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To the Bold Man Who
First Ate a Raw Oyster
This is a technical article related to risk assessment, which is incredibly central to maritime endeavors. We operate in an environment with many unknowns and high unpredictability, and anything we do requires a risk assessment. In fact, naval architects, marine engineers, ship’s engineers and, most of all, ship masters do nothing but cast whatever they do in terms of risk. Risk assessment can be mathematically evaluated, but most of us analyze risk based on experience. Let’s face it, a first boat trip for a 16-year-old is simply a fun ride, but once they have experienced a few bad trips and trip ups, a boat trip becomes an entirely different animal. In maritime, and also daily life, risk too often is perception, but our perceptions are often wrong. Maybe someday I will write about the Inspection Paradox and why it can be true when an airline says that only a small percentage of their flights are full, and why most frequent flyers can truthfully indicate that most of their flights are full. But here I will talk about perceptions and oysters. Jona16 MN
than Swift is credited with saying, “It was a bold man who first ate a raw oyster.” I was not first, and, by having others eat them first, I learned to like eating raw oysters, even though raw oyster consumption, like beef tartare, and even raw salad consumption, is not completely without risk (I tell my wife I manage that risk by cutting down on salads). Besides being tasty, oysters are also an extremely important component of our littoral ecosystems. Without oysters, complete littoral ecosystem restoration in not achievable. This is why there are so many places where people try to restore oyster populations and especially oyster reefs. And this occurred in the Navesink River in New Jersey in the first few years of this century. But then in 2008, just when the oysters started to settle in, the state came in and told the local baykeeper to dig them up and destroy them because they were being grown in waters that were not approved for oyster cultivation. The water was safe for swimming and even for clamming (but requiring post catch purification), but did not meet raw oyster consumption September 2020
