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Meg Wolf reached through the green leaves toward a plump blueberry at Bybee Blueberry Farm, looking for the perfect berry to fill the cobblers at her wedding.

“I look for big, firm blueberries,” Wolf said. “You don’t want it to be too mushy.”

She and her fiancé Seamus Kelly had recruited 20 of their wedding guests to come to the North Bend blueberry farm to pick blueberries for cobblers that would feed 125 people.

Like many Bybee pickers, the Seattle couple had made a tradition of blueberry season.

“We come out here every year,” Kelly said. “Picking blueberries is one of our favorite things. We’ll keep picking until our fingers turn blue.”

Bybee Blueberry Farms attracts thousands of sweet- and tart-toothed people every summer. The family that owns the farm has roots as deep as their blueberry bushes. Steve Bybee’s father bought the property in 1946, two years before Steve’s birth. Steve and his sister purchased it from their parents in 1980, and Steve bought his sister’s portion from her this year.

“Dad was going to sell it and move away. When we bought it, he got to live here and not do any of the work,” Steve said, laughing.

Nowadays, he manages the farm with his wife, Jayne. After graduating from Mount Si High School, Steve served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He met Jayne when he returned to the Valley, cruising from one end of North Bend to the other in his Volkswagen Beetle.

“We’d graduated and he had already been in the service and back,” said Jayne, who was 17 when she met her 20-year-old beau. 

Plants almost care for themselves

Now, the Bybees tend to their farm, and the Valley has a number of elements that help the blueberries flourish. The bushes thrive in the acidic soil, the high water table means they don’t need a sprinkler system and mulch from the grass and plants fertilize them.

“We haven’t fertilized in 20 years,” Steve said. “If you just let these plants exist, they take care of themselves.”

They do take one precaution: spraying the twigs and ground to prevent fungus. The mummy berry fungus makes the berries look like white mummies, ghosts of their blue selves. One year, the Bybees lost three-fourths of their crop because they didn’t spray, a mistake they don’t plan to make again.

Some plants are 60 years old and still generate blueberries. Steve called pruning the secret to blueberry longevity, cutting old branches and encouraging new growth.

In the winter, the bushes are bare, making them easier to prune. By early spring, the bushes blossom and then ripen into blueberries by summer, if the weather permits. The Bybees have opened their farm as early as July 7 and as late as Aug. 1, depending on the weather. One year, they stayed open until Oct. 14.

On a cloudy day in August, Kristen Gehrett, of Sammamish, asked Steve where she could find the best berries.

“Go to the middle of the row,” Steve said.

Pickers tend to start at the entry point and work their way to the end, but they should venture further into the rows, where six varieties of blueberries dangle in the breeze.

“Dig in,” Steve said.

“You really have to spread the branches apart or just get low,” Jayne said.

The Bybees said blueberry pickers serve another purpose, in addition to buying their crop, “the more where people go, the more they scare the birds,” Steve said, asking people to shield his bushes from starlings, crows and robins.

Less bird interference means more berries for pickers. The little blue fruit is full of vitamin C and E, and antioxidants, which destroy free radicals.

While the Bybees built a fence to keep out bears and elk, they do welcome bees. Honeybees are poor pollinators, but mason and bumblebees get the job done, buzzing toward flowers, spreading pollen in their wake.

Katherine Staberow, of Monroe, visited the farm with her infant son, Kelton. She planned to puree her blueberries into baby food. Her mother, Debbie Cernick, of Cle Elum, had other plans.

“I like a real strong flavor,” Cernick said. “I like to freeze them and eat them like marbles.”

New growth

The Bybees have more than blueberries on their plate. In 2008, they built a wedding venue, so lovebirds could get married at the base of Mount Si, amid sweet smelling fruit. In 2010, 15 couples got married there. Wedding season ends in mid-September, before the weather turns.

“To make a living farming, you have to have something else besides crop,” Steve said.

The family also plans to start a vineyard, planting grapes in their acidic soil. If all goes well, they could produce pinot noir.

Some changes are less welcome. Jayne’s father, Bob Vezzoni, known for playing loud Italian music for the blueberry pickers, died in May. Almost every day, people ask Jayne about his whereabouts.

“It’s been tough,” she said. “I think next summer will maybe be better.”

The Bybees have two daughters — Michelle, a nurse, and Kelli, who plans to take over the farm when her parents retire. Their daughters help them pick custom orders, which they fill at the beginning of the season when the blueberries are more plentiful.

Meanwhile, as the wedding party concluded its picking for its cobblers, Aidan Kelly, father-of-the-groom, gazed beyond the blueberries at Mount Si.

“It’s just amazing with the background,” he said. “We don’t have anything like this in Iowa.”

Laura Geggel: 392-6434, ext. 241, or lgeggel@isspress.com.

Touching the edge

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Brian Perkins kicks up spray while taking a test run during Seafair. (Photo by Dan Catchpole)

In hydroplane racing, the start is everything.

Drivers have five minutes to get from the docks to the start line. They jockey for position, trying to time it so they cross the start line at full power when the green flag goes up.

Cross too soon and get penalized. Cross too late, and you’re already out of the race.

“Most of the actual competition happens before the start. The rest — you’re just going for a ride,” Kayleigh Perkins-Mallory said.

It was a bad start that did in the North Bend driver in the final heat for the unlimited light hydroplanes Aug. 8 at Seafair on Lake Washington. Driving the UL-72 Foster Care-Triad Racing Technologies, she crossed the start line in fifth place.

Even so, Perkins-Mallory, who won last year’s race, roared back to finish in second place, less than a boat length behind the leader, Paul Becker.

She took the loss in stride. Becker dedicated his win to his brother, who died in June.

“For anything to lose to, it was an OK loss by me,” Perkins-Mallory said.

The 22-year-old driver is currently in third place in the national standings.

Breaking barriers

Despite her young age, Perkins-Mallory has already made a big impact in unlimited lights. She has been the national champion every year since she began in 2007, when she won the Rookie of the Year award.

The day before the final heat, Perkins-Mallory became the first woman since 1982 to drive an unlimited hydroplane, when she took two-time defending national champion U-1 Oh Boy! Oberto out for test laps.

As defending national champion for unlimited light hydroplanes, Kayleigh Perkins-Mallory has plenty to smile about. She rewrote history at Seafair when she took practice laps in the U-1 Oh Boy! Oberto behind her. She is the first woman since 1982 to drive an unlimited. By Dan Catchpole

It was a big step up from unlimited lights, which weigh half as much as the turbine-powered unlimited hydros. Perkins-Mallory had been lifting weights for months to build her upper body strength that’s critical for pulling the big boats out of turns.

“You could feel the weight on the turns,” Perkins-Mallory said.

She hit 175 mph, with an average of 147 mph.

Despite a sore neck, she said she’s looking forward to getting out again.

Some people think skittering across the water’s surface at speeds approaching 200 mph is dangerous.

It doesn’t have to be, Perkins-Mallory said.

“I’ve seen a lot of friends get hurt driving these,” she said.

But by driving smart, a racer can avoid most crashes.

Perkins-Mallory has never had a bad crash herself, but, she said, she has learned from other drivers’ mistakes while watching on the dock.

Her older brother, Brian Perkins, got her into racing. Before her first race in a 2.5-liter stock hydroplane when she was 16, Perkins-Mallory had been into ballet.

But she and her brother grew up around hydroplane racing. Her family has supported Seafair for decades. As children, she and her brother hung around the boat pits, “sitting in every boat that the crew would let us,” she said.

Today, Perkins-Mallory is a role model for young fans, especially girls.

Before one practice session, two young girls in braces asked if she would pose with them for a picture.

“Of course!” she said.

On the edge

Brian Perkins has also had a strong career so far. He is making a name for himself as the driver for Go Fast Turn Left Racing Inc., which owns U-21 Miss Albert Lee.

Perkins finished third in the final heat for the Albert Lee Cup at Seafair. He is in fourth place in the national standings.

Like his sister, Perkins loves boat racing, and he is in his element in the boat pit.

“I love the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people. There isn’t a thing about it I don’t love,” Perkins said.

So, what is it like to race an unlimited hydroplane?

“It’s absolutely amazing,” Perkins said, as his eyes sparked with adrenaline. “You’re literally flying over the water.”

Perkins-Mallory gives a slightly different take on it. It’s like “being in a small plane going down a road with a lot of potholes,” she said.

To win, a driver has to race on the edge, Perkins said. He has to know exactly how far he can push his boat.

Perkins said he is still learning what the edge feels like.

With a new boat, he and his crew are also still fine-tuning and squeezing every bit of speed out of it they can find.

After practice laps Aug. 6, the crew dismantled the U-21’s engine to tweak its gear combination in an effort to find a few more miles per hour.

Co-owner Brian O’Farrell said they plan to lighten the boat’s hull after this season to further increase its speed.

Fast doesn’t come cheap

But being fast in hydro racing isn’t cheap.

The parts are expensive — a propeller can cost upward of $15,000 — and money has become scarcer in the sport.

Several big sponsors — including Budweiser — have pulled out in recent years, leaving teams scrambling for new sponsors.

Very few teams have full-time members. For Perkins and Perkins-Mallory, driving is a part-time gig. They both work day jobs at Seattle-based Perkins Glass, which their family has owned for more than 100 years. Both dream of working full time as drivers one day, though.

O’Farrell is hopeful that hydroplane races will get national television coverage again in the next few years.

“Once we do that, there will be money back in it. Right now, there isn’t money,” he said.

He and his father Gregg co-own Go Fast Turn Left Racing Inc., a money loser for them. They support the team with their company, Lakeridge Paving Co.

The sport’s growing international audience could bring money back into it, too. The next — and last — scheduled race this year is in Qatar, Nov. 18-20.

There is talk of races being scheduled in Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and even China, he said.

The growing overseas popularity of hydros was evident the next pit over, where the U-96 Spirit of Qatar was parked. The boat is driven by veteran star Dave Villwock, who finished a close second at Seafair.

It’s a death-defying sport with little financial gain.

But Perkins-Mallory wouldn’t do anything else.

“I make a lot better boat driver than a dancer,” she said.

Dan Catchpole: 392-6434, ext. 246, or editor@snovalleystar.com. Comment at www.snovalleystar.com.