Meet the men fishing Scotland’s last wild oyster bed

It is time to go fishing for oysters. The Vital Spark is a Clyde-built boat, almost 40 years old. Seven days a week during the oyster season, which starts in September and runs until April, she works the waters of Loch Ryan, a long and narrow sea loch on the Galloway coast. This is the only place in Scotland where wild native oysters – Ostrea edulis, to use the Sunday name of this coveted beastie – are still fished commercially. The fishing rights were granted to the Wallace family by the crown in 1701 and are still held by that local estate to this day, meaning that the Vital Spark is the only boat out there bringing up oysters. There are two of a crew – Rab Lamont and John Mills, Stranraer natives each just a little older than the boat in which they sail. Neither man likes oysters or, more accurately, has ever been able to bring himself to try one. “Aye, the boss’s catch is safe with us two,” says Rab. They sustain themselves instead, during the long cold days, with endless mugs of coffee, endless roll-ups, and rounds of toast and marmalade which, being tough seamen, they do not cut daintily but instead fold in half and gobble in snatched moments while the dredge is on the bottom. The wheelhouse is a mausoleum of toast crumbs and half-smoked fags lying in scallop ashtrays. An old battered metal kettle, which one imagines to be encrusted on the inside with barnacles, puts in a hard shift on the hob. Rab and John love their job. They view bad weather – whether it be a temperature of minus 14 or the northerly wind that comes howling down the loch – as a pleasurable challenge rather than something to be tholed. They have known each other for 30 years and seem to get along, to go together like oysters and stout, which is just as well given they spend eight months of the year in each other’s company daily. Fishing is forbidden during the breeding season, which means any month without an “r” in it, so the summer is when the oystermen catch up on their drinking and DIY. They seem to enjoy the company of guests, although they have certain reservations about bringing women on board; like many fishermen, they consider this to be bad luck, and still rue the day when they hosted “a 25-year-old barmaid from Toronto” and found themselves unable to catch a thing. “Aye,” says John, “she was a f***ing demon, right enough.” John is a big man; dark haired, solid and possessed of an extraordinarily gruff laugh. This begins somewhere around his wellies, comes growling up behind his muddy oilskins, and emerges eventually from his throat as a sound so sonorous it could warn shipping from the coast. Someone once told him he was “the George Clooney o’ the fishin’ ” – a compliment to which he clings like a drowning man to a mast. He has been a fisherman since leaving school and has sailed right round the British Isles. Although he is only 43, he gives the impression of being a grizzled, weathered veteran, the last generation, as he sees it, to learn the trade right. He prides himself on being able to splice rope, mend nets and tie all the nautical knots. He likes to keep the boat clean, giving it a good scrub each Friday, as is the tradition. He has been on the Vital Spark for four years. Rab, the skipper, is 47, wiry and tough, with close-cropped silver hair. He sometimes takes a break from puffing on a fag to puff on an asthma inhaler. He used to work as a steward on the ferries sailing to and from Northern Ireland, but has been an oysterman since his late thirties. His greatest burden, he feels, is having his ears bent by John’s off-colour jokes and wind-ups. “He once told me that Ailsa Craig was the Isle of Man. Think of spending 12 hours a day with that and you won’t wonder that I’m grey.” We sail first up the eastern side of the loch, overlooked by the hills. Here, because the water flows better and there is less silt, the oysters have a classical oystery shape and are therefore favoured in the restaurants and bars of London, where they will sell for between two and three pounds each. The Loch Ryan Oyster Fishery Company supplies the Ritz, Savoy, Harrods and Selfridges. In Scotland, they sell oysters to Andrew Fairlie, Martin Wishart and to Rogano. They also ship to Italy, France, Holland and Canada, foreign palates apparently favouring slightly smaller oysters. John shucks open a few for me to try with lemon juice. They have a deliciously briney, brackish, lip-smackish zing. These wild oysters, as opposed to the non-native rock oysters which are now cultivated in the UK all year round, are the sort that Charles Dickens would have been able to buy from street stalls at three for a penny, that Julius Caesar would have eaten while invading Britain, that Casanova shared with his lovers in their morning bath. Although they know the waters by such local and personal names as the Scar, the Smiley and Pelican Toes, the oystermen also use a navigational computer to help them in their work. Known oyster beds are marked on the screen with red crosses. But these are beds where oysters are still growing and so they must to be avoided. An oyster takes about ten years to reach the right size and weight – 75 grams and above. Undersize oysters are returned to the bottom and the coordinates noted. “We’ll be back here in three, four years’ time,” says Rab, tipping a basket-full back into the loch. It is like laying down wine or maturing whisky in a bond. The point, too, is to make the oyster beds sustainable and not to fish them out. “See, you’re not just fishing for the now, you’re fishing for the future,” says John. “You’ve got to think ahead. Because this is the last yin in Scotland.” According to Scottish Natural Heritage, native oysters have been in steep decline for over 100 years as a result of over-fishing and pollution. They have long been part of the Scottish diet, as shells gathered from Mesolithic middens show. Scotland’s biggest and best known fisheries were, from the 13th century, in the Firth of Forth, with large fleets of oystermen working on both the Fife and Lothian coasts. By the start of the 19th century, fisheries there were landing 30 million oysters a year; Charles Darwin, while a medical student in Edinburgh, sometimes sailed with oystermen from Newhaven. By 1957, Ostrea edulis was thought to be extinct in those waters, although recent discoveries suggest it is making a small recovery. Thanks to careful management, Loch Ryan has survived much better. It is expected that around 40 tons, half a million oysters, will be fished this year. There are thought to be 60 million down there, 20 feet below the waves. Victorian-era record books, in the possession of the Wallace family, give a flavour of the money that could be made from oysters and the risks that men would take to take to bring them ashore. “Blowing a gale of wind from the north,” reads the entry for October 7, 1889. “Boat swamped and three of our men nearly drowned. Not fit to dredge.” The dredge of the Vital Spark is a large square chain pouch on a galvanised wire. Rab and John take it in turns to fish, the other steering the boat. After seven minutes scouring the bottom, as the Spark advances at around one and a half knots, the dredge is brought up, beribboned in brown seaweed, and its contents released, rattling, on to a metal table at the back of the boat. The two men sort the oysters by size, quick as Vegas croupiers dealing chips, and remove all unwanted creatures – cockles, mussels, shrimps, crabs, Buckie whelks. Orange starfish, killed by leaving them to dry on the edge of the boat, are considered to be enemies as they eat oysters; these starfish are also, apparently, prized by certain pigeon fanciers, who leave them around their lofts, believing that they will fatally poison any cat foolhardy enough to eat one. The dredge brings up rubbish too. At one time it was known to find crockery embossed with swastikas, artefacts from surrendered U-boats which were held in the loch before scuttling. Nothing so darkly glamorous today, though. “There’s a can of beer with an oyster stuck to it,” says Rab, holding up an old can. “Does that not sum up Scotland?” In the course of a day, Rab and John will fill four large baskets full of sellable oysters – around 2,500 of them. In the absence of other boats, they compete with one another, each man keen to catch as much as possible. It is always an exciting moment when the catch comes out the water; a slight air of one of those claw games from the fair. So they don’t get bored. Every day is different. The wind. The tide. The catch. The craic. This is the perfect job for them, they say; “away oot the road”, the world their oyster. “Right,” says Rab, handing his pal a slice of toast and marmalade. “Fold your gums around that, and I’ll go and lift the dredge.” «