Sea Change: Cape Cod Summer 2018 Update

Hello Family and Friends! As usual it has been way too long since I have updated you about my life, but this time it is not for positive reasons like having way too much fun to write a blog post. As some of you know, but many of you don't, my life has changed quite a bit since I last wrote, and I haven't really felt like talking about it to anyone other than my immediate family. But now I feel the time is overdue to let you all know what's going on.

I moved to Cape Cod for a job doing shellfishing with the Town of Barnstable, and that was all going great for the first couple of months that I was here. Around that time, though, the back injury I had been dealing with when I was in Florida reared its ugly head again, and the eventual culmination was that I was let go from my job because I wasn't physically able to do it anymore. That was a huge blow at first because I had moved here specifically for that job, and I started to doubt whether I should even be here at all without it. I went through a few weeks of feeling very low and unhappy as I scrambled to find work so I could afford to keep living here. However, my fortunes were good, and I was able to get a full-time position with the company I had been doing catering for on the weekends, called the Casual Gourmet. So now I work at the cafe they run at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, and although it's not what I ideally would like to be doing, the work is way less physically demanding and much better for my healing process.


I have been working there for a little over two months now, and I've settled in nicely. Even though it's an entry-level food service job, it's surprisingly enjoyable, and I look forward to going to work most days. I have been going to physical therapy and a chiropractor for my back, and it has been steadily improving. I'm at the point now where I hardly notice pain at all, which is such a huge relief from the days many weeks ago when I was in constant pain, which was having a negative impact on my mental health. I am also on a healing journey with the rest of my health issues as well, and have made some changes in order to wean off the extremely restrictive diet I was on and to add more healing foods to try to use food as medicine. Overall I'm in a good place now and much happier than I was several months ago, although I still have a ways to go before I feel like my health is back to 100%.

Despite the fact that I'm no longer doing shellfishing, I have some pictures I took during my last few weeks at that job, so I figured I would share them with you now and give you a little taste of what I was doing. When they let me go, they said I would be eligible to be rehired next season, which starts in April, so as long as my back cooperates, that is my tentative plan.

Our boat out on the water

My coworker Kendall enjoying the boat ride

One of the sites where we grew oysters (you can see the racks we put the trays of shellfish into just below the surface in the foreground)

Our crew digging for quahogs

Baby quahogs (clams) are placed under nets on the sand in tidal areas, and a few years later once they are fully grown, we come back and move them from the growing areas to the harvest areas where recreational shellfish license holders can dig them up again.

 

Me digging quahogs. Look at those muscles! I hope I don't lose that with my indoor work. :P

Shellfisherman Lindsay

 

Showing off my catch

My coworker Kendall and our supervisor Liz working at the Flupsy (floating upweller system). It's basically a floating dock with containers underneath called silos that hold very small baby shellfish. We grow them there until they are big enough to be put out into trays (for oysters) or under nets (for quahogs). 

Liz pouring a bag of super tiny baby oysters into a silo. There are 250,000 babies there!

A picture of the motor on the Flupsy (hard to see because it's underwater), which pulls water into the silos to bring food in for the shellfish, plus a silo to the left.

Liz replacing the silo into its spot in the Flupsy.

So there you have it, a glimpse into what my life was like before the major changes. Hopefully that is what I will be going back to next spring, but in the meantime I have to focus on healing. My life is not terribly interesting anymore without the shellfishing, since working at a cafe is not very rugged or glamorous, so I imagine I will not be updating my blog very often. However, I do have some vacations planned in the upcoming months, so I'm sure those will get some attention on here. So stay tuned for that, and thank you as always for reading and keeping up with my adventures!