Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Oral History Project Index
Florida’s Forgotten Coast – Home
WORKING THE BAY
Melanie
Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette
Hicks
Monica
Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty
McNeill
Charles &
Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles
Thompson
Genaro
“Jiggs” Zingarelli
PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice
Richards
Anthony
Taranto
Tommy Ward
THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George
Watkins
VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood
& Honey
WHERE TO EAT
Apalach
Eateries
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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans Streeter.
This project sponsored by the St.
Joe Company.
Tommy Ward
Thirteen Mile Oyster Co
13 Mile
Apalachicola, FL 32320
(850) 653-8522
You know, once you get this water in your blood—working on this water—nothing else satisfies you. It's hard to go to a land job and go to work. I mean, could you imagine being out here in this all day, every day, you know, and you get paid for it? This here is paradise right here. It does not get any prettier than this. – Tommy Ward
Born in 1961, Tommy Ward grew up with an appreciation for the place he still calls home. His parents, Buddy and Martha Pearl Ward, raised Tommy in the business out at their seafood house, 13 Mile. The remote location, thirteen miles west of Apalachicola, gave Tommy a hands-on education in his natural surroundings and life on the bay. As a teenager, Tommy left home and spent some time away at college. He also paid his dues working at some other seafood houses in Apalachicola. Eventually, he returned to the family business. But 13 Mile is not just his business. It’s his heritage. Hurricane Dennis practically destroyed the place in 2005. But with the help of his friends and family, he rebuilt. Today, the freshly painted building that stands along the water’s edge is a monument of sorts. It’s a monument to a place, its past, and to a man. Buddy Ward passed away in April of 2006.
Listen to this 4-minute audio clip of Tommy Ward talking about oyster leases and tonging versus dredging the bay’s bottom to harvest. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.] What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: Tommy Ward – 13 Mile Oyster House – Near Apalachicola, FL
DATE: December 2, 2005
LOCATION: On a fishing boat in the Apalachicola Bay near St. Vincent Island
INTERVIEWER: Amy Evans
Amy Evans: [This is] Friday, December 2nd, 2005. I'm at Thirteen Mile with Tommy Ward, and we're in a boat looking at St. Vincent Island. And tell me that again, Tommy, what you started to say?
Tommy Ward: About Picaleen and all?
Yeah.
The Indians used to come over here and stay a lot in this little hole over here next to the beach, fifteen to twenty-foot deep called Picaleen—well Picaleen Hole. But anyway, there is a lot of Indian pottery and arrowheads and things along this beach over here you can pick up. But you're not supposed to pick it up, but you can pick it up and look at it and throw it back down.
And that whole island is a reserve, you say?
Yes, the whole island is—they done it for a bird reserve. I think that's a big bald eagle over there on the bar right there that we're looking at. I'm not sure. It looks like he's got a white head. But they've been oystering a lot in here through this little gulley we're trying to go through, and maybe we won't hit bottom and we can ease through [in the boat].
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So you were saying before we left [13 Mile to get in the boat] about how this part of the bay doesn't close. Can you explain that?
Well, this here, particularly the area from Eight Mile to the west is what they call approved waters. You don't have, you know, a bunch of homes, a bunch of pollution, you know, septic tanks and things of that nature draining off into the—into the aquifer or to the water. And the water just seems to be a lot more cleaner and—and all. And plus you're—you know, several miles away from the river, and so you don't get the flow down the Apalachicola River into the bay quite as heavy here. Which that has its advantages and disadvantages because the water—the freshwater and the nutrients that comes down the river is what your oysters feed on a lot of times to make them grow. But then again, you've got a bad part about it being, you know, like that—you have a lot of predators that come in that will kill the oyster bed. Your oyster drills—conchs, red fish—you know, will eat a tremendous amount of oysters.
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[The boat is now on the shore St. Vincent Island. Tommy and the interviewer walk along the shoreline for a bit.]
So all of these shells that we're walking on—is this just a natural washing up of old [oyster] shells?
Yeah, of dead oysters. And, you know, maybe somebody has come over here and sit around and ate them and throwed them down.
When you shuck at the [13 Mile Oyster House] over there, what happens to the shells that are used over there?
Well a lot of times, you know, we use them around for driveways and all at the [oyster] plant. But we also—I also replant my oyster beds with them, use it for seed stock. In other words, on my leases I replant [the oyster beds.] I like to use scallop shells. They seem to grow oysters so much better than an oyster shell.
Because of all those ridges on a scallop shell?
Well, no. You take an oyster shell [picks up an oyster shell from the beach.] Take this oyster shell here, for instance. It's dry. When the oysters go to spawn and the organism floats through the water, and it attaches to something. Okay. So say you get five of those organisms attached to this one shell. Well when they go to growing, it will be what they call a burr. And this oyster shell is so hard; it's hard to break them apart without killing some of the oysters. You take a scallop shell, when it grows—when it gets three or four spats [or juvenile oysters] on it, and the oyster goes to growing, they're brittle—easy to crack, so they'll break apart from 
each other. And that oyster—scallop shell has a tendency to roll around on that bottom a little bit with the current. And it forms and rolls up and makes a thick cup oyster.
Can you talk about leasing beds and how that works?
Well, we have two oyster leases. They—we acquired them from the State. One of them, I think, on my mother's side of the family [the Miller family] in the early 1930s to the fifties, I guess. My uncle, Dewey Miller, acquired the lease over here in Big Bayou in St. Vincent Sound. And then we have another oyster lease across the bay over here. [Points across the bay] See that big white pole?
Uh-hmm.
That's another one of my leases. My dad [Buddy Ward] acquired that in—I want to say in 1961, sixty-two. Okay, you take a—you had to take a barren piece of bottom, and you had to have it surveyed and marked out, and then you planted with shell and all to make it a productive bed—oyster bed. And that's what he done. And it's for—in perpetuity and—but they do not give those leases no more to—they do not lease none of the bottom out anymore to the people. So we own over half of the leased beds in Apalachicola Bay. And we mechanical harvest off of these leased beds. We call it a cultivator. The terminology in Louisiana [and] Mississippi [it] is called a dredge. But I'm not dredging up the bottom; I'm cultivating my oyster beds and harvesting oysters just like a farmer tills his land and grows crops. That's what I do.
When did you go from tonging to dredging [in the leased areas]?
I want to say we got the rights to do that—I want to say the [nineteen] eighties. I'm not real sure the exact time. I'd have to go back and check the records, but they didn't—everybody was against using mechanical harvest in this bay, you know, and we had to go to court, and we had to fight, you know, a lot of your old-time oystermen and all. They wanted tongs [used]. But what they don't realize is I take that cultivator, and I work my leased beds with it. I'm turning the bottom up. When we was talking while ago about what oysters will like to grow on and what shells I like to plant, you get a lot of silt on your shells, and when this organism floats through the water and attaches to that shell, if it's got a lot of silt on it, just the current of the water will wash that organism off of whatever he tried to attach to. So you won't get a good spat set [or collection of juvenile oysters to settle and grow]. But with this cultivator, the boat is always moving, and it's a scrape. When he picks these oyster shells and oysters up off
of the bottom with the scrape he's moving—so it washes the silt off of the shells, and then it spreads it back out over the bottom to where when they are spawning, they're able to float through and attach to them and stay without getting washed away. You—you follow me?
I think so.
Okay. A tonger will go out there, and he'll tong oysters up and put them on a cull board, and then he'll sit down in one spot and cull these oysters off [or break them apart so they are individual oysters, not in clusters. The broken shells or unusable oysters are then thrown back into the water, creating a pile in one area]. And that's what they call a cull pile. And so you take all these shells, and you pile them up in one spot. Well, the little oysters in that pile is covered up. He's not able to feed and grow like he should, and the shells underneath that cull pile are not able to—to catch spat if they don't have too much sediment on them. You—you kind of comprehend what I'm trying to say here?...Anyway, that's the difference in using mechanical harvest and using tongs. And plus, it's more productive and it does not hurt the environment. It does not hurt the bed. It helps it. So—
So is that—that boat Miss Sara up at the dock, is that—that's the cultivator?
That's the cultivator. I bought that in Buras, Louisiana—Empire [Louisiana].
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Did you rename [your cultivator] after your daughter, or did it come called Sara?
Yeah, I renamed it after my daughter. I've named my shrimp boat after my daughter also. She didn't like her name on that ugly old oyster boat, so I named my shrimp boat after her.
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That's the—is that the only [cultivator] you have? The only one you need?
I've got a small one, but that's the main one I use.
So if you go out o
ne day and you cultivate one of your beds, how—how—how many—how much can you bring in relative to one boat out with tongs?
Well, that one boat can catch as much as three boats tonging or four. And it's just amazing what it can do. And I have oysters year-round off my leased beds. We don't try to catch everything up, and I plant and I, you know, I enjoy growing oysters. That's—you know, I enjoy planting the shells, I enjoy checking out the spat set that I get. I've learned—a lot of things I've learned, I learned from my father [Buddy Ward].
How do you check the spat set? You pick some up—?
Well, I mean—yeah, you go back and check it, you know. You—you know, you kind of figure what time of the year that they're going to go to spawn and—and you want to put your shells out within two to three weeks before they go to spawning or right during the spawning season. That way you put a dry shell out, you don't have the sediment on it. And you throw a good dry shell out, and they attach to that shell a lot quicker.
And then you check in on them and make sure they're still there?
Well, several months later you go back and—and check it or, you know, a month later. But it takes a little while for that little organism to start growing to really see what kind of spat set you've got.
And what do you look for when you check the spat set? Just that it—?
Just for a small oyster, a baby oyster.
And then when you—when you harvest them, about how old are they?
This one area you can harvest within a year-and-a-half to two years; sometimes it may take three [years] to make a legal [sized] oyster.
And a legal oyster is what?
It's three inches long…Look at the spat set on that oyster shell right there. [Pointing to a collection of little oyster shells that he picked up on the beach.] You see what I'm saying? See all the little oysters? That would be your spat set.
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What's a really big oyster that you've harvested or seen come out of the bay?
Well, I get big oysters off of this lease in Big Bayou [which is a part of the Apalachicola Bay at St. Vincent’s Island]. Dr. Livingston done a study, and he's done it in Australia—all over the world—and that place grows oysters like no other place he's ever seen, he said. You know, now I don't have that documented in writing. I'm repeating [it] behind say, my father or someone else that I've talked to over the years.
What would you attribute that to, any idea?
Just the water flow that flows through the Bayou and the nutrients coming off of the island. You know, I—I went out to Oregon and went on up into Washington up around Ayock in the oyster field and they—they grow oysters up there, just—it's unreal, I loved it. I really enjoyed it up there talking with the oystermen in that area and the—the growers. And—but they have the cold water, and they have the tidal flow to go with the cold water, so that's the elements you need to really grow oysters. Cold weather—when the bay gets cold, when the water gets cold in the bay and then you get a good tidal flow where they can feed and—it's just something about the cold water and all that just makes them grow like crazy.
So the perfect blend of salinity and—and fresh [water] and temperature?
Yeah, all that plays a factor.
And then I’ve heard about the wind having an effect on the salinity of the water?
Oh, the wind-driven bay? …[Y]ou take an east wind, water—east wind blows fresh water from the river down the bay, and it will make the oysters fresh tasting. You get a west wind that blows the water in through Indian Pass, which is saltwater [from the Gulf of Mexico], into the bay, and it will make the oysters a lot saltier. The east wind oyster will be fatte
r than the west wind.
Why is that?
Because you're getting the nutrients from the river and the freshwater coming down the bay and there's—I don't know, it just makes them fatter. You can tell the difference in the oyster on the east wind and the west wind, as far as the meat content and the shell.
But then so if an oyster is harvested at, you know, a couple years over time, how does that effect take hold? Does it matter at the time of harvesting?
When it's harvested. But you've got to have that mix of freshwater with the saltwater to make the oysters grow and survive. But if you get too much freshwater, it'll kill them. And if you get too much saltwater, it'll either kill them or the predators will come in and kill them. [*Interviewers Note: Some folks in Apalachicola talk about old-timers putting a crate of fresh-tasting oysters in the Gulf water over by Port St. Joe. The will leave them in there for a few hours, and when they take them out, the oysters are salty.]
Delicate balance, huh?
Yeah, really. And—and it's amazing. But that's like the red tide [which is a bloom of dinoflagellates that causes reddish discoloration of coastal ocean waters, which is often toxic and fatal to fish] come in and—and then had to shut down for several months. But it gave the bay a break to where the smaller oysters was able to grow up and mature in—in those few mo
nths, you know. You get some cold weather and everything and some freshwater oysters will grow quite rapidly, you know. But—and—and we—we have a problem sometimes, maybe the oystermen catching them too little, and you don't have enough enforcement from the law to—to manage it and oversee what's going on.
So what have you been doing with this down-time? You had [Hurricane] Dennis that wreaked havoc on your house and [oyster] house over there?
Well Dennis—well, it wiped it completely out. I mean, I can show you some pictures where, you know, the walls and—and everything was just gone. And I've worked for—since July 12th [on rebuilding 13 Mile], and you see the shape it's still in around there. But we've been working—I've been working every day, seven days a week.
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[Interviewer asked about Tommy’s father and 13 Mile. Recording begins again.]
Okay, my dad [Buddy Ward] got out of the Service in 1957. He come back here December of 1957 and started running the oyster house here [which is called 13 Mile]. He had bought it from some of my mother's family that had it [The Miller family], and he worked here and built an oyster house and built his business up. And then when I started kindergarten, we moved to Apalachicola to downtown Apalach [from 13 Mile].
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All right, we're in the boat, and we just saw a dolphin. And Tommy was just telling me about them coming up in the bay.
Well, they bring their young up here and teach them how to fish. And there he goes right there [points to the dolphin in the water]. But they bring them in and teach them how to fish and, you know, I have my own little Sea World here—gators, snakes, dolphin, eagles, fish, shrimp; it's all right here. This here lease is 178 acres that I have right here that's up in St. Vincent's Island called Big Bayou.
So right now we're on the south side of the bay?
Right, correct—the south—south side of the bay, coming up into Big Bayou and St. Vincent's Island.
And you were saying that these white posts mark the edges of your—?
These mark the boundary line of my lease. They—they come in here and tear my poles down, the oystermen do, when I pull them up, so they can slip across the line and—and steal my oysters.
You mean they move them around a little bit thinking you won't notice a few feet?
No, they pull them up and throw them away. [Laughs] No, they don't move them. They just throw them away. All my signs are gone. [Pointing across the bay] Look at—the white pelicans—is that white pelicans? I don't know, but it looks like white pelicans. I'm not sure. Anyway, back in the [nineteen] sixties and seventies we had a house built right here on this point. It was a guard house to watch over the leases.
Well this is awfully remote [and accessible only by boat]. What was it like growing up here? I mean how many—how often would you go into town or—?
Oh, I don't know. We'd go into town, you know, maybe on the weekends. We went to school there. We was known as Thirteen Mile Trash. We was poor white folks from Thirteen Mile.
How did you get to school? In a boat?
No, a bus—a school bus picked us up down there. There used to be forty and fifty families that used to live down there. [Interviewer’s note: See the interviews with James Hicks and Bobby Shiver for more information about the families that used to live and work at 13 Mile] It was a big community. They—but it was a lot of houses down there. My dad moved a lot of houses out of Kenny's Mill over in St. Joe and built down there. One of the houses that I lived in come from Kenny's Mill when I was a kid. So anyway this is—this is Big Bayou. This here is paradise right here. It does not get any prettier than this. Yeah, right there by that old pine tree, we had a nice house built there. We'd come over and stay when I was a kid coming up. You know, a 
teenager. We would—we would—me and my friends, we'd come down here and stay in—in that house on the weekends and all.
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So being in this pristine Big Bayou and then knowing what real estate is doing on land, [are things] moving too fast for you?
Well, yeah. You know, our way of life is going to be gone as I know it. I guess a new way will come in. But you can put too much pressure on the sanctuary with development with houses, roads, and you got septic tanks or bigger sewer plants, and I don't know that the bay can withstand all the pressure that's going to be put on it. You know, that's what scares me. That's like up on the waterfront [in downtown Apalachicola], we have one of the last big shrimp houses left in this [Franklin] County. You know, Carrabelle don't even have a shrimp house no more. And Buddy Ward and Sons Seafood is one of the last ones. They want to build condos and homes and everything and do away with the waterfront—we—as we know it. And if you do away with the waterfront and take all the shrimp houses and fish houses and oyster houses [away], and you develop it with marinas and condos, then the seafood industry is no longer in existence. And it's coming every day, faster and faster. I guess that's the reason I love it so much down here. It don't get no prettier than this, though, does it?
I don't believe it does.
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Well, tell me about the place in Apalach[icola] on the waterfront.
The shrimp house [Buddy Ward & Sons]? Well, we started out with a little old bitty building down there and a couple shrimp boats and we, you know—we all just worked in it. My dad had a boat built named Buddy's Boys by Bud Seymour, and it was a fifty-one-foot shrimp boat, and it was a nice boat. He had—I was in third grade when they put that boat in the water.
I think I saw that down [in the water] on Water Street [in Apalachicola].
Yeah, they used that for all the—he brought the Santa Claus in on parade of—or on Light-Up Night [during the Christmas holidays]. It totes the King and Queen at the Seafood Festivals. But that's a really neat boat. And me and my brother shrimped that boat for years, when I was a kid. That was Olan. Anyway, I shrimped with him when I was probably thirteen, fourteen and maybe, fifteen [years old]. We'd shrimp from Apalachicola, Alabama, Mississippi, and maybe down south. He—he was a good fellow. He—he had three kids. He—he drowned in February 23rd, 1978…Anyway, he was running the oyster house and he drowned and my—my dad really didn't [short pause] want—he didn't want nothing else to do with the place. But anyway he leased the place out to some people—to the Pauls and they had it for several years. I went onto school and went off to college. I got out of college, and I moved down to Crystal River. I drove trucks for my dad, and we built a shrimp house and all down in Yankee Town, and I moved down there and run it. I hired Smokey Parish, which works down there [at the shrimp plant now], and me and him roomed together in college and we grew up together. So anyway, me and him moved down there and run a shrimp house and a stone crab plant and grouper boats and all for about a year-and-a-half. And then we was in partners with some people from France. Anyway, the partnership dissolved and me and Smokey moved back to Apalach, and I drove trucks hauling shrimp to Singleton's, Red Lobster, Treasure Island, people like that, you know, at these breading plants. And I worked for my dad for quite a few years. And then me and him had a disagreement or a falling out, so he fired me. And I went to work for Leavins Seafood, and I worked there probably a year-and-a-half or so, and then me and my dad talked, and me and him went in partners in the oyster business, and he still had this place leased out down here. And I wanted the place, you know, because of all the [family] ties. But anyway, over a period of a few years we ended up with the place, and he gave it to me. I've been here probably—you know, probably close to fifteen years, I've been running the place. The shrimp house is doing good. Dakie [nickname of Walter Ward], my older—my oldest brother now, he—he runs it, him and Smokey. I haul their shrimp for them. I handle the trucking end, which me and my dad, we have become, you know, 
extremely closer than what we've ever been. And he's a self-made man. He's—he's really, you know, respected in the community.
Was he born in Apalach?
Yeah, as far as I know he was. Yeah, he was born out at—at the airport. It used to be a Military Base at the Military Hospital out there, if I'm not mistaken. He's seventy years old—seventy or seventy-one. He talks artificial now; he's not in the greatest of health right now but he—he's—he's a really fine fellow—him and my momma [Martha Pearl Ward] both. She was a Miller—is her maiden name. And the Miller side of the family is the one that had Thirteen Mile years ago. But they—they both—really, really good people, and I'm not just saying that because it's my mother and father. And a lot of other people think so, too. You know, [in] my personal opinion, my daddy has done a great deal for a lot of people in this community, and he's done a great deal for the seafood industry, and he has stood by and has fought the development of things in this part of the world for the seafood industry…And, you know, I got a good family. I got a good wife; I got, you know, three good kids.
What are all your kids' names?
My oldest boy name is Kevin. He's—he's twenty-seven years old. He—he went into the Marines for four years, and he done two terms in Okinawa. They sent him to Indonesia for a while. He come back and went to college—or he come back and was going to work with me. And that didn't go over well at all. Then I got another son named Thomas Lee Ward, Junior [who goes by TJ] that—he's seventeen. He's—he's really, you know—he's—he's intelligent. He—and I'm very proud of him, too. And then I got a fourteen year-old daughter and her name is Sara. And she loves to dance; she plays the viOlan. And that's my heart, you know. [Laughs] She's precious. And then my wife is Patty, she—or Patricia. She works at the State's Attorney's Office. She's been there for about twenty-eight years. She's really a good woman, and she has put up with me, you know, for many years. She has put up with me working in the seafood business. It's been hard, you know. It's a lot of long hours. There's—you know, the oyster business is not, you know, [there’s not an] extremely great amount of wealth in it, but it's a good honest living, and I enjoy it. And she has put up with that.
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How many employees do you keep up at the oyster house usually?
Well, you know, you figure I've got two truck drivers, a secretary, three to five house men, then you figure I probably am—you know, at the time, I probably had eight or ten shuckers. Then, not counting the oystermen, you're talking about another thirty-five people, so you figure fifty, sixty people. You know, it's not no big corporation or no big firm or nothing, but fifty or sixty people, you know, that have a wife and kids too. So that there is my outlook on that, you know. Maybe I'm a little strange or weird but—I don't know.
So have most of those folks been able to stay with you through the rebuild and kind of help out in a different way?
They really didn't—didn't come down there and work. I had a couple oystermen that I tried to, you know—to pay to come in and help me build and—you know, once you get this water in your blood, working on this water, nothing else satisfies you. It's hard to go to a land job and go to work. I mean could you imagine being out here in this all day, every day, you know, and you get paid for it?
I can see the draw for sure.
You know—you know, and once you get that water—that saltwater in that blood, hey, they just—it's hard to be satisfied after that. But, you know, I'm—I guess I'm just so fortunate to have the family I got and, you know, the friends that I have. You know, a lot of people say if you can count your friends on one hand you're—you're a lucky person. You know, I feel like I can count my friends on my hands and my toes 'cause so many people has helped me. And, you know, but that goes back—you know, I try to help a lot of people, too. You know people—people is good to me, and I try to be good to them. I try to treat people the way I would like to be treated, you know.
And you were talking about your—how you have in your heritage, you have some Indian and you have some Irish. What—were your father's parents—did they live here? Was he born here?
My daddy's parents come out of North and South CarOlana, I believe, and they was—my daddy—my grand-daddy and his daddy migrated from North or South CarOlana down to Apalachicola. My grandfather used to be a tugboat captain on the Apalachicola River. He rafted the lodge down the river for the saw mill years ago. I have my grand-daddy's houseboat. My dad gave it to me...And Smokey—me and Smokey have it together. And it's up the river in Hump Creek Slew. But me and Smokey have my grandfather's houseboat. And so, you know, where a lot of things mean, you know—I guess I'm kind of simple minded and—and all, and I kind of like the old way of life a lot more than people do anymore—the worldly things. You know, a lot of worldly things don't appeal to me. Now, I enjoy—now, I enjoy flying out to Oregon. The first time I ever flew on a big plane. And I enjoyed going out there, you know, learning some of the history there. That was really, you know—really impressive to me—the west coast.
What did you go out there for?
I went out there to [an] ISS Conference. Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference. I go to pretty much all of them anymore. I'm the Oyster Dealer President, Apalachicola Bay Oyster Dealer President. I represent a lot of the dealers when we go to these meetings, you know and—and I've got a little bit of sense of reality—what needs to be done, what kind of enforcement needs to take place, you know, from what I see from my business in this particular area. But, you know, it changes from state to state and bay to bay on how it needs to be managed and what rules and regulations needs to be set forth.
I pride myself in having the best oyster in the world. We have the best oysters in the whole world right here in this bay. I pride myself in Thirteen Mile Brand product. The old man with the pipe in his mouth, Old Salt, you know. That's been my daddy's logo for years.
But, you know, one thing my dad told me, you know, when we went in business together and handling oysters and—and shrimp and fish—I handle—I just don't handle oysters. I sell shrimp, fish, clams, you know—but we got our name on that product, you know. And when you see the old man with the pipe in his mouth, that's a sign of quality. You know, we take pride in it. That's just like our shrimp in our shrimp house. We take pride in the product that we pack and put on the market and—[distracted] look at the ducks. But, you know, that's—that's one thing that—that Buddy Ward and Sons Seafood strives to do is put out a good safe quality product for people to eat, for people to take home to their families to eat. I don't sell nothing that I wouldn't eat myself.
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So what about all the oyster boats that are up on the—the [shore by 13 Mile]?
On the hill? On them trailers? Those oystermen work for me. They own their own boat. They—they're self-employed. In other words, they work when they want to work, and when they don't want to work, they won't work. But they work—they can only work for me on the days that I have orders for the product to come in.
And they only harvest your beds?
No, they harvest public bars. Public bars. My little cultivator just went out and checked my one bed over there, and he caught twelve bags in just a few minutes and come in.
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Well, that sounds like it's going to come to an end, and so is this magical evening. This has been awesome. Well, you tell your wife that you took a city girl on the bay and just made her day.
You're welcome. I enjoyed it.
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