On a recent Sunday, Rawle Jefferds is sitting in a spacious office, reminiscing about the early days of Penn Cove Shellfish.

The room is intimately familiar to him as is the filtered view of Penn Cove through large windows.

Years ago, the place Jefferds is sitting was his parents’ living room. Now, it serves as a business office with desks, computers and chairs.

Down the hall is a private office that holds a big desk and large fish tank featuring three imposing Oscars.

This is the office of Ian Jefferds, Rawle’s business partner and older brother.

“Ian’s office is my old bedroom,” Rawle said, cracking into a smile.

It’s hard for Rawle Jefferds to fathom just how far the family’s shellfish operation has come over the years.

Started by Peter Jefferds in 1975, the mussel farm was sold to his eldest and youngest sons in 1986 and has grown into a thriving, diverse shellfish operation that has put Penn Cove on the map in places thousands of miles from Whidbey Island.

Approximately 2 million pounds of mussels are grown and sold nationally each year by the company, which now also offers a wide assortment of oysters and clams raised elsewhere in Puget Sound.

“It started out in the back of my mom’s station wagon,” Rawle said. “It’s come a long ways.”

And for two brothers from Coupeville High School’s classes of 1976 and ‘81, the journey and growth can seem like a blur.

Depending on the day.

“Some days when I look how far we’ve gone, it seems like a long time,” Ian said.

Both were still in school when their father combed the waters of North Puget Sound seeking an ideal spot to launch an unorthodox business idea he developed overseas during his military service in the Army.

Intrigued by consumers’ healthy appetite for mussels in parts of Europe and Asia, he hatched a plan to create a market in North America and came across Coupeville as a site while gassing up his boat at the wharf one evening and noticing pilings covered with mussels on the return home to Seattle from the San Juan islands.

The San Juans were the original target, but more research after the chance encounter led to Penn Cove as being an ideal location.

Still, there was still one major underlying problem.

“In this country, people didn’t eat mussels,” Rawle said, noting they were referred to as perch bait. “People walked over them to get to clams and oysters.

“There was no commercial market for them.”

But in time, that all changed.

After their first harvest, the Jefferds were persistent and thick-skinned in their trips to some of Seattle’s finest restaurants and caught a break when some top French chefs raved about the Penn Cove mussels that reminded them of the ones back home.

Gradually, public perception changed and Peter Jefferds’ puzzling plan suddenly had real promise.

“My hat’s really off to him for taking such a huge risk and creating this venture,” Rawle said. “He had faith that he could create a market. It didn’t happen over night, but it did.”

Through the years, the company has cracked out of its Coupeville shell and expanded.

In 1996, Penn Cove Mussels formed a joint venture with Coast Seafoods Company, the country’s largest oyster farm, to become Penn Cove Shellfish.

Now, Penn Cove Shellfish consists of three sites with mussel farms in Coupeville and Quilcene and a boat and equipment fabrication shop in Burlington. The company employs 84 people.

Along with mussels, the company also wet stores and distributes Manila clams and a wide variety of oysters that come from regional allied growers.

The growth included the construction of a large packaging and maintenance shop in Coupeville in recent years just a short distance away from the business office that was once the Jefferds family home.

While some things have changed, others haven’t.

“We harvest to order every day,” said Tim Jones, longtime operations manager. “Our policy is it’s good when it’s really fresh. That’s what we try to do. It’s not a fishery. We don’t harvest them and try to sell them. We sell them and go to harvest them.”

In Penn Cove, harvest occurs on acres of mussel rafts, where mollusks attach themselves to dangling ropes and grow to harvest size of nearly 3 inches in a single year.

The Jefferds have refined the process, using a patented disc and dissolvable sacks to allow the mussels to separate and grow to harvestable size.

A refrigerated truck leaves Coupeville bound for SeaTac Airport five days a week before sunrise to destinations all over the country with the goal of getting the shellfish to a dinner plate on the East Coast that same evening.

Rawle Jefferds handles a separate Seattle route himself, catching the 4:40 a.m. ferry from Clinton to Mukilteo four days a week. He delivers to Pike’s Place Market and restaurants.

Karen Jefferds, Ian’s wife, serves as the company’s assistant general manager.

“When they were putting those mussel rafts in, originally there was quite a bit of controversy,” said retired Coupeville farmer Roger Sherman. “People living there thought it would break up the scenic view.

“It employs all kinds of people. It brings money back into the economy. People are used to it now. And the tourism stuff they do. They’re community-friendly.

“We farm dirt. They farm water. I think that’s a pretty good deal.”