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It looks like a smugglers' coast and once it was, all small creeks and communities where much could go unnoticed and fishing was the legitimate mask of business. These days on Norfolk's northern rim, tourism has replaced smuggling but the fishing - now mainly shellfishing - remains. And if the sector now has bigger boats with power winches and heated wheelhouses, there is still an element which goes back to basics. For among the shrimpers, cocklers and crabbers, there are the small-time musselers and theirs is really physical work.

Their muddy labours are still barely mechanised; no machines, apart from small, shallow draft 'oyster' boats, can help in those cloying conditions, and yet musselers, big and small, must still cater for the vaguaries of the 'spatfall', for if one year's mussel seed does not find and flourish upon suitable ground, then two years on, there will be few saleable mussels to show for it.

Left to nature, musseling is a lottery. The mussel spills its seed with the first warm weather, the dispersing seminal fluid turning the seawater milky as those microscopic individuals drift off with the current. As they grow, they sink in search of a foothold, but by then, in a turbulent springtime North Sea, they could be anywhere, perhaps consumed by predators or on a sandy bottom with no anchorage or simply out of reach of those who would make their living from them. And even when they have formed and their young shells begun to harden, they might be scattered again by the wrong combination of wind and tide.

So fishermen try to take control. They collect immature mussels the size of a thumb nail, scooping them from the scalpes - pronounced 'scorpes', from a Dutch word meaning shell - where they have established and which, off Norfolk's shores, are mainly in the Wash, and they put them on 'lays', areas of seabed on which they have registered tenure. The big boats dredge young mussels by the tonne, piling them on their decks or in purpose built tanks to be carried off and jettisoned on lays which those boats can reach - usually intertidal mudbanks also in the Wash. Their aim is protection from predators, particularly starfish which consume vast amounts. Starfish will not venture much onto ground exposed even by the lower ebbs, and while birds will then take many, the big boats rely on economies of scale, dredging them up again when they have grown.

Smaller operators, like John Dowsing of Stiffkey and Johnny Webster of Cley, both from fishing families, work with smaller amounts, greater efficiency and far less capital input. 'It's more hand work than boat work' says John. 'It's mostly manual labour.'

Their lays are in creeks where starfish rarely go and mussels, constantly submerged, are protected from birds and can feed and grow continuously.

They collect their stock - if they can find it - from shallows or exposed mudbanks, raking up young mussels at the ebb and conveying them by boat to the lay with a prayer that they stay there. And they must not take them too young and soft or the shore crabs will do as the starfish.

But lately they haven't found it. 'There has been no spatfall in Blakeney Harbour in recent years' says Johnny. 'So we have to buy seed from the Wash and that eats into our profits.'

Hand laying young mussels is a summer job. There is no regulatory reason why mussels on private lays cannot be harvested all year and in some places they are. But after spawning, the mollusc is smaller in its shell and in Norfolk, they leave the stock from March until September.
And anyway, the lays need maintenance. There is mud to be dug away. A bed of feeding mussels secretes perhaps 25mm of filtered mud each month. If they have been laid too thickly and risk suffocation, excessive mud build-up is the sign, though they must not be re-arranged during a spring tide which, with a north wind to intensify the scour, would scatter all before it.

A surviving crop will be mature at two years and big at three. At two years, a mussel shell is relatively clean; at three, the meat in each will be almost a mouthful but the shell will probably have barnacles which don't look good in a restaurant's sauce. So a three-year crop needs more cleaning.

Harvest involves forking them from the shallows or standing beside the boat, chest-deep in water at low tide, using a long rake with a small collecting net attached to lift them into the boat. The rake is known variously as a wim or a dydle or even a lab rake at locations just a few miles apart along the coast, but a few hours raking are enough for the strongest back, wherever it is. Then the mussels must be riddled and sorted and although some still use the hand riddle - probably the most physical job of the lot - here, at least, mechanisation has arrived, even if early models damaged shells and hardly improved productivity.

And finally, if the location is not of 'Grade A' water purity - and these days, few are, although things are improving again - there is the 42-hour purification in tanks of circulating UV-treated seawater. That plant is expensive but essential and those who don't have it rely on those who do. Only then can they supply their customers and get paid.

Stock depletion has sometimes closed the Wash mussel fishery, the dredgers re-gearing and going after shrimp, although the northern creeks have usually kept going. Yet with stocks now improved, each year nevertheless depends on a preceding spatfall and that part of the equation so far has eluded close control.

But nothing much seems likely to change. In a decade or two, mussels will probably still be gathered by a combination of industrial dredging and laborious raking and for big and small operators, it will remain an unpredictable business. But it will probably remain.

Further reading: 'Fishermen - A community living from the sea.'
Sally Festinog.