An oyster tour with no oysters

A couple of nights ago at dinner I pulled aside Mick, our expedition leader, to see if I couldn’t finagle my way on to the Coles Bay Oyster Lovers Tour in Freycinet. I knew it was a long shot. There were only 12 slots open and those had been filled before the ship even sailed. Still, you’ve got to give something like that a shot—an afternoon spent at the renowned Freycinet Marine Farm slurping just-shucked oysters from the Freycinet National Park which is said to have perhaps the cleanest, most pristine ocean water in the world.

Well, I got lucky. Last night, after dinner, there was an envelope slipped under my door with a message from Mick saying there has been a cancellation and if I still wanted to go, I needed to let him know by eight this morning. Which I did. So shortly after lunch a dozen of us hopped into two of the Zodiacs and were whisked over to Coles Bay where our guide, Brad, a young twentysomething dude with a pony-tail, showed us to his little minibus to begin our tour.

“Right,” said Brad. “Just wanted to let everyone know that there will be no oysters on our oyster tour.”

Pandemonium.

Not my fault, said Brad, slipping the minibus into gear and heading away from the harbor before anyone could jump ship, as it were. The weather didn’t allow the boats to get out. The oyster farm didn’t have any oysters today. What could he do?

A guy from Melbourne, sitting behind me, said, Well, someone in Cole’s Bay must have some oysters. You need to find them. Brad, sensing that things were going south very, very quickly, got on his cell phone while driving and tried to rustle up some oysters. No luck. Not a single supplier in Coles Bay had even one bivalve. “Look,” said Brad, trying to lighten things up, “we’ll just pop on over to the oyster farm and have some mussels instead. You like mussels don’t you?”

Well, yes, everyone liked mussels and it was generally agreed that if there were no oysters to be had the next best thing would be to at least eat some mussels. So that’s where we’re headed. To the oyster farm, which has no oysters, on the Oyster Lovers Tour to eat mussels.