below 25 in those months. 

So here, at the southern end of the Bay where the Gulf currents, underwater terrain, and surrounding geography converge in a swirl of exceptionally clear, highly saline waters, the ideal conditions exist for growing world-class oysters. In waters saturated with just the right concentration of minerals, nutrients, and phytoplankton, amid these conditions there exists some of the best that can be found, anywhere on earth. 

***** 

Approaching the farm’s shore you are greeted by Joe Ingraham, a bearded oysterman and great storyteller. He looks like “a pirate, 200 years too late,” as Jimmy Buffett might put it. The farm stretches out into the bay for 1,400 feet, and you can see black buoys rectangling in the sea. There are nearly 700,000 oysters growing in this space. It’s shallow and the Admiral team rarely has to use boats. It’s mostly waders when they’re out checking the cages. 

Ingraham is on the farm every weekday. When you visit Admiral, and observe Joe and co-owner Anthony Ricciardone working the farm, you quickly learn this is not a project for dilettantes. Or the faint-hearted. 

Ingraham is explaining the lay of the land to our photographer. 

“When the cage is suspended, that’s exactly where they sit – in that top two feet,” Ingraham says. “But that also gives them protection from would-be predators.” 

Ingraham and his team are constantly working with the oysters, shaking and handling and fine-tuning the bags. This is partly an effort to keep the “lip” off the shell, which is a form of curation that allows for better presentation. They also take the oysters out of the bag and let them air-dry, which helps kill off things like algae. 

“In terms of a handcrafted product, we’re literally shaping the cup of the oyster. Our chefs want consistency, and they want the same branded product every day,” says Ricciardone. “With these cups, it looks like the meat is exploding out of the shell, so it makes a really cool table presentation.” 

Ingraham pulls some oysters out of the water, shucks them, and shows us the contours of the cup. The point is clear. 

“The fact that Admiral is concentrating that much on each cup of oyster, that is what puts their product above and beyond,” says Seth Temple, head chef at La Chat Noir, an acclaimed restaurant in New Orleans’ Warehouse District that serves Admiral oysters daily. “They’re bringing that saltier oyster that customers crave. The salinity levels are matching that of Prince Edward Island, which is extremely rare in the Gulf.” 

But along Prince Edward Island, it can take three to four years to grow an oyster to market. At Admiral, they can grow an oyster to market in as little as six months, due largely to the warmth of the water, and other factors. In terms of putting Mobile Bay oysters on the global culinary map, this is an enormous advantage.

Read the rest of the article here.