Oyster farm’s closure has veteran worker looking for new job

Paco Aceves, a veteran oyster farm worker, is about to become unemployed.

“It isn’t a good feeling,” said Aceves, 46, a production manager at Drakes Bay Oyster Co. in Point Reyes National Seashore.

Aceves and about a dozen other workers will be jobless Jan. 1, the day after the company shuts down - by government mandate - and leaves Drakes Estero.

The oyster farm’s fate was sealed in a settlement reached with the National Park Service in October, ending two years of litigation over the government’s decision not to renew the permit for a commercial shellfish operation in a federally protected waterway.

More than half of the farm’s employees have left, many no longer needed as it scaled back operations, closing an oyster cannery and retail sales shack in July.

Aceves is among the workers who elected to stay put. He’s worked at oyster farms for 16 years, mostly in Tomales Bay, and the past four years at the edge of Drakes Estero, a windswept estuary of cold, clear water that abounds with harbor seals, leopard sharks, fish, crabs and beds of green eelgrass.

“Hardly anybody has a 1,000-acre office,” he said last week, somewhat understating the estero’s 2,500-acre size.

Wearing a stained Drakes Bay Oyster Co. sweatshirt, jeans and green wading boots, Aceves took a break from processing a load of oysters bound for North Bay restaurants and markets. The settlement gives the company, owned by the Lunny family, until midnight Dec. 31 to haul all the oysters, regardless of size, out of the water.

“I told him (co-owner Kevin Lunny) I would be around till the end,” Aceves said. “Pretty much we’re in the same boat.”

Aceves said he expects to find another job, but worries about his finances, especially since the oldest of his three children just graduated from high school and wants to go to college.

“It’s all parents’ dream to make a better life for their kids,” Aceves said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.