I didn't have a clue when I left Colby what I was going to do," said Karen Davis, who shares the aquaculture work of Baywater, Inc., with her husband, Joth. Their farm in Hood Canal off the Olympic Peninsula is 40 minutes from their house on Bainbridge Island, a Seattle suburb with a population of 20,000--and a far cry from her hometown of Santa Fe, N.M. A partnership that began as a marriage currently manages a business that grows about 250,000 oysters a year. Joth Davis worked summers on Cape Cod oyster farms while pursuing an M.A. at Yale, and he knew he wanted to be his own boss and to be near the water. He also learned the biology of shellfish culture and did genetic research on how to grow clams and oysters to market size faster. By chromosome manipulation, Joth makes the animals unable to reproduce, and the result is more and better tasting meat. The business is hard work. Twice a week at low tide he walks or goes by boat to pull up the three-and-a-half-foot by two-foot bags of clams. On a little cart he takes them back to a working table and sorts, counts, tags, invoices and puts them in a cooler for the 35-minute boat ride to Seattle, where everything is sold. With two low tides every day, he's working half the year at night with a headlamp. Karen calls it "great fun," although she admits she's "not big on the middle of the night. I prefer to do that kind of work in the summer." In the spring and summer she "seeds out" the small oysters or clams into shell bags and places them onto growing racks. Karen says that when banks see people looking to finance oyster farms, which are easily swept away in high seas or tainted by red tide in the 18 months it takes an oyster to reach marketable size, "They look at you and say, `Yeah, right.'" Starting small and without partners, they put their own money into the business, got it incorporated in 1987 and had their first marketable crop in the spring of 1989. Initially they sold most of their product in Japan. As their three kids grow up--"smelling like oysters," said Karen--she is staying closer to home and also working as a mediator in divorce and custody cases. Even as she does all of Baywater's bookkeeping and taxes, she claims that her M.B.A. from the University of Connecticut isn't being used very much. But today the business is about to add a third crop, a huge clam called a goeduck (pronounced "gooeyduck") that is used in sushi in Japan and in Asian restaurants in this country. They would like to expand the company, growing more animals and, possibly, dealing overseas again, Joth says, but their main focus continues to be "just piecing careers together."