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Many things have changed about oyster growing in the past century. The most fundamental have not: You put out baby oysters and let Puget Sound nurture them to slurping size. Once they’re out of the hatchery, all work on oysters is done in shallow bays at low tides. In winter months, those tides are dead-center in the middle of the night. Thus, most work in the oyster beds — moving, crating up, spreading, redistributing and other tinkering — is a graveyard-shift proposition.

You never really get used to that, and turnover for beginner jobs is high. But some workers get hooked on the fresh air and simple pleasures. And they stick with it. Kurt Goodale, 27, a graduate of Western Washington University and an aquaculture program at Bellingham Technical College, has been at it for a few years. He’s one of the employees being groomed for the longer haul, a designation that comes with a few perks in addition to ultra-fresh oysters.

One of them is skippering the Janet P. The boat, a shiny new aluminum behemoth, weighs about 70,000 pounds but draws only about 18 inches of water. It’s the perfect craft for heavy-duty oyster farming in Samish Bay, where most floating work on company oyster beds is conducted in water less than 6 feet deep.