Heck, I would travel from California to see huge raccoons juggling and jumping through hoops!

Trish — If you live in the area and you like oysters, you should get a recreational shellfish license and partake of the various town programs. Here in Barnstable, there’s a big effort to grow oysters that get planted on local beaches for residents. It’s worth it! But thanks for your offer — we may just take you up on it some day.

Myrna — One of the greatest things about doing Starving is getting to “know” people from, literally, around the world. Kevin and I have always talked about taking an RV across the country one of these days, and I’d love to map out stops to meet the people who have commented here. Idaho would definitely be on our agenda.

Mike — Most of us in Barnstable Harbor take oysters out, for the very reason you cite. Ice would crush the equipment, and so we take it, and the osyters in it, out for the winter (our oysters are intertidal, so we don’t have the option of leaving them in the water — I assume yours are subtidal). Oysters go dormant when it’s cold, and the system works pretty well. The seed oysters (about an inch) we put in the cooler last winter had almost no mortality. Larger oysters, we’ve been told, don’t do so well. The proportion we’d lose would depend on the conditions we stored them in, as well as lots of other issues we probably don’t have a very good understanding of (hey, it’s our second year). In a normal winter, we’d take them out in December and put them back in March or April. This year is SO not normal. Where do you oyster?