The $125 oyster

Worth their weight in gold--just harvested Cole Bay oysters. Photo by David Lansing.

At the oyster farm there was a little rustic café (just a pass-through window, really, and a half dozen picnic tables outside) where normally they serve customers lots of lots of Cole Bay oysters. Thinking that perhaps they had just a few hidden away, Brad went to the window and asked the owner, Julie, if she didn’t perhaps have a dozen oysters tucked away somewhere. “These people are on a cruise ship and they’re taking the Oyster Lovers Tour and they’d be perfectly happy if they could each just have one little oyster.”

Sorry, said Julie. Sold out. No oysters today.

Well, what are you going to do. Brad ordered several pots of mussels from Julie as well as a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc wine and we sat at two of the picnic tables and shared the mussels and drank the wine from plastic cups and joked about being on an Oyster Lovers Tour with no oysters. We finished up and everyone got back on the minibus except for me. I was wandering around the oyster farm looking at huge piles, four feet tall, of scallop and oyster shells and taking photos when a pickup came up the dirt road and pulled up to the back of the café. Curious, I walked over. Two oyster farmers were unloading three bushel baskets of oysters fresh off the boat. “It’s all we were able to get today,” one told me. “It’s pitiful but we had an obligation to a client we just had to meet one way or the other.”

Brad, back at the minibus, honked the horn and leaned out the window entreating me to get onboard. “We’re waiting for you,” he yelled in the wind. I ignored him and turned to one of the oyster farmers. “Listen,” I said, “I’m on the Orion cruise ship and I’ve just spent a $125 on an Oyster Lovers Tour for which we were told there were no oysters. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me have just one, would you?”

“Ah, yeah,” said the farmer. And right there, at the back door of the café, he took an oyster knife out and shucked me the largest oyster in the bushel. “There you go mate.”

I quickly slurped it down while Brad continued to honk his horn.

It was lovely. Smooth and sweet and lightly brined from the most pristine ocean water in Tasmania. It was both the best oyster I’ve ever had as well as the most expensive.

When I climbed back on the minibus everyone wanted to know what I’d been doing in the back of the café.

I got an oyster, I confessed. You didn’t, said the man from Melbourne behind me. I did, I told him.

“And how was it?”

“Better than you’ll ever know.”

Which was a little mean. But also true.