A Trip in Totten InletBy Susan Macomson In June and July my husband and I took separate boat trips around Totten Inlet. We both returned from our rides with the same worries about corporate shellfish farming. What brought us on this trip is what we have experienced on our own land. Our neighbors have all decided to lease their lands to a shellfish operator. What he didn't tell them is they kill all predators on the beach. Well, we too lost all living things on our beach. When I had a discussion with the operator and later with another operator I was told by both that their vision for Puget Sound was to make it all into farm lands. When I asked about wild life I was told that's not the point. I needed to see what this vision was. Totten Inlet is 90% farmed so this was the place to see. We left from Carlyon Beach Marina and winded our way past Steamboat Island. The first sign of activity was a geoduck farm and one of the workers was putting in plastic tubing. All along the shoreline we noticed everything was level and covered with seaweed. We saw other activity along the inlet like corporate farmers sandblasting the geoduck out for harvest, leaving the beach completely bare and all the water along the shoreline brown with silt. We saw fields of oyster bags so thick that walking the beach was impossible, nor could any creature live here. We saw rectangles of planted geoducks, oysters, and clams covering the shore for as far as we could see. Metal boxes or cages of some kind stacked four feet high, rebar and plastic everywhere. The last thing we saw was the mussel rafts. These are a storage place for all the industries stuff and the smell was so offensive the reporter on the boat asked the driver and guide to move on. The industry wants to add 58 rafts into the area, a system that will be at least a mile long, smelly and stacked with junk. Totten used to have a lot of birds and herring; both are now in short supply. We saw one sea gull and one heron in three hours. I saw no kingfisher, pigeon, guillemots, cormorants or shore birds. I have heard the wintering duck numbers have plummeted. Many ducks as well as cormorants, raccoons, otters, crabs, starfish and sand dollars are all considered pests by the industry; they would like to be able to spray chemicals legally in our Sound. Understandably, they want the water clean but it seems they would prefer it without any life aside from their shellfish. The Governor says one of her important initiatives is cleaning up Puget Sound. I wonder if she doing this for the industry or for the Sound? One will give us clean water the other will give us a healthy ecological system that we can all benefit from.
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