Gatherers, locavores relish Florida's gulf

February 01, 2009|Patricia Borns, Globe Correspondent

APALACHICOLA, Fla. - "Getting the food yourself. That's something you can pass on," said Carrie Ozment as he waded into a rare interior dune lake on Florida's northwest coast. Clearly visible through the amber-stained water were dozens of enormous blue crabs, easily taken with Ozment's nylon net or, for the brave, by firmly pressing the crabs' blue-green shells against the sand and lifting them by the pincers, as Chris Hastings was showing his guests how to do.

For centuries if not eons, northwest Florida has been a lure for hunter-gatherers from neighboring landlocked areas.

"Between Alligator Harbor and Port St. Joe is an unbelievable food source," said Hastings, who scours the area's waters and woods for his Birmingham, Ala., restaurant, Hot and Hot Fish Club. Now as more people come for the beaches - extraordinary beaches whose every new draping of sand looks like fresh snow - a loose alliance of locavores hopes to reconnect travelers with nature and nurture. Hastings's lure is a four-day odyssey of hunting, gathering, cooking, and eating that he leads several times a year.

In a part of Florida where everything is not candy-coated for prime time tourism, the trip artfully weaves people and place at both ends of the food chain. One minute, Hastings was orchestrating a crab boil at the opulent gray-shingled WaterSound Beach Club near Santa Rosa. The next, his guests were hunkered down in a banged-up skiff with waterman Kendall Schoelles, skimming across mud-brown Apalachicola Bay to harvest its famous oyster beds.

In the western part of the bay known as The Miles (the "mile" in a shore name refers to its distance from Apalachicola's John Gorrie Bridge), Schoelles dropped anchor at mile 13 in the lee of St. Vincent Island where the oysters are said to be the best. A local legend in oystering, Tommy Ward owns the majority of the oyster bed leases here and the respect of area chefs.

"Tommy's one of those people who are disproportionately passionate about what they do," said Hastings. "He's vital to his industry."

Ward's facility on shore road C-30 is a good place to buy retail and watch men weighing their haul and women shucking it, jobs that have sustained local families for generations.

While Schoelles demonstrated harvesting oysters with a giant wooden scissors-like contraption, amateurs were raking up a feast on public beds with little more than a fishing license and basic gardening tools.

"A short-tined rake works well," suggested Josh Hodson, assistant manager at St. George Island State Park, which has a stunning 9-mile barrier island beach accessible by a 4-mile bridge from Eastpoint. Visitors will find oyster beds within wading distance on the park's bay side at low tide.