For year-end, I'm going to show you how we button up our oyster farm for the winter. It's for all y'all who like the farming nitty gritty. All 7 of you! It starts at dawn on Christmas day. Not always, but this year we had a tide we couldn't afford to lose. 1/ 
The bags have oysters that were thumbnail-size in June. Now they're 2+ inches, and each bag weighs 35ish pounds, and we have to bring them in so ice doesn't sweep them off to Portugal. This is one of the few jobs where we hire people to help & Gerald is with Kevin and me.
The bags are clipped on both ends to trays, so step one is unclipping them and standing them up. There are 600 bags, and we'll take about 300, because we were able to borrow 2 28-foot boats and 2 box trucks (not being used Xmas day!).
Our boat is 24 feet, which might not sound much less than 28, but it is. When all the bags are stood up, we wait for the water to come back so we can float the boats down the aisles and put the bags in the boats.
I can lift 35 pounds over my head, but I can't do it too many times. Luckily, Kevin can and so can Gerald, who is the ideal combination of strength, speed, and skill. We load both boats and head to the landing. Gerald's driving one ...
And Kevin's got the other. Both boats have about 150 bags, which is very heavily loaded. We get to the landing, and back the trucks down to the water. We load directly from the boats into the trucks.
So far, we have lifted each bag 3 times. They will be lifted 3 more times before the day is done.
We take them to the plant of our wholesaler, and Gerald's highly skilled, all-Brazilian crew is there to help us finish the job. We put 2 sorting tables behind the trucks, pour out each bag and transfer the oysters to onion bags, which get palletized.
The pallets get wrapped to keep them stable, and go in shipping containers for the winter. Because oysters are dormant at low temperatures, it doesn't matter whether they're in the water or out of it.
Once they're all done, we clip the grow-out bags together in groups of five, load them into the trucks, and take them to the back 40, where we'll store them until we need them next year.
Then we're done. And it's 10 hours later. We still have the second half to bring in, and that'll take us at least 2 more days, since we won't have 2 big boats again. And then the trays come in (another few days) and we're done for the year.
I will add that this is extremely heavy work, and on our farm it gets done with the help of skilled, hard-working immigrants, willing to pitch in even on Christmas day. I don't know much Portuguese but I do know obrigado. THE END.
