The Young Wireless Operator—With the Oyster Fleet / How Alec Cunningham Won His Way to the Top in the Oyster Business

by Lewis E. Theiss

Elsa took the sounding-line and dropped the lead into the waves, the line paying out over her finger. When the lead came to rest on the bottom, she noted the depth on the line. Then she took Alec's fountain pen and set down the depth beside the cross Alec had made on the map.

"Just date it, too," said Alec, "and note down the stage of both wind and tide. It's pretty well toward ebb now, and, if the book is right, we oughtn't to expect to find many larvæ. They seem to drop down to the bottom and anchor themselves during the ebb-tide to avoid being swept out to sea. They come up when the tide turns, and we ought to find more in the flood-tide than in the ebb."

Alec, all this time, was getting ready for his part of the work. He took a galvanized bucket that belonged on the Osprey and lowered it overboard for a few moments so it would take on the temperature of the Bay. Then he lifted it aboard, brimming with water, and set it in the shade. Elsa thrust the salinometer and testing tube into the bucket to cool. Then Alec attached his hose to his lift pump, and carefully lowering the hose to a point within a few inches of the bottom, pumped his own bucket, which had also been cooling in the waves, full of water. It was the sample from the bottom, in which the oysters actually lie, that he wanted to test.

Elsa drew her tube and salinometer out of the cooling bucket, and Alec filled the tube with water from his own bucket. Elsa lowered the salinometer into it and put the tube in the shade. Then she held the bolting-cloth net over a tub, while Alec slowly emptied his bucket of water from the bottom into it. The bucket contained ten quarts and Alec had it brimming full. Gradually the water filtered through the net into the tub, leaving on the inside of the net whatever sediment had been in the water. In this sediment Alec expected to find the oyster larvæ. Ten times they did this, until they had strained one hundred quarts of water through the net. From time to time Alec threw the filtered water overboard. Finally the net was lifted clear of the tub and the last of the water allowed to filter through it. While Elsa held the net up, Alec washed the sediment from the sides down into the tip of the net, with water dipped from the tub. When the filtering process was fully completed, and the sediment all concentrated in the tip of the net, Alec carefully untied the draw string, opening the end of the net, and, using his large rubber bulb pipette, washed the sediment into one of his wide-mouthed settling bottles.

Now Elsa turned her attention to her salinometer. It was intended to register the density or degree of saltiness of the water. Alec could hardly restrain his impatience, so eager was he to see what the instrument would tell.

"You know, Elsa," he said, "that sometimes the best seed grounds are in waters of so low a density as to be entirely unsuitable for fattening or even growing oysters. I've been thinking about that a whole lot, for most of the oysters we dredged on the Bertha B this year were very poor. They hadn't fattened a bit. Captain Bagley said he never had caught any good oysters in that bed. I've just been wondering if the water wasn't of the proper density. Why, those oysters would have been worth a whole lot more if they had been fat."

Elsa lifted the salinometer from the tube. "The water ought not to be very dense here," said Alec, "for we're so near the shore and it's near the end of the ebb-tide. There's fresh water pouring in all the time from the tributaries."

They found, as Alec had surmised, a low degree of density. The reading of the thermometer was also low. "That's what I expected, too," commented Alec. "This has been the coldest spring I can remember. I thought for a time that I was deceived because I was out in the wind so much, but the skipper said it really had been unusually cold this spring. I asked him the other day. It doesn't look as though we'd get much of a set this year. Why, that water is barely warm enough for oysters to spawn at all. And this water close to shore ought to be warmer than that farther out."

Elsa marked down on the chart the density and temperature.