March 31, 2020 — Joaquin Padilla steered his white oyster boat, MISS KOSOVARE, in deliberate, counter-clockwise circles on an unusually placid Galveston Bay. The boat’s oyster dredge — a chain mesh net with a heavy steel frame – dragged on the port side of the boat along the floor of the bay, raking up dozens of oysters of various sizes.
Padilla lifted the dredge out of the water using a crank, and the net dumped a pile of oysters on a small table. His deckhands, Jaime Martinez and Miguel Vasquez, quickly went to work cleaning and sorting oysters, hammering with mechanical precision and chucking rocks and dead or undersized oysters back into the water.
As a kid growing up in San Leon and working as a deckhand for his fisherman-uncle, Padilla remembered seeing up to 150 oyster boats in Galveston Bay, competing for an abundant harvest.