A wild Wellfleet oyster (crassostrea virginica) begins its life as a free-floating larva. It wafts through the cold and salty waters of Wellfleet harbor and its estuaries before settling on a suitable solid surface, such as a rock, piling, or old shell. There it grows for the rest of its life, perhaps spawning new seed if the conditions are right, until it is ready to be plucked from its aqueous home by another rare breed, a wild oyster harvester.

History shows that Wellfleet’s sheltered harbor has been ideal for oyster harvesting for centuries. Native populations regularly harvested wild oysters for food. In 1606, French explorer Samuel de Champlain surveyed the area and named it “Port Aux Huitres” or “Oyster Port.” In the late 17th century, shellfishing drove the economies of early European settlements, and by the late 18th century, the Wellfleet oyster was already being overfished as well as severely impacted by naturally occurring disease. An initial community effort in the early 1800s to reseed the harbor’s estuaries launched the town’s ongoing aquaculture efforts. Wellfleet currently oversees close to one hundred shellfish farms, the most of any town in the Commonwealth, and in 2020 the town’s Shellfish Department  issued 175 permits to wild harvesters.

“It isn’t for everybody,” says Wellfleet Shellfish Constable Nancy Civetta, of the wild fishery. “The job is physically demanding, and you work in all kinds of conditions. You live by the tides, you live by the weather, and you need to know where you are going and what you are doing.” While the majority of wild harvesters are men, there are women who have been working on the flats for decades and female rookies join the industry each year. “As a woman, seeing a number of other women recently entering the fishery was a joy,”  says Civetta.

Falling in love with shellfishing was equally as easy for Melissa Lynch, who with her husband Justin, wild harvests for oysters and clams while also farming a deep-water grant. “I’m not from Cape Cod,” says Lynch, who hails from the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, “but I moved here four years ago because my husband is a native Wellfleetian.” Lynch was a career academic with a master’s in foreign language when her husband, who has been fishing for over twenty years, gifted her a commercial license for Christmas one year. “Every day is different, and you have to find your own rhythm and groove. I really fell in love with the lifestyle and even though I never realized this would become my occupation, it is the best move I could have made, for myself personally and for my family.”

Lynch and her husband have a five-year-old son, River, who has been joining his parents both at their grant and during wild harvesting since he was three. “It’s wonderful to have a grant and get to work it together and to also bring him wild picking with us. He loves digging for clams and is very comfortable on the flats.” Being able to include their son in her work was a driving force behind Lynch’s momentous career switch. “We get to be together on a daily basis and maximize our family time. It’s a beautiful lifestyle.”

The Lynches typically try to spend some time during the off-season traveling each year, and this past winter they visited Justin’s mother’s home on the island of Maui for a couple of months. In early March, they were returning to what they believed would be another busy spring and summer when the pandemic hit. “We flew into Boston just as this part of the world was starting to shut down,” says Lynch. “We arrived home to a closed shellfish market.” They had to get creative because many of the distribution channels that supply restaurants with fresh Wellfleet oysters and clams closed. “We are fortunate that we have great personal accounts that kept us afloat,” says Lynch, “and I’m so grateful that our distributors were able to move our shellfish.”

The market shutdown also affected Woodman and Yow, who each found ways to adapt. “I went from having several buyers calling for oysters to everything shutting down,” says Woodman, who says she was lucky to find one buyer with whom she has been working since May. “The volume went down and along with that was a reduction in price, but in this environment I was really happy to be able to keep working.”

“I was digging clams on double tides every day,” says Yow, who finds that the clam market is often more stable, perhaps because they are more easily prepared by home chefs. “Not everyone knows how to shuck an oyster,” she says, “and the restaurants were all closed at the start. So clams have been my saving grace through these times.”

With shellfishing being so critical to Wellfleet’s economic stability (25 percent of the town’s working age population makes their living in the shellfish industry), a local nonprofit stepped in to support the men and women who work the flats. “When the pandemic hit and restaurants and distributors closed, our shellfishermen lost their source of income overnight,”  says Michele Insley, executive director of Wellfleet SPAT (Shellfish Promotion and Tasting Inc.), “We immediately realized that we had to help, so we developed a three-part Wellfleet Shellfish Harvesters Relief Program.”

The projects included a community food share system, in which SPAT purchased shellfish from harvesters, and through established distribution channels donated it to food pantries. SPAT also allocated funds to help with basic living expenses and built upon a low-interest loan program that had been started in 2015. “Wellfleet has a long tradition of shellfishing, with what I believe to be the best oyster product in the world,” says Insley. “Shellfishing is critical to not only our local economy, but to the state’s as well.” Insley cites an impressive statistic, echoed by Civetta: in 2019 the town of Wellfleet was number one in Massachusetts for shellfish landing value (of all species and from both wild harvesting and aquaculture) to the tune of $7.7 million.

That is just one of the reasons why the town actively bolsters sustainable shellfishing. “Over the past few years we have purposefully and thoughtfully been increasing our propagation program,” says Civetta. “We buy field plant oyster and quahog seeds from hatcheries and maintain our nursery bed to grow out predator resistant-sized juvenile shellfish to broadcast them to areas of the harbor where they can finish growing.” The shellfish department also has set up a revolving fund in which 75 percent of all revenues from permit sales and aquaculture grant licensees goes into nursery efforts, and has managed a seed donation program where local shellfish farmers can gift “hat seed,” (oyster seed collected from the wild) toward the wild fishery. The town has even invested in their own spat-collecting devices to use in the harbor for attracting wildly spawned larvae.

Every one of these women who interact in some way with the wild shellfish of Wellfleet feels lucky that her town is blessed with this unique natural phenomenon. “I can’t say exactly why we have such an amazing natural reproduction, especially of oysters,” says Civetta.
“I have heard that it could be because of the way the tide currents move or prevailing southwest winds keep the larvae in our harbor. Whatever it is, we will continue our propagation efforts in order to create a sustainable future for our shellfishery.”

Any effort to keep the fishery strong pleases the women of the wild harvest. “The fishery is not always reliable,” says Yow. “So you have to be willing to stick it out through tough times.” Lynch agrees that you need to have endurance, both physically and mentally. “I have the utmost respect for the people who have been doing it for so long,” she says, “And now I am committed to this life as well.”

“It can be hot, it can be cold. There is ice, mud, the rising tide,” says Woodman. “You have to have patience, but you also have to move fast, so there are days when it is stressful for sure.” She then recalls moments when she has been out on the flats, not finding anything, when all of sudden she discovers shellfish treasure. “Those days make it all worthwhile, and I’m just so happy that I’m wild picking.”