Offshore Harvest : Shellfish Go From Oil Platforms to Dinner Plates

Poised on the ocean’s surface like a navy of giant, floating insects, the offshore oil platforms here are viewed as unhealthy, polluting eyesores by some and curiosities by others.

To scientists, however, the platforms--which sit on stilts extending as far as 700 feet to the ocean floor--provide nothing short of a biological miracle. “They are similar to an island with a fairly steep shelf,” said Bob Meek, whose doctorate in marine biology comes from UC Santa Barbara. “They are like vertical artificial reefs with huge (sunlit) zones. You just don’t see this density of life” in many other places.

Of particular interest to Meek are the hordes of black mussels--succulent water-siphoning shellfish--that cling to the platforms’ stilts by the tens of thousands. He has spent the last 14 years creating a small industry around them. The result: a generation of Orange County restaurant patrons unaware that the shellfish on their plates often come from the platforms off their coastline.

“It looks like it’s almost still alive,” Mike Turley, a visitor from Pittsburgh, said recently, staring warily at a pot of the stuff at Walt’s Wharf, a popular seafood restaurant in Seal Beach. “They look a little risky.”

But looks can be deceiving, according to Pat Wells, a sanitary engineering associate with the state Department of Health Services, whose job includes testing the oil-platform mussels regularly for various toxins. In fact, he says, these mussels are among the cleanest in the state. “If I had to eat something raw,” Wells said, “I’d eat it off those platforms. This is probably the highest quality of shellfish meat sold in California and maybe the entire country; they have a near-perfect monitoring record. Nothing else comes close.”

Meek, 48, got his start in 1980 after the company he had founded--Ecomar Marine Consulting of Santa Barbara--conducted a study for Shell Oil Co. examining the marine growth on the company’s oil platforms from Point Conception to Huntington Beach. What they found, Meek said, was a rich underwater community, dominated by mussels, with a predictable rate of growth and replenishment--in short, perfect conditions for commercial harvesting.

His proposal to provide the regular scraping required by oil platforms at a low price in exchange for permission to sell the mussels was met with initial skepticism by health officials. Over time, he was able to establish the safety of the meat. Their healthful quality, officials now believe, is due to the platforms’ relatively long distance from the polluted waters near shore--several miles.

Today, Ecomar harvests up to 500,000 pounds of mussels a year from 12 platforms in Southern California owned by five oil companies.

About half of those mussels, according to Meek, come from four Shell Oil Co. platforms off Huntington Beach where Ecomar began harvesting just last year.

“We have to clean the (platform) anyway,” said Corbin Weed, maintenance supervisor of Shell’s Platform Ellen, which pumps about 10,000 barrels of oil a day from its position seven miles off Huntington Beach. Without regular scraping, he said, the buildup of mussels and other organisms on the platform’s legs would cause enough friction to threaten its stability in high ocean currents. Until recently, Weed said, the company hired divers to regularly pull the mussels loose and drop them to the ocean floor. “Doing it this way,” he said, “is about 33% cheaper.”

Shell spokesman Bill Gibson said: “It was a business decision, but one that felt good too. There’s no reason you can’t have good business and good environment too.” That good environment is much in evidence on the three days each week that Meek and his divers catch the Shell Oil Co. boat from Long Beach Harbor to Platform Ellen. Working in two-man teams, they descend to a depth of about 50 feet where one scrapes mussels off the columns while the other holds a large underwater vacuum hose that sucks them to the surface.

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The underwater scene is eerily beautiful, punctuated by huge vertical legs with crossbeams every 50 feet covered by thick blankets of pink strawberry anemones mixed with rock scallops and brittle stars. A variety of fish hang nearby, awaiting the succulent morsels regularly provided by the debris of the divers’ work. And everywhere a sense of lushness pervades, an image of nature thriving wildly amid mechanical human contrivance.

Entire fleets of sport fishing boats stop here regularly, preying on the scads of bass and cabezon in the area. And as a colony of seals suns itself on the platform’s lower level, the wetsuit-clad mussel harvesters carefully sort their catch before tossing it into huge bins for the long trip home.

Traveling by boat and truck, the mussels--about 2,000 pounds a day from this platform alone--are taken to a processing plant in Santa Barbara and, within 24 hours, delivered to restaurants up and down the coast, half of which are in the Los Angeles-Orange County area.

One of them is Walt’s Wharf, where patrons can enjoy a pot full of the little critters for $12.95. “We were using New Zealand greenlip mussels,” manager John Ryan said, “but these are fresher, plumper and juicier.”

Since first being offered two months ago, he said, the oil-platform mussels have become a major hit, with about 75% of the restaurant’s mussel-eating customers switching to the local brand. “They kind of melt in your mouth,” Ryan said. “People like them a lot.”

That certainly seemed to be the case one recent evening at the restaurant as several patrons ordered the mussels as appetizers. “They’re pretty good,” said Jennifer Laythe, 21, of Costa Mesa. “We were in a shellfish mood.”

Across the dining room at the Eppich family gathering, the consensus seemed much the same. “I’m really picky about my seafood,” admitted Kristin Eppich, 25, a kindergarten teacher from Huntington Beach, “but I had more than one.”

Not everyone, however, was completely enamored of the little black shellfish that, less than a day before, had been clinging for their lives to the beams of an offshore oil platform. Mary Eppich, Kristin’s mother, managed to get through her entire meal without tasting a single mussel.

The reason was simple, she later explained. “They give me the willies.”

Mussel Bound At four oil rigs off Orange County’s shoreline, mussels are harvested, transported and sold to local restaurants. The platforms provide a vertical artificial habitat replete with a variety of fish and other sea life. Beneath The Surface Oil rigs and artificial reefs attract fish because they are fixed objects. Fish remain near the rigs because the structures often provide both food and shelter. Below, some of the organisms and the zones they inhabit.: * Sunlight draws plankton to the ocean surface. * Mussels eat plankton as they float past. Zone I: (Tideline) Acorn and gooseneck barnacles Zone II:(35 feet and above) Barnacles, mussels, starfish, sponges, white and strawberry anemone, opaleye, kelp bass, bat ray Zone III: (Below 35 feet) Mussels, rock scallops, rock oysters, giant starfish, strawberry anemone, white anemone, rockfish, cabezon, lingcod, bat ray, sand shark, kelp beds

The Harvest 1. Diver scrapes mussels from rig legs. 2. Second diver vacuums mussels into hose. 3. Rotating sifter separates mussels from other material. 4. Mussels collected in tubs. 5. Workers load into transportation bins. The meaty flesh of mussels makes them food for a variety of sea life as well as humans. The 4-to-10-inch animals are recognizable by iridescent blue-black shells. Source: Ecomar, Inc., Department of Fish and Game; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times