Norm Gibbons: The beginnings of cultivated oysters, landscaping and novels

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - By 1979, Norm Gibbons wanted a change. He had been one of the partners in the Refuge Cove Store for the past eight years.  He had not yet decided to move to Cortes Island, when he started looking into the oyster sector.


“Oysters weren't cultured at that point in time. There were just oysters out there. Anybody involved in the industry picked oysters, shucked them, and sold the shuck to Vancouver.”

“Then I found out about this operation down in Lasqueti Island that had its own packing plant. This place was the vanguard of the transition that was starting to happen in British Columbia, the transition into culture from wild harvesting.” 


“The reason for that was that oysters go through somewhere between a 7 and a 10 year cycle, where there's what's called a general spat fall. Oysters spat, they attach to all the intertidal walls in the whole southern gulf here, to all the rocks, to all the shells and so on. You end up with this huge volume of oysters.” 

“That's how this wild fishery reproduced itself all by itself, but the whole thing came apart about the time that I got into the business.  The oysters just weren't doing their thing. That  brought in a whole new group of oyster growers.” 

“We actually got ourselves a grant to go to Japan, and spent six weeks in Japan touring their entire seafood industry. We spent a lot of time looking at how they grew mussels, how they grew oysters and clams and so on.  When we came back to Canada, we knew a hell of a lot more than we did when we left.” 

“I was still living at Refuge Cove. The B. C. government was very supportive of what we were doing and we got grants to do all kinds of things. We ended up doing what's called raft culture.” 

“You can hang the oysters from a raft. The column of water that has plankton in it, that the oysters can eat, goes down around 20 feet. So, there's a 20 foot column that the oysters can feed in. They can be strung. You can have an oyster shell, with oysters that have spatted onto it and then that shell grows out into a big cluster.  You can put those shells on a string.  Every foot, you can have 15 or so shells on one string and a lot of strings on a raft. Oysters don't sleep, they just eat. That's all they do. So they grow really fast that way.” 

“It took about ten years, from 1980 to maybe 1990, to really get some of this new technology, not necessarily perfected, but at least  at a level that you could commercialize it.” 

“I started my first oyster lease  at Refuge Cove: on the other side of Centre Island, that's in the middle of Refuge Cove. Then I applied for leases all around Redonda and up Lewis Channel.”

“Our business was doing very well. We had a premier customer in New York City, the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar. I think it's the biggest oyster bar in the world. We patented the name Golden Mantle. The Golden Mantle oyster is sold in restaurants all around North America, it's sold all around the world.” 


By 1985. Norm's business had outgrown Refuge Cove. There is more in the podcast