Muddy Waters

Laura Hendricks, who had arranged the gathering at Totten Inlet, pointed out that the conflict isn’t just about geoducks. “In most of these areas,” she said, “industry is trying to maximize profits by planting geoducks in the deepest sections, then oysters, then Manila clams. This effectively takes over the entire beach with nets, tubes, rebar, oyster bags, and clam netting.”

“There used to be big schools of sand lance and other baitfish in here,” said Fritz Mondau, president of the Association for the Protection of Hammersley, Eld, and Totten Inlets. “This activity is taking place in the historical spawning places of these forage fishes. They need zooplankton to survive. Starve them for a few hours and they’re in big trouble. Juvenile Chinook salmon, [federally] threatened in Puget Sound, depend heavily on sand lance.”

“Our water used to be crystal clear,” declared Anita Woodnutt. “You could stand out there waist-deep, look down, and see the place teeming with little fish and crabs and all kinds of life. All that’s gone. You used to be able to kick over the rocks and see things crawling out. No more.”

“In places where they haven’t done any geoduck planting, you don’t see this muddy water except in the worst winter storms,” said Bill Burrows, a retired University of Washington business professor and spokesman for the Concerned Citizens of Har-stine and Stretch Islands. “This level of siltation is totally unnatural.”

I didn’t see much life on the beach. On the other hand, the tide had covered most of it and we were walking on the rocky section. The water was indeed muddy, especially around the geoduck beds. But Totten Inlet is shallow, and a bottleneck entrance at Steamboat Island drastically impedes flushing action.

The assemblage was particularly exercised about the unauthorized planting of an estimated 25 acres of Totten Inlet’s state-owned tidelands to oysters and geoducks. On July 12, 2008, after a lengthy interview and tour with Laura Hendricks, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that “critics estimate Taylor secretly converted at least 25 acres of state tidelands into a shellfish farm.”

The conversion to private land, which happened in 1905, was indeed “secret” but only in the sense that apparently no one—including Taylor, which purchased the parcel from one Carl Adams in 1972—knew about it. In 1895, six years after statehood, Washington passed the Bush Act, by which public tidelands could be sold into private ownership specifically for the farming of native oysters. Surveys were inaccurate, titles unclear, boundaries confused. For 103 years all shellfish growers who farmed this piece of state property had incorrectly believed they owned it.

Hendricks contends that the Totten Inlet situation “isn’t just an isolated incident,” and maybe it isn’t. But legal farming of public tidelands will soon be under way. The state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which is charged not only with managing public beaches but with making money from them, has been given authority by the legislature to lease state tidelands for geoduck aquaculture. “Two hundred and fifty acres would be the upper limit,” says the agency’s land manager, Jeff Shreck.

That doesn’t sound like much until you consider three facts: 1) Geoducks can be planted only in thin bands along the intertidal zone, so 250 acres might extend along 30 miles of beach; 2) geoduck aquaculture is feasible only on smooth, sandy beaches—the ones most popular with the public; and 3) only about 10 percent of the beaches in the south sound, where geoducks can be farmed, are publicly owned, meaning all of the public shoreline could be taken up by geoduck farming.

“There simply are not enough beaches available in the public domain for 250 acres of geoducks,” said Bill Burrows. “Those beaches belong to everyone. We think private companies that make money from shellfish aquaculture should do so on private beaches.”