The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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As an itinerant and persistent South End researcher, I was called this week by my old pal Bob Friel, the author of the Barefoot Bandit, now a documentarian for an environmental group up on Orcas Island, the Sea Docs. They’re making all manner of films about the Salish Sea and had heard South Camano was where the grey whales came into our shallow tidelands to feed on the ghost shrimp, scooping huge craters of sand into their baleens and capturing tonight’s dinner, thousands of the mud shrimp. Needless to say, Bob and his pal Joe Gaydos needed an experienced guide for the hike out to the whale holes to avoid the ever dangerous quicksand shallows that swallow boots and shoes, threatening to trap the less vigilant adventurer. Plus they needed a dummy who would carry half their gear. Which was about as much as what a Hollywood movie scene would require….

The grey whales migrate every year from Mexico to the Arctic but some take a detour into our neck of the woods … or sea … to fatten up for a month or so before hurrying to catch up to the herd already up north. We got about one zillion sand shrimp out front here, so many the sand is porous from their burrows, making walking out to the eelgrass where the crabs rule a hazardous and arduous endeavor. The old timers here remember playing baseball on the flats when the sand was firm but in my 47 years here I haven’t seen any ball games out there. Or many people either, the quicksand is plenty intimidating.

Well, we did some filming, scooped up a few shrimp, wandered the whale holes and pondered the whole whale/shrimp relationship to firmness of the beach and health of the greys. The boyz had hip and chest waders recently purchased for this excursion but I went barefoot, a nod, I suppose to the Bandit of Bob’s book. Three hours later I couldn’t feel my toes. Small price to pay for science. But in the course of filming and studying, I realized there was a bias favoring the whales. The poor shrimp, well, they were just a food source for our heroic cetaceans. Didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair. Granted, I was freezing more than my toes off and maybe my deductive reasoning was being sucked up along with my feet out there on the sand barrens, but dammit, an injustice is an injustice! And so I have vowed to start my own environmental foundation, the Save Our Shrimp, SOS!

Bob and Joe had collected a few of the clawed creatures from dredging the sand with their homemade suction gun, a remodeled giant water squirter, deposited them in a special container and when they left the scene, drove the samples back to Orcas. Don’t think for a South End minute I didn’t understand their motives. They were bringing undocumented immigrants back to the San Juan Island beaches in hopes of luring the grey whales to their islands. They were shanghaiing our shrimp for their own nefarious plot!

This cannot stand! Donate now to the tax deductible Save Our Shrimp foundation. The San Juans may not include us in their archipelago, but we’re no pushovers either. Instead of an apartheid archipelago, wouldn’t it have been easier just to include us? Rather than steal our shrimp.

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