Sweet Spot at Little Ledge

Our last harvest for this set of tides was Monday. My friend Maria showed up on Sunday afternoon- fresh from a permaculture course she took in Southern Maine. Lovely gal she is, I put her right to work packaging seaweed, and she taught me a beautiful song while we worked. “I’ve got this everlasting light/ shining like the sun/ and it shines on everyone/ and the more that I give/ the more I’ve got to give/ It’s the way that I live/ It’s what I’m living for.”  The following morning we scurried to package orders. We shipped out the last box for the Iron Chef. Did I mention that the Iron Chef tv show is going to be using a variety of our seaweed- they are filming tomorrow but the show will air months from now. We taped up the last giant box of seaweed for that order and then we stretched our wet suits over our already heated bodies and scurried out for a noon time harvest.

This time we went out to Bonny Chess to harvest Alaria esculenta (Atlantic Wakame). Bonny chess is a series of rocks and ledges covered with barnacles. The water can get pretty turbulent around these rocks so we attempt to visit them when the seas are most calm. Soon into our harvest the water began to rise and the waves began to push us around. We crept around on the rocks like creatures that had just landed on a foreign planet- watching the waves as if they were wild creatures we didn’t quite know how to approach. Harvesting alaria often feels as if we are stealing the seaweeds from just within the oceans reach. We scaled the edges of Bonny Chess, with the high sun beating down on us. We watched the water rushing over the weeds wondering when the golden midribs would untangle, allowing us to grasp with the right hand, cut with the left, lift and drag sometimes hearty fists full of long thin glistening fronds to safety, out of the hungry seas reach.

We left Bonny Chess with a very modest load of alaria. It seems that I’ve been finding the best spots to harvest just as the tide is about to swallow up the last of the days visible catch. On the boat ride home we watched the seals and cormorants sunning. We got back to the house in a ravished and exhausted state. We cooked up a heap of food. Then closed our eyes and sunk into our own comfy corners of the house, for about forty minutes. Seaweed swaying back and forth in the cove waiting to be hung before dusk, dried seaweed resting lightly in boxes beneath us waiting to be packaged. The work continues for a few more weeks.

Oh yea! We got a kitten, and we want to name her Misha Ram ram Hare.

Casey and I are off to Vermont for the weekend. Then back for the seaweed talk I will give next Wednesday evening in Blue Hill.

Kacie with a hank of Alaria

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