For 51 weeks of the year, Tyne Valley is a quiet hamlet in western Prince Edward Island with a population of little over 200 people.
But it’s a different story for that one other week, July 29 to Aug 2.
That week is the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival, established in 1964 — it is full of music, parties, community fun and thousands upon thousands of oysters.
These folks are serious about their shellfish, so much so that every year they crown a Canadian Oyster Shucking Champion.
The competition is fierce and seeing the participants’ work is something to behold, especially for anyone who has attempted to open one of the hard-shelled bivalves.
Case in point, 2015 champion, Eamon Clark, of Toronto, set a new Canadian record during the competition, cleanly opening 18 oysters in one minute and 37 seconds while a crowd of more than 1,000 watched and cheered.
This was Clark’s seventh year as the reigning Canadian champ.
He’s humble about it.
“It’s an honour to win… we all take it very seriously and we’re all very proud of the work that we do,” he said recently, speaking with The Navigator as he traveled home from the festival.
Clark comes by his craft honestly, having learned by watching his father work.
Rodney Clark, originally from Summerside, moved to Toronto and opened one of the city’s first oyster bars in the 1980s.
Originally, the elder Clark would get sent boxes of Malpeque oysters from his family back home on the Island, with instructions to deliver them to customers around Toronto. He’d usually have to stick around to teach them how to open the shellfish and he eventually got so busy he quit his job and went into oysters full-time, eventually opening Rodney’s Oyster House on Adelaide Street.
Photos submitted by the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival
Today, Rodney’s in Toronto serves 1.75 million oysters a year, while its Calgary location consumes about 500,000 a year.
The younger Clark got his start working in the family business, opening oysters in the kitchen, bar and eventually its catering operation.
“I think catering really got me into competition, because there’s nothing like showing up an hour late to a party and having a thousand oysters in a cooler and having a couple of hundred people staring at you,” recalled Clark.
But it was watching his dad compete at the Tyne Valley festival that turned Clark on to wanting to be a champ.
As a kid, every summer Clark and his family and a few other Islanders in their circle, would travel to P.E.I. and visit the Oyster Festival, his father even became a three-time Canadian oyster shucking champion.
They had a healthy father/son rivalry going, he recalled.
“I wanted to compete against my father. He’s quite the character and I thought to beat him would be fun.”
Clark’s first competition was in 2005, but he didn’t record his first win until 2007 (his dad came second).
Since that first win, Clark has eked out a legacy for himself. His story has been told often and anytime he competes in the shucking championship (he has missed a few years) he’s the guy everyone is gunning for.
Because of that attention, he often gets asked what his secret is.
Opening an oyster can be downright dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing — more than one up and coming shucker has shed some blood because of a misplaced knife, so trying to open 18 in a little more than a minute would seem inadvisable.
But Clark denies that there’s some otherworldly trick to what he does. It’s just practice, he said and lots of it.
“There’s no real trick… I don’t want to sound cheesy, I just sit there and open them at this point,” he said.
At this stage in his shucking career, Clark feels he doesn’t have much left to prove. He keeps participating in the shucking championships because it’s fun and for no other reason.
“When it starts to become, you know, not fun I’ll probably stop. But I’ll always go to the festival. It’s just such a unique group of people and it’s a really great time. But I see myself working with oysters for a very long time,” he said.
But even if he does eventually stop competing for the shucking title, Clark intends to keep making his annual pilgrimage to his father’s homeland on Prince Edward Island and to the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival.
It’s too good a time to pass up, he said.
“I don’t think I’ll ever miss the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival, just because it’s just such a unique little piece of Canada.”
