Solo Out of Season Oysters

[Tap]

21st of Summer 516AV

It was summer and that bummed Tap out, at least about this particular job she was working. Oysters were today's catch. She had been specifically hired by the Forest Meridian House to collect a good amount of them. Even though oysters were bested collected in Winter or early Spring, people always wanted things year round. She had warned the restaurant that the oysters would not be nearly as tasteful as they would be in those previously mentioned seasons, but they assured her their traveling tourists and eager Konti customers would pay no mind. She shrugged and went off to the oyster bed she knew so well. Oysters were very easy to find and collect. They grew in large clusters on the beach, far enough in to be underwater during high tide and just barely watered during low. Luckily for the Forest Meridian house Konti Isle had not experienced any rain during the past couple of days and so the oysters were ready and safe to collect today, rather than having to wait a few more days for clear weather. Oysters were unsafe to collect after rainfall and so they must be collected after a stretch of fair sun.

With her Tap wore her normal outfit though this time outfitted with thick leather gloves and sturdy leather boots. Although they were a drag to wear in the water, the boots, they protected her feet well enough from the sharp shells of the oyster clusters and were wide enough so that her small weight was spread out so she didn't sink in the thick and sticky mud that always surrounded oysters beds. The gloves served a similar purpose as well, protecting her soft hands from the vicious shells she would be plucking from the water. She brought with her her mesh bag to collect the oysters in. The animals needed to be kept cool and alive and until she was able to get them to the Forest Meridian House they would need to be kept soaked in the ocean waves until she had collected enough to turn in. She also brought her stake mallet, a hammer intended for another purpose, that she often used to knock the oyster clusters they stuck to the rocky shores. The last of her tools she brought with her was her oyster knife that she used to break the oysters out of the cluster into singles. More often than not she would also use the knife to carve open and oyster and snack while on the job. Finally she of course brought her waterskin for she would be wading in the cool water while being bathed in the hot summer sun. Other than that Tap believed in traveling light.

[Tap]

Tap knew of many, if not all the oysters beds that surrounded Mura’s coast. The knowledge came from years of experience collecting oysters. The shellfish were one of the very first sea animals Tap had ever learned to fish, since they were so common and so easy to collect. Fortunately the abundance of clusters meant very little danger of overfishing. Tap felt very strongly towards only collecting oysters of mature and ripe stages. One could tell a mature oyster by its shell size. An oyster ripe enough would be 3 inches or larger. One smaller than this had more time to grow and populate and therefore should be left to do so. Larger oysters are more desired by customers anyway and so the cycle is protected and continued. Today Tap decided on fishing in a cluster on the eastern edge of Mura’s city limits. This specific cluster had been left alone,t least as far as Tap knew, for some time now. She herself had not harvested from it in perhaps a year and a couple seasons. It wouldn’t take a long time to walk there.

From the Forest Meridian House Tap set out towards the ocean shoreline on the Eastern edge of Konti Isle. When she arrived on the beach she saw that the waves were currently descending from high tide, and it would be another bell or so before low tide peaked and Tap would be able to wade into the dredge of mud to collect the oysters. The fisher did not mind of course, she loved to simply sit on the beach and lay still while she felt the tiny sand critters scurry in the sands under her.

She had to keep herself from falling asleep, but it wasn't long until the water was low enough that Tap could see the tips of the oyster clusters poking out of the tiny waves rolling onto shore.Getting up she retrieved her mesh bag as well as her mallet. Making sure her gloved and boots were secure she waded out into the shallow water, careful to step around the clusters and into the thick, sticky mud instead so nothing would be crushed or cut.

Finding a cluster she deemed large enough to hack away at she knelt down in the water. She didn't mind her clothing wet, Tap was a water being, she rather liked it. This cluster was large, spanning a few feet across the shore, attached to a few small rocks that Tap could see just in the center. The cluster grew as more and more oysters decided to cling to each other rather than a base rock or coral. She would have to be careful to break one end of a branch instead of a middle so she didn’t ruin an entire line. She picked an oyster then traced it with her eyes following it back the wrong way to a small rock. Sighing, she traced it the other way until she found the end of the clinging branch of shellfish.

[Tap]

With her hammer at the ready she brought it down on top of a cluster of oysters. The shells were hard enough to take the brunt of the blow without cracking, but their holds on the rock, mud and each other were not. And so with that first strike a clump of five or six oysters came loose and she bent down to pick it up and place it inside her mesh bag. The bag would keep them wet and alive until she turned them over to her customer. Continuing to work on this branch of oysters she moved and hit it with the rock again. This time she missed on accident, almost falling into the water with the releasing momentum. Chuckling inwardly at herself she got back up straight and kit at the branch again, knocking off a few more oysters. She did this until the branch was decimated to the core. She left a few still clinging to the original rock as to help facilitate its regrowth, but other than that she had accumulated about 30 oysters in her mesh bag.

She wanted many more oysters than this, maybe 200. Plus she would have to go through each cluster, break them apart and search for dead ones. This reef was large enough to meet her demand, though she would have to remember to let this oyster cove recover before harvesting from it again. The Forest Meridian House was the finest dining option in Mura, and with a population of 2000 Konti about, the restaurant had a high demand for oysters because of their amount of customers on a daily basis. Konti tended to enjoy seafood and oysters were among the many delicacies.

At this point she wondered if she wanted to collect all 200 and then separate and sort them or collect some and sort, collect more and sort… She thought about it for a quick tick until she decided to do the latter so she wouldn’t die of boredom or exhaustion breaking all the shellfish off the reef. At this decision she sat down in the water, she never minded if her clothes got wet, for Tap herself was a sea creature in part herself. She placed her hammer in the mesh bag and retrieved a small cluster of oysters. She took out her oyster knife as well to separate them more accurately. Now the first thing to do when separating oysters was to simply remove them from their anchor point. This usually wasnt too difficult with an oyster knife handy. Tap, being mindful of any open skill getting to close to the sharp edges of the shells, inserted the tip of her knife into the anchor point and worked it through to the other side, separating the edges from the anchor. The oyster would fall off and plp into her open hand where she would place it back into her collection bag.

She did this with each oyster on the cluster she was working on until she was left with a large dirt clump anchor and a small pile of dead oysters in the water beside her. Dead oysters were occasionally found on each clusters that had died so recently they had not dropped their anchor yet. They were easily found. Every oyster had its shell slightly open to filter ocean water through for food. When lightly tapped an alive oyster would swiftly close it shell, whereas a dead one would not. Dead ones were common and by the time she had finished with her 30 or so shellfish she had previously gathered, perhaps 7 of them were dead. It was an annoying loss, but unavoidable.