Drakes Bay Oyster Co. marks end of retail business

“Keep on shuckin” said the back of the blue t-shirts and sweatshirts worn by many of the more than 200 people who turned out on a cloudy, breezy Thursday morning at Drakes Bay Oyster Company on the edge of Drakes Estero in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

But in fact, shucking open the marine bivalves grown in the estero’s cold, clear water came to an end with a bittersweet celebration marking closure of the company’s oyster sales shack and cannery, the latter the only one of its kind in California.

“It’s been a blessing at the same time it’s been very difficult,” owner Kevin Lunny told the crowd, summarizing his experience running the oyster farm since 2005 and fighting the Interior Department to hold onto it for the past 20 months. “We don’t know our next step, but there will be a next step.”

How much longer the company will be allowed to continue harvesting oysters from the 2,500-acre estero near Inverness in west Marin County remains uncertain, as lawyers for a group of Lunny’s allies filed a request Thursday in federal court seeking to keep the business going until their case is heard.

Lunny remained upbeat, while his sister, Ginny Cummings, had her voice crack with emotion, some friends shed tears and one person likened the event to a funeral.

“I believe we’re actually gathering here to witness a death,” John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project told the crowd, calling the shutdown a “murder.”

Phyllis Faber, co-founder of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, blasted the National Park Service for putting an end to more than 80 years of oyster farming in the Pacific Ocean estuary with extensive eelgrass beds and a harbor seal colony.

“What an incredibly sad and unnecessary, stupid day today,” Faber said, asserting the park service was “blinded by a director in Washington who doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.”

Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar opted not to renew a 40-year federal permit for the oyster operation in November 2012, setting off a legal battle that gained national attention with several groups of attorneys providing Lunny with free legal services to take his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Following the high court’s decision not to accept the case, Lunny announced three weeks ago he would close the oyster shack at the end of July.

His lawsuit is now back before a federal district judge in Oakland, who told lawyers for Lunny and the Interior Department to negotiate a shutdown schedule for the oyster farm and set a follow-up conference for Aug. 11.

Following Thursday’s ceremony, a big yellow earth mover picked up the steel shipping container that had housed the oyster cannery, where workers had showed up at 4 a.m. Thursday to prepare the last day’s delivery of raw oyster meat.

The oyster shack shutdown will cost the company about half of its $1.5 million annual revenue, Lunny said.

“This is good government in action,” Amy Trainer, executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, said in a telephone interview. The oyster farm’s closure fulfills Congress’ “visionary action” in 1976 designating 33,000 acres of the seashore as wilderness, she said.

The five-fingered estero was classified as potential wilderness, with full wilderness status awaiting removal of the commercial oyster farm.

Trainer, whose office is 10 miles away in Point Reyes Station, said that step is “a matter of fairness. The public owns these lands and waters; we’ve waited over three decades to get our wilderness area.”

Lunny, meanwhile, has made “hundreds of thousands of dollars” selling oysters without paying the park service any rent since his permit expired, Trainer said.

Faber told the crowd that Point Reyes is wild but hasn’t been wilderness for more than 200 years, and that wilderness is “an old term that is misused today.”

Signs around west Marin that say “Save our Drakes Bay Oyster Company” should be changed to read: “Shame on the park; shame on the park,” Faber said.

Sam Dolcini, president of the Marin County Farm Bureau, described the event as “another gathering of the cowboy boots and Birkenstocks,” referring to the alliance of ranchers and environmentalists backing the Lunny family. “The weather here today is fitting for the mood,” he said under gray skies.

Later, Dolcini said in an interview that many Point Reyes ranchers fear their operations may be in jeopardy from what he said was the Park Service’s apparent intention to eliminate commercial agriculture.

“Every five to 10 years they take another little nibble at the pie,” he said.

Lunny said the chilly morning was a “typical July day” on Drakes Estero, where his mother and father still run the family’s cattle ranch where Lunny and his siblings were raised.

In an interview before the event, Lunny said he has already put 15 big-rig truckloads of oyster-growing gear into storage, hoping to use it and to employ his crew of workers again somewhere else.

“Our eyes are open. We’re looking at possibilities,” he said, holding his grandson, 6-month-old Dylan Mata. “We’d really like to be back in Drakes Estero.”

The park service has agreed to give him 30 days’ notice of any order to stop harvesting oysters and to bulldoze the buildings, including the weatherbeaten white woodframe oyster shack..

Anne Sands, who lives near Bolinas, bought her last jar of oysters there on Thursday. Sands, 73, said she’d been buying Drakes Bay oysters since the 1960s and still hopes Lunny can continue growing them.

“There’s nothing like a fresh oyster,” she said. “It tastes like the ocean.”

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.