Dredging and drifting with the last wild oyster fishermen of the River Fal

“It’s in my blood,” Jason says, squinting into the middle distance. The early sun cuts hard lines into his salt-weathered face – a complexion etched by a life hauling rope, reading tides, and smoking wet, filterless cigarettes on a river that hasn’t changed much in a thousand years.

It is a crisp October morning and we are standing outside his fisherman’s cottage on the edge of the Fal, pulling on waders. Outside, the river sits glassy and pale, willow trees dipping their fingers into the water. Woodsmoke lifts from a nearby chimney. It is beautiful, unspoilt, Cornwall preserved in amber.

“This,” he says, flicking his head behind him, ​“is the family home.” His father was a fisherman too. He learnt everything here. ​“I was never going to do anything else.”

The Fal oyster fishery is the last of its kind in England: a wild, regulated, sail-powered fishery for native oysters. These are not farmed shellfish, fattened and uniform. These are Ostrea edulis, European flat oysters, slow-grown, irregular, briny and wild. They take years to reach maturity, living through storms, cold winters and shifting seabeds.

On the Fal, oysters can be fished under sail and oar power alone. Engines are allowed to get you out to the fishing grounds, but once you’re there, the law insists on wind, tide and muscle. It’s an anachronism that turns out to be the fishery’s greatest defence.

“Engines would make things too easy,” Jason explains.

With modern sonar and diesel, you could find a rich patch of oysters and work it again and again, mining it until it was empty. With sail, everything is inexact. You hunt rather than harvest. Stocks are protected for future generations.

“95% of oyster fisheries in this country have collapsed,” Jason tells me. ​“Colchester, Maldon, The Solent. But ours is still going. At the moment, anyway.”

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The Fal has strict rules about when you can fish. The season is short, October to March, with only six hours of fishing permitted each day: 9am to 3pm. Sunday is a rest day.

We punt out to his oyster boat, a few hundred yards into the zig-zagging estuary. Getting the boat ready each day takes a good hour. We – or more accurately, he – hoists the mainsail, the sides sails, checks the ropes and straps, swings the enormous wooden beam around.

Once we’re ready, Jason fires up the old diesel engine, coughing and sputtering out the overnight rainwater, and putters out to sea.

The Fal opens out slowly, the river widening and loosening as it goes. Mud banks catch and hold the early morning light. Gulls wheel overhead, calling to one another, our only witnesses. There are barely any other boats. Jason scans the water, squinting slightly, taking it all in.

“There was a time when there’d have been 80 of us out here,” he says, nodding towards the open sea. ​“We’ll be lucky if we see five today.”

Jason cuts the engine. He hoists the sail. Everything softens. There is no noise, no vibration, just wind, water and canvas.

“That’s what I like about oyster fishing,” Jason says. ​“It’s totally peaceful.”

He lines the boat up, tacking gently into the wind, reading the water like palimpsest. Then, suddenly, he drops the dredges over the side, two metal lipped-baskets that sink down into the water. They are open-weaved rope knots, tight enough to hold oysters and loose enough to let the detritus fall through. They scrape along the seabed as we drift.

“I used to have a second man on here,” Jason says, watching the water. ​“We’d work four dredges together. I wouldn’t charge him rent, just a percentage to cover the running costs.”

He pauses.

“It was nice to have the company.”

Finding people willing to do the work has become harder. Demand for seafood is down. People eat less of it, and when they do, they want familiarity: cod, haddock, farmed salmon. Native oysters don’t fit easily into modern expectations.

“One problem is the rise of farmed oysters,” Jason explains. Farmed oysters are grown on an artificial bed floating high up the water column. They grow quickly, uniformly, and can be harvested at a consistent size. Restaurants, and consumers, have grown to expect that uniformity, to reject the variance and occasional ugliness of wild oysters. 

Wild oysters, by contrast, grow slowly on the seabed. They need the right temperature, the right water, clean ground and time. They are richer, more minerally, gamier. Yet British palettes have softened to the gentler taste of farmed natives and imported Pacific oysters.

“What I like most about the wild oyster is that it has a chance,” Jason says. ​“It can avoid us, live out its full life. Farmed ones – you know exactly how it ends.”

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Jason lets the boat drift for a while, the current moving us slowly towards shore. Time behaves differently once the engine is off. There is no sense of rushing, no optimisation of effort. Jason decides when it’s enough by instinct alone. Then, sharply: ​“Right!”

We haul the dredges in together. My heart lifts, expecting bounty. Instead, the contents spill onto the sorting board in a jumble: a few oysters, which get transferred into netted bags, but mostly empty shells, old scallop husks, and thick tangles of invasive purple algae that choke the beds.

“This didn’t used to be here,” Jason says, lifting a clump of it and dropping it back into the water. ​“Probably came in on the hull of some cargo ship. Who knows.” 

It doesn’t kill the oysters outright, but it clogs the dredges, wasting space and turning each haul into slower, heavier work.

Jason sorts expertly, hands moving fast, unshowy. Each oyster is checked against the size gauge, the horseshoe slipped over the shell to check diameter. The babies are thrown back immediately, splashing into the water to grow on. The empty shells matter too – oyster larvae attach themselves to them, turning them into future homes.

“It’s in all our interests to only take them when they’re ready,” he says. ​“They need time. You take them early and you’re just robbing yourself next year.”

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We repeat this process all day. Drop the dredges, drift, drag, haul, sort. Again and again, until repetition becomes rhythm and the work loses its edges. It is heavy, monotonous labour, performed in cold wind with occasional squalls of rain. Jason is normally out here all day, sustained by a thermos of tea, wet cigarettes, and the company of a seagull that perches on the end of the boat.

“Some people struggle with the solitude,” Jason says, unprompted. ​“But I don’t mind my own company.” There’s a pause. ​“And how many people can say they are truly free?”

I ask him where his oysters end up.

“Oh, France or Spain. A few stay local, but most are exported,” he says, sadly. ​“No one round here has a taste for them anymore.”

These wild, native, ancient things are sold to a middleman, rebranded as origin-less ​“oysters” and sold at markets all over Europe. Britain, Jason continues, exports its best seafood and imports bland substitutes.

It feels criminal to me that some millennial branding agency hasn’t already slapped a hand-drawn illustration of Jason and his sailboat on a crate and sold them back to us at triple the price.

Because that’s the strange thing about oysters. They’re still associated with luxury in Britain, with indulgence and excess and gastronomic signalling. People happily pay top dollar to guzzle imported, farmed specimens, three-for-a-tenner at hipster food markets, while Jason exports his hand-caught native oysters to be sold anonymously abroad. We like the idea of oysters more than we seem to care about where they come from, what they taste like, or what it took to pull them out of the water.

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3pm comes, Jason lowers the sail, and we head home.

On the way back, we idle past a small boat, hand-punted, its dredges winched up by arm power alone. It’s Julian, a mate of Jason’s – an oyster fisherman still working the Fal the old way.

We drift alongside and they talk about the old days, about adapting, about scratching a living whilst the world rearranges itself around them.

“There have been times where I wanted to wake away from it all,” Jason says, as we pull off again. ​“But once you’ve been fishing, as hard as it is, it’s difficult to do anything else. It’s like a drug, really. You get addicted to it.”

As the sun dips below the trees, Jason stores the day’s catch in his allocated patch of river, an open-water larder governed by centuries old-rules, the oysters held there in dark, moving water until the buyer makes his weekly visit.

Back at the cottage, his mother puts the kettle on. The fire crackles, wet gear steaming gently as it dries. Outside, the river slips into evening, unchanged and unbothered.

“Fishing chose me,” Jason says, settling into his favourite armchair.

The question is what, exactly, we have chosen instead.

Jack Burke is a freelance journalist and sometimes chef. Follow him on Instagram.

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