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NORWALK, Conn. John Rauscher looked out the window at his co-workers, a steady chip-chip-chip sound in the salt air along with the music on the radio and the hum of the boat's engine. He was happy to have landed on his feet in a tough economy four years ago with a job in the waters off Norwalk and Westport.
"I wish I was here 10 years," said the Milford man, a former asbestos-removal supervisor who was piloting the Ringgold Brothers, a century-old Chesapeake Bay oyster boat belonging to Norm Bloom and Son.
Mario Romano, a lifelong Norwalker, and four men from Honduras stood in front of him in the hot sun, separating the marketable oysters from the throwbacks, vacant shells going into piles on the deck around them, a continual process that has gone on for decades.
The men were raking the beds 22 feet below on a 100-acre diamond-shaped plot 2 miles off Westport's Cockenoe Island.
"It'll take a month to clean this lot," Rauscher said. "I'll keep going over it until I get down to the sand. Then I'll move."
The dredging cages went down and then came back up. The men cleaned off shells. The good oysters were put in bags, which occasionally were drenched in cold sea water. Every three hours a smaller boat came out, collecting the bags and taking them ashore to the 40-degree chipping room on Norm Bloom's property. This way, the oysters don't lose their freshness sitting in the sun, Rauscher said.
The chipping room also is a destination for some of the workers when the boats come in, according to Rauscher. "They have steam coming off them," he said.
"They're hard workers," Rauscher said of his comrades. "I don't know how they can do it." The immigrants, who are legally documented, had on four layers of clothing.
Rauscher always has lived near the water, but didn't expect to be captain of an oyster boat.
"When the economy went down four years ago so did my job," he said. A friend hooked him up with Norm Bloom.
How does this summer differ from last year? There are more ordinary people out fishing. "The only thing we saw last year was oyster boats and sailboats," he said. Maybe the price of gas kept people away, he said.
Norwalk became known as "Oyster Town" in the mid-1880s, according to Helium.com, but things took a turn downhill. Norm and Hilliard Bloom bought Talmadge Brothers Inc. in 1972, restoring the city's pride with hard work. Norwalk is Connecticut's largest producer of oysters, the website says.
Norm Bloom oysters go as far as Colorado and California, Rauscher said. "The New England oysters are better than oysters from anywhere else," he said. "You get that temperature change in the water, that gives it that flavor. It's better."
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