A Virginia Oyster Lovers Paradise

Lynhaven River Oysters Have Not Arrived

2011-10-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yep - I'd been looking forward to a few dozen oysters that were supposed to have looked just like this:

I guess that I will have to be content with oysters from more reputable farms.

Oyster season is coming very soon and I look forward to reviewing the harvest from as many Chesapeake Bay Oyster Farms as possible - stay tuned.

In the meantime: join the Facebook group:

Chesapeake Bay Oyster Farms

Until the next post... enjoy Chesapeake Bay Oysters!!!

Lynnhaven River Oysters

2011-07-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

I love finding new good oyster farms, and am looking forward to getting my first shipment from Lynnhaven River Oysters.

"Fresh, outstandingly good, live oysters from the Lynnhaven River Estuary of the Chesapeake Bay".

How could I resist ordering after reading their ad copy from their website: www.seasidequalityseafood.com. Tell me if this doesn't just make your mouth water:

"Salty and with that wonderful fresh ocean taste - directly from the boat to your home.

World Famous - The Favorite of Presidents and Royalty

The unique environment of the Lynnhaven River Estuary produces oysters that have been acclaimed around the world for their wonderfully salty taste of the ocean. The taste of oysters is highly dependent on their living conditions. They prefer a mix of fresh water and seawater and tolerate a range of saltiness (salinity). Generally the saltier the water (up to the limit in which oysters thrive) the better the taste of the oysters. Because our oysters live at the very southern end of the Chesapeake Bay where it meets the ocean the water has that desirable high salinity and ideal conditions exist for producing the best tasting oysters you can find".

My shipment is on it's way.. and I will post whether they live up to the hype or not. Mmmmm. In fact, I will try a new oyster recipe with these and post it on http://oysterrecipes.blogspot.com - be sure to check it out!

Here is an earlier post made on this blog: Lynnhaven Oysters Make a Comeback: Here is the obvious sign of this comeback!!!

Read the post here:

http://oysterloversparadise.blogspot.com/2008/07/lynnhaven-oysters-make-comeback.html

Check back for the review...

Virginia's First Oyster Co-op Launched

2010-12-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

Businessmen, watermen and scientists have collaborated to launch Virginia's first privately funded oyster co-op.

The Oyster Company of Virginia, founded in August by Northern Neck businessman W. Tolar Nolley, is goinf to equip a dozen watermen with the resources they need to farm oysters in the Chesapeake Bay.

The cooperative will lease acres of bay bottom from the state, and buy oyster seed and cages to grow the oysters. Salaried watermen will then plant the seeds, and harvest and sell the mature oysters.

Profits from the program will pay the watermen's salary, fund the purchase of new equipment, and expand the program, said Ken Smith, president of the Virginia State Waterman's Association.

"I've never seen 12 people so excited in my life," said Smith, chief operating officer of the cooperative, which will officially unveil its plans Thursday at The Watermen's Museum in Yorktown.

Chesapeake oysters have been plagued for decades by disease, loss of habitat and pollution. They are at less than 1 percent of their peak historic population. Many watermen have resisted calls to abandon the centuries-old hunter-gatherer approach in favor of oyster farming, also known as aquaculture.

The industry has made numerous advances in the last decade, most notably developing more disease-tolerant oyster seeds, that have made aquaculture a more viable option. That, combined with the endorsement of Smith and others trusted by watermen, led to the cooperative's formation.

It hopes to reruit more watermen in the coming years and attract corporate support by promoting the program as a way to reduce bay pollution, Smith said. Oysters, which filter up to 50 gallons of water per day, help rid the bay of excess nutrients that cause dead zones and other problems.

"The oyster has a positive effect cleaning up the bay," Smith said.

The cooperative plans to lobby state and federal officials to include their efforts in the "pollution diet" the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is drafting for the bay.

The effort is similar to one introduced two years ago by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. It used part of the $15 million it received to revive the Chesapeake's blue crab population to train dozens of watermen to farm oysters.

In addition to oyster farming, Oyster Company of Virginia has partnered with Reeftek Inc., a reef-building company run by Middle Peninsula businessman Robert Jensen. The cooperative will work will Reeftek to create oyster sanctuaries, Smith said.

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Oyster Festivals:

Oyster Facts: Basic Oyster Facts:

Oyster Festivals

2010-09-27T14:06:00.001-07:00

Oyster festivals are the EVENT OF THE YEAR for oyster lovers!

I am not a vendor, oysterman, or merchant. You will not see me at a festival offering or selling anything. I am just an fan and oyster lover.

I enjoy the oysterfest atmosphere (almost as much as I love eating oysters).

The people that you meet and the sounds and experiences makes one feel good to be alive.

Just imagine any county fair that you have been to:

The sounds, the smells, the tastes. All of that and more can be found in any oyster festival.

You can also find ALL of the usual fare: Corndogs, Italian sausages and Phillys, funnel cakes, and of course candy apples, and Peanut butter and Jelly on a stick? - (it's probably pretty good).

PB&J on a stick - photo by Cheryl Carlin.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Now of course, I am going for the oysters...

I will most likely hit a good half dozen vendors - which are usually churches or civic organizations - and buy (and eat) 1/2 dozen oysters from each.

My choice of fried, raw, or steamed on the half shell will depend on the conversations that I have with the employees working the tent. I like to engage the workers around the corner or at the back of the tent.

If the group is a church that is opening jars of shucked oysters and frying in a secret recipe - well... - give me an order of fried oysters RIGHT NOW! - with a healthy portion of their homemade dipping sauce - mmmmmm.

If the tent represents a local restaurant who buys fresh from local oystermen - and I talk with the guy in charge and believe that the oysters that they are serving right then were pulled from the water earlier - well they need to immediately serve me some oysters raw - on the half shell (probably a full dozen).

Anything questionable - give me 1/2 dozen steamed on the half shell - and I'm moving on.

To all of my readers: I'm sorry that I haven't posted for a while. It;s all thanks to the new job and all. I will return soon.

Check out the new recipe that I posted on our blog: OYSTER BLOG

I hope to see you all at the 53rd Annual Oyster Festival in Urbanna Virginia. November 5th and 5th 2010.

Check out the oyster festival website: HERE http://www.urbannaoysterfestival.com/

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The Chesapeake Bay is Fighting its Own 'Oil Spill'

2010-06-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Wheeler posted this thought-provoking item on the B'More Green blog.

This map shows the BP Gulf oil slick superimposed over the Chesapeake Bay.

That really puts things into perspective.

For those of us in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, here’s another thought: the Bay has been struggling against a similarly sized danger for years in the form of high levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment pollution.

In a recent post on Chronicling the Chesapeake Bay, CBF Senior Scientist Beth McGee notes there are many similarities between the Gulf disaster and the Bay’s poor health. The big difference is one you can see and one you can't.

"I think it is in a sense that nitrogen is our oil," said McGee. Degraded water quality makes portions of the Bay unlivable for fish, oysters, and crabs.

It also puts stress on those that remain, making them more susceptible to disease, "which is exactly what oil does."

"We’re not outraged because it's not in our face, like it is in the face of the folks in the Gulf," said McGee, referring to the fact that views of our waterways from the surface are misleading, as most of the damage is taking place underwater.

The reality is that what is happening to communities in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana is exactly what has been happening for years to communities in Virginia, Maryland, and throughout the Bay watershed—people can't go fishing, they can't buy fresh seafood, and those who make a living off the water have lost and continue to lose their livelihood and their culture.

That's why CBF is fighting hard for passage of the Chesapeake Clean Water Act, the most significant legislation for the Bay's future health since the 1972 Clean Water Act.

As for whether the Gulf spill will make its way to Virginia’s shoreline: "it’s highly unlikely", as stated by a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as reported by Examiner.com.

Any oil that makes it into the Gulf Stream—which flows fairly close to North Carolina before veering east into the Atlantic—will likely remain in the stream.

However, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation will continue to monitor the situation.

While the oil might not make its way to the Chesapeake Bay region, its impact on the Gulf's oyster fishery has.

Bay-area oyster processors who rely on Gulf oysters have lost work and restoration efforts that rely on Gulf shell anticipate shortages.

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Basic Oyster Facts

2009-06-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Here are some oyster basics:

The native eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, usually lives in water depths of between 8 and 25 feet and naturally forms three-dimensional intertidal reefs.

An oyster orients itself with the flared edge of its shell tilted upward. The left valve is cupped, while the right valve is flat. The shell opens periodically to permit the oyster to feed on plankton.

Oysters usually mature by age one. They are protandric, which means that in the first year they spawn as males, but as they grow larger and develop more energy reserves in the next two to three years, they spawn as females.

An increase in water temperatures triggers the male oyster to release sperm and the female to release eggs into the water. This triggers a chain reaction of spawning which clouds the water with millions of eggs and sperm. A single female oyster produces 10 to 100 million eggs annually.

The eggs are fertilized in the water and soon develop into larvae, or veligers, which are drawn to the chemicals released by older oysters on the bottom. Oysters need to settle in a suitable spot, such as another oyster’s shell. Juvenile attached oysters are called “spat.”

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Oyster Management and Restoration

2009-05-13T19:21:00.001-07:00

Oyster reefs are more than just habitat, they are complex and diverse communities.

Bay Program partners developed the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Management Plan to help restore and maintain the valuable ecological services provided by native oysters while continuing to support an oyster fishery. The strategy described in the Oyster Management Plan consists of three components: Defining oyster sanctuaries, managing harvest and overcoming the effects of disease.

Chesapeake Bay Oyster Restoration

However, it is important to understand that the Bay's poor water quality is not due solely to the loss of the oyster population and, therefore, cannot be corrected by restoring oysters alone. Other pressures on the Bay's ecosystem—including land use practices and nutrient and sediment pollution—must be addressed for future oyster and water quality restoration efforts to be successful.

Oyster Sanctuaries

The first component of the oyster management strategy defines sanctuaries—areas where harvesting is prohibited—to increase the ecological function of oyster beds.

Scientists also improve habitat in these areas by cleaning sediment off the reefs and adding cultch (clean, empty shells or other hard material) for new spat to settle on.

By restoring oyster reefs and protecting them from harvest, there is potential to increase populations of spawning adult oysters and, in turn, larval production.
In the short term, factors like disease and water quality will significantly limit the success of oyster sanctuaries and the increase in oyster populations; however, sanctuaries will become important contributors to oyster restoration if disease resistance is allowed to evolve over time in wild populations and is supported by management practices.

Decisions about where to locate sanctuaries are guided by the Virginia Oyster Restoration Plan, developed by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC); and by Maryland's Priority Restoration Areas, developed by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MD DNR) and the Maryland Oyster Roundtable Steering Committee.

Managing Oyster Harvest

The second component of the oyster management strategy implements harvest strategies to build a sustainable oyster industry in both Maryland and Virginia.

The main strategy for regulating harvest and enhancing harvest potential is to establish sanctuaries and special management areas throughout the Bay.
The ideal situation is to estimate the amount of oysters that can be taken safely from the population while maintaining a sustainable Bay-wide population of oysters.
A major challenge is to determine what level of exploitation is appropriate and will not compromise restoration efforts.

Management strategies for the Maryland oyster fishery are considered by a number of advisory groups working with MD DNR. In Virginia, oyster harvest is managed on a bar-specific basis.

Oyster Disease

The third component of the oyster management strategy recognizes the constraints of disease and implements management strategies that reduce the impact of disease.

A major challenge to oyster restoration in the Bay is to overcome the effects of the diseases MSX and Dermo. It is estimated that, by age 3, 80 percent or more of a year class in high disease areas (i.e., the Virginia portion of the Bay) will die due to disease.

Maryland and Virginia confront different problems concerning disease. Virginia oysters are faced with constant disease pressure because MSX and Dermo thrive in warmer, saltier waters. Maryland's situation is more variable depending on weather conditions.

Research efforts have been underway for a number of years to breed strains of native oysters with greater disease resistance. Current research will give scientists a better understanding of how these disease-tolerant strains could contribute to large-scale oyster restoration efforts.

Recently, it has been found that oysters in areas subject to high exposure to MSX are evolving to resist the disease. Scientists and managers are adjusting harvest and sanctuary management strategies to optimize the long-term benefits of the development of MSX resistance.

Introduction of a Non-native Oyster

In response to the decline in the native oyster population, Maryland and Virginia have proposed intentional introduction of a non-native oyster species, Crassostrea ariakensis (also known as Suminoe or Asian oyster). This species is believed to have greater resistance to MSX and Dermo.

Considerable controversy exists over this proposal, and many questions remain about the possible implications of introduction. In 2003, the U.S. Congress mandated that an environmental impact statement (EIS) be prepared to examine both the risks and benefits of introducing this species to the Bay, compared with the risks and benefits of other management alternatives. A draft EIS is expected to be released in 2008.

In 2004 the National Research Council of the National Academies published its year-long study, Nonnative Oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. This independent study is the most complete analysis to date on the possible introduction of non-native oysters into the Bay.

According to the study, introduction of a non-native oyster should be delayed until more is known about the environmental risks. However, carefully regulated cultivation of sterile Asian oysters in contained areas could help both researchers and the Bay's oyster industry.

The study also noted that it could take decades before there are enough oysters to improve water quality. While Asian oysters would filter excess algae from the water, they would not be a “quick fix” to restore water quality.

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Plans for Non-Native Oysters in Bay DROPPED

2009-04-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

Foreign species deemed ecologically dangerous

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Proposals to use a foreign species to restore the Chesapeake Bay's depleted oyster population were essentially scrapped Monday as state and federal governments agreed to focus on bringing back the native oyster.

Maryland, Virginia and federal agencies announced that they remain "fully committed" to using only native oysters, even in trying to help rebuild the bay's seafood industry. Using non-native oysters poses "unacceptable ecological risks," officials said.

The decision ends years of debate about whether to introduce an Asian oyster into the bay and concludes nearly five years of formal study, costing $17 million in state and federal funds.

The Ehrlich administration had pushed for seeding the Chesapeake with the fast-growing Asian oysters because they resist the diseases that have nearly wiped out the bay's native shellfish. Amid scientific fears that the alien species could create ecological havoc, the O'Malley administration abandoned that stance.

In Virginia, though, the seafood industry sought to farm Asian oysters bred to be sterile. The state backed the industry through seven years of "field trials" in which businesses grew batches of the sterile shellfish in cages.

But the state relented in the face of widespread scientific concerns that, despite safeguards, some Asian oysters eventually would reproduce in the bay and their offspring would spread.

Yesterday's joint statement left open the possibility that small, carefully controlled studies might still be approved. But any research in open bay waters would require approval from all parties - unlikely, given firm opposition to such experiments by Maryland and federal environmental agencies.

The governments now plan to craft a strategy for replenishing oyster reefs and seeding them with native bivalves bred in hatcheries. Watermen, meanwhile, will be encouraged to try oyster farming.

But scientists caution that unless native oysters develop a resistance to the diseases killing them, replenishing the bay's wild population could be time-consuming and costly. Large-scale restoration could require spending as much as $50 million a year over the next decade - 10 times what has been spent so far, officials estimate.

The federal government has committed $6.6 million in the coming year, Maryland $5 million and Virginia up to $1 million. The two states are seeking $24 more million in federal economic stimulus funds to apply to oyster restoration efforts.

"We cannot guarantee success, but we'll give it a helluva go," said Col. Dionysios Anninos of the Norfolk District of the Army Corps of Engineers, which has directed two reef restorations in Virginia, where native oysters appear to be thriving.

The decision was hailed by environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which had threatened to sue if the governments authorized using non-native oysters.

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Asian oysters off the Bay menu?

2009-03-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

From: BaltimoreSun.com

A surprising development in Virginia may mean the end - at least for now - of the debate over whether Asian oysters have any place in the Chesapeake Bay.

On Tuesday, the Virginia Seafood Council abruptly withdrew its request to raise 1.1 million Asian oysters in 11 locations around the bay. The oysters would have been genetically modified and bred to be sterile, though critics have said there is still at least a slight chance that some would be able to reproduce.

In a statement read at a hearing before the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, Frances W. Porter, the seafood council's executive director, said the group remained "firm in its confidence in the Asian oysters, but we have exhausted our negotiating capabilities with federal and state authorities."

According to this story by Scott Harper in the Virginian-Pilot, Porter said the council dropped its push for the Asian oyster field trials after "conversations with unnamed state officials over the weekend."

Porter also said the group believed that the Asian oyster would never realize its potential as an aquaculture product, and that Virginia's oyster industry would never be restored to its historic prominence.

The withdrawal comes on the eve of a conference call scheduled Wednesday between Maryland and Virginia natural resources officials and the Army Corps commander to try to reach agreement on whether even sterilized Asian oysters should have a role in restoring the bay's oysters.

Watermen and seafood businesses in both states contend that years of costly efforts to restore the bay's native oysters after decades of devastation by habitat loss and disease have not succeeded. They have pressed for permission to try Asian oysters, since they have proven to resist the diseases killing off native bivalves.

A four-year scientific study of how to restore the bay's oysters, however, said there were uncertainties about whether the non-native bivalve could be grown in a controlled way that would prevent it from spreading.

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Memorabilia of Bay's Heyday Selling Well

2009-02-28T12:18:00.001-08:00

By JOANNE MALENE

Joe Parlett, owner of Keeper's, holds two of his favorite oyster cans, both with custom labels. The can on the left comes from the Leonard Copsey Oyster Co. Copsey's wife, Josephine, drew the waterman on the label. The can on the right comes from Shorter's Place in Benedict.

Staff photo by JOANNE MALENE

Banagan holds oyster cans from Capt. Sam's Seafood in Bushwood and the Potomac View, which also operated in St. Mary's County.

The first sign of sunshine and warm weather motivates many people to clean their garage or storage area, throwing away old trash like rags, jars or paint cans.

But, before you heave that old paint can, take a good look to see if it was meant to hold paint – or oysters.

And, if you find an old oyster tin, there are a couple of fellows who would like to talk with you.

Joe Parlett, owner of Keeper's in New Market, has been collecting, buying and selling oyster cans for a long time.

Parlett grew up in St. Mary's County with parents who had the antique collecting bug. He started going to auctions with them, buying fishing lures for $8 to $10 each. When prices of lures started going up, he switched to oyster cans.

"I sell crabbing supplies and sometimes I would see oyster cans being used as paint buckets," Parlett said. "So, I told my wife I was going to start collecting oyster cans. I started talking to people and trying to learn as much as I could about cans."

Originally, oysters were packed in stoneware crocks and in glass jars. During the Civil War, oysters were packed in plain square tins. After the war, oysters were packed in plain round metal cans. Paper labels and then embossed labels were added as a marketing device. Cans from before World War II have bail handles on them.

According to Parlett, by the late 1960s, local oyster packing companies had given up packing oysters in metal cans. Most companies began using plastic tubs because they were less expensive and easier to store.

"There were two different types of tin cans used, stock cans and custom cans," he said. "A stock can had a generic label, maybe one that was used by a number of different companies. To get a custom can, a company had to pay thousands of dollars for the graphics and then had to buy 2,000 or more of the cans. A lot of small packers couldn't afford to pay that."

The graphics or picture on the can, the condition and the name on the can all entice a buyer.

"Everyone had the same product — it's all oysters," said Parlett.

"But, look at the different cans — some have mermaids, some have boats, some have Native Americans on the labels. The graphics alone can make you want to buy their product. When I started collecting, I just wanted a can with a boat on it."

Jimmy Banagan of Abell is another oyster can collector.

"I had a janitorial company and we were cleaning out a garage," Banagan said. "I noticed the guy had cans with `Capt. Sam's Oysters' on it and it caught my eye. Now, I collect oyster cans, oyster knives, crab cans — anything to do with seafood."

Like Parlett, Banagan collects cans because of the graphics.

"Every can is different — and every one of them has a different story," Banagan said.

"The most colorful ones go for the biggest money. Good cans are hard to find. Sometimes you find cans and they are filled with nails and screws.

"When I first started collecting them, people would give them to you," Banagan said with a little smile. "If I had started collecting 10 years before I did, I would have been good."

According to Banagan and Parlett, there used to be about 75 oyster companies in St. Mary's County. Now, it is an industry that has largely died.

Starting in 1925, according to "It Ain't Like It Was Then," a book written by Richard J. Dodds and Robert J. Hurry and published by the Calvert Marine Museum, health permit numbers were required on all cans.

If someone got sick eating oysters, the health department would be able to track where the oysters originated. Each facility had its own number.

"It is a wonder more people didn't get sick from eating oysters," Banagan said. "Some of the early tins were sealed with lead solder. When they opened the can, the solder would drip down onto the oysters."

When local companies went out of business, many of them destroyed their cans. Parlett said companies were worried that someone else, who might possibly have bad oysters, would use the cans.

"When they got out of the business, they got out of the business," Parlett said. "Some of these older oystermen don't even have one of the cans with their name on it."

Labeled oyster cans are not limited to companies that were located around the Chesapeake Bay; they can be found in Michigan, Ohio and even Iowa, Parlett said. In the early 20th century, oysters were harvested in Southern Maryland, trucked to and shucked in Baltimore, then packed in big cans and sent all over the country. Companies would repack the oysters in their own cans.

Prices for oyster cans with labels in good condition can range from a couple of dollars to thousands of dollars. The rarity and condition of the can drives the market.

Parlett said he knows hundreds of oyster can collectors, some with more than 2,000 cans in their collections.

"Everyone wants them all," he said. "We trade, we shop and we barter. I think the part I enjoy the most about collecting is getting the story behind it. People would say, `Are you still looking for oyster cans? Well, so and so has one.' I am kind of picky — I don't deal with rust buckets. Condition is everything. If you are a collector, you are always willing to upgrade, to find a better can."

Banagan said that local antique shops and even eBay are good sources for cans.

"The competition to find them is terrible," Banagan said.

"There are the high rollers, or people with lots of money, who can spend what they want to get a can. Sometimes you can find cans on eBay, and then someone comes in and outbids you. That can be frustrating. But there are still good cans out there."

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Oystering - a Skeleton of its History

2009-01-26T17:53:00.000-08:00

P. KEVIN MORLEY/TIMES-DISPATCH

Billy Lett uses 16-foot tongs to pull in a load of oysters in about 7 feet of water.

Chesapeake Bay’s oyster population was so abundant that Indians named the bay Chesepiook, or “great shellfish bay.“

Indians and European settlers easily collected oysters to eat.

Oysters kept many Jamestown settlers from starving.

The bay’s oyster fishery became the largest in the world in the late 1800s.

Its plight:

Today, the bay’s oyster population is estimated to be 1 percent or less of its size in the late 1800s.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only were oysters valuable as food, but their shells were an important building material.

Watermen took all the oysters and shells they could get.

With the reefs nearly wiped out, shell-less baby oysters found few places to take hold. That devastated reproduction.

Hope, trouble:

In the late 1920s, people began trucking in rocks from the west, and oyster shells were no longer needed for construction. State workers started tossing shells back in the water.

Oysters began coming back. Virginia’s landings topped 4 million bushels by the late 1950s.

Then diseases called MSX and Dermo, harmless to people, began killing oysters just before they reached market size.

Also, development along the bay and its rivers creates pollution that kills oysters and erosion that smothers them in mud.

The light of a cold dawn revealed an endangered species on the James River -- waterman Rodgers Green of Gloucester.

Green catches oysters the old-fashioned way, with 16-foot tongs that resemble two rakes attached like scissors.

Disease, pollution and long-ago overharvesting have sunk Virginia's oyster population to about 1 percent of a century ago. For Green, 55, thoughts of the future leave a bad taste in his mouth.

"This is about the last of it," Green said aboard his 36-foot workboat, the Donna Lisa. "I can't see nothing to encourage the younger generation to even try to get into it."

In the 1920s, thousands of oyster boats worked the slightly salty James in southeastern Virginia. In the 1980s, there were hundreds. Now, a big day would be 20, and on this morning only three were in sight.

"Oystering on the James is just a skeleton of its history right now," said Jim Wesson, head of oyster restoration for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

People familiar with the rocky James in Richmond would not recognize the waterway that Green and friend Billy Lett worked -- 5 miles wide, giant sky above.

Lett pulled up some oysters, swung the tongs close by Green's head and dumped the catch with a clatter on a wooden platform called the culling board.

There, Green's strong hands broke market-size oysters from masses of mussels, barnacles and too-small oysters, then swept the remains overboard.

At mid-morning, the temperature reached about 40, with little wind. In the brogue of the watermen, the river was "cam," or calm -- just right for catching "arsters."

The oyster was once so abundant in the bay region that huge piles of them and their shells -- variously called reefs, rocks, shoals or bars -- posed hazards to boats.

Parts of the James today, such as Wreck Shoal and Horsehead Shoal, were named after oyster reefs, which loomed just below the surface or, at low tide, jutted slightly above water.

Indians and early settlers waded to hand-pick oysters. Colonists took up tonging, and more-effective, mechanized dredges joined tongers' boats after the Civil War. By the end of the 1800s, the bay region's oyster fishery became the largest in the world, stocking restaurants from New York to San Francisco.

In the late 1800s, Virginia watermen harvested between 6 million and 8 million bushels a year. Today, the annual catch totals a meager 20,000 to 80,000 bushels.

On a typical day, Green and Lett collect eight to 10 bushels, which they sell for about $30 a bushel. After subtracting for gas and other expenses, the men made about $135 each.

A decade or so ago, Green said, "We'd catch twice that many in half the amount of time."

Chesapeake oysters are important to more than the palate and pocketbook. They filter dirt and other impurities from water. Their reefs provide homes for small crabs, fish and young oysters.

"Oysters are like coral reefs," said Tommy Leggett, an oyster scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group. "They provide a lot of the same ecological services."

The bay, like Rodgers Green, needs the oyster badly.

Since 1993, Virginia has spent about $40 million to bring back the oyster, doing such things as creating artificial reefs to which young oysters could attach.

During that time, the oyster declined an additional 60 percent. The main culprit was diseases called MSX and Dermo, harmless to people, that kill oysters as they approach market size.

The diseases, the first of which surfaced in the late 1950s, have been particularly deadly over the past two decades.

Oysters spawn in summer, producing shell-less, microscopic babies that float about before attaching to oyster shells. Then they grow their own shells and help build the reef.

The James historically produced oysters in huge numbers. Among other reasons, an unusual movement of the James' tidal waters doesn't take baby oysters far away. They remain close to their parents, increasing the odds that they can find shells to which they can attach and grow.

Through the decades, the James River oyster has never been particularly popular with diners. Some said they have a gray, snotty look.

But the James was a hot market for "seed oysters" -- tiny ones that buyers dropped in other rivers to harvest later.

The James declined as a source of seed oysters in recent years because, after all the effort of moving the young oysters, they ended up succumbing to disease.

The James, for all its troubles, has fought back. A roughly 5-mile stretch of the river near Newport News is salty enough for oysters but not for the diseases. There, the diseases infect the oysters but don't kill them. The oysters in that stretch produce the closest thing to natural reefs you can find anywhere, experts say.

"It's a national treasure," said Wesson of the marine resources commission. "It's just too unique to take any chance on losing it. There is just nowhere like it."

For that reason, the state does not allow mechanized oyster dredges there. But tongers like Green, who are less destructive, work that area for market oysters.

Raised by his grandparents, Green became a waterman at 13. "Granddaddy wasn't able to work, so I had to pretty well do it to take care of the family." His schooling ended in sixth grade.

Years of tonging have damaged Green's back, and the work often pains his wrists and forearms, a condition watermen call "tongitis."

But you can tell Green and Lett enjoy being on the water, where they have no boss and no time clock.

"It's the onliest thing I know how to do," Green said.

The men bantered as they worked, telling tales of the time Green tried to put a dead possum in Lett's truck, and of the day Lett pulled up a Navy bombshell from the Potomac River. Lett whistled at a loon, trying to make it call.

"This is the type of work where you take the bitter with the sweet," Lett said.

In hopes of restoring the industry, some people want to release an Asian oyster in the bay region; others say it could drive out the few remaining native oysters. Some believe the answer may be finding disease-resistant natives and growing them in cages.

Green hopes he can keep tonging James River oysters. On his boat, he pried one open. It looked tan and succulent.

For the record, it was delicious.

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A Skipjack's Extreme Makeover

2009-01-18T17:07:00.000-08:00

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Oystering sailboat to teach about life on the bay
(Baltimore Sun photo by Jed Kirschbaum / December 10, 2008)

Mike Vlahovich uses a plainer as he squares up an oak timber to be used as the inner bow stem on the mastless Caleb W. Jones in background on left.

The skipjack Caleb W. Jones is being restored at The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum by the staff and apprentices of the non-profit Coastal Heritage Alliance.

The deck of the Caleb W. Jones gleams with a fresh coat of white paint, as does the new cabin aft. Down below, though, the 55-year-old skipjack is showing its age - and even some daylight. You can poke three fingers through a hole in its rotted wooden hull.

Built in 1953, this remnant of the Chesapeake Bay's fading fleet of sail-powered oyster dredging boats is getting an extreme makeover at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. On dry ground for now, the Caleb's hull is being taken apart and put back together again, a timber and plank at a time.

"The boat was partially sunk when I got it," explains Mike Vlahovich, a veteran boat builder and founder of the Coastal Heritage Alliance, a nonprofit that works to preserve the vessels and culture of fishing communities. "It was pretty clear that no one really cared too much about it."

With the help of apprentices and volunteers, Vlahovich spent more than a year rehabbing the topside of the 44-foot skipjack while it sat in the water, its leaks controlled by pumping. A few weeks ago, he had it hoisted out of the water with a crane at the museum so he and his helpers could restore the hull on land.

"It has to be done in careful fashion, and braced up, so we don't lose shape," Vlahovich said. It's painstaking work, pulling the hull apart a bit at a time to replace the rotten wood. Like a jigsaw puzzle, no two pieces are exactly alike; each replacement piece must be carefully measured to fit the gap it must fill.

The restoration is being underwritten by the boat's owner, Michael Sullivan, a developer from Charles County. Sullivan, 53, grew up in Charles and has supported land-based historic preservation projects there. Though not a sailor himself, Sullivan said he was drawn to restore the Caleb W. Jones because his great-grandfather had worked on the water and had a skipjack.

"I just wanted to help preserve the heritage of Maryland," he says. "There are so few of them left."

Indeed, there are only five still dredging the bay bottom for oysters - three based in Somerset County, one that sails from Tilghman Island and one from Baltimore. In the late 1800s, more than a thousand reportedly plied the bay.

Read the rest of the article HERE:

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Chesapeake Sportsman: Outdoorsmen Must be Environmentalists

2009-01-15T09:11:00.001-08:00

By C.D. Dollar — For HometownAnnapolis

It’s a good bet that this year professional resource managers, conservation leaders and sport anglers will again discuss the best strategy to restore native oysters – important for fish habitat and clean water – to Maryland waters.

The geese flew late that frigid morning, and a pause in the blind banter offered a chance for the mind to wonder. How half of January had already swept past the hull remains a mystery, and soon my thoughts mulled over the fisheries and wildlife challenges confronting the collective outdoors community in 2009.

On a personal level, one of this year’s goals I’ve set is to simplify my life, pare down the extras that I probably can do without. That list, of course, is a work in progress, but so far much of it seems achievable. For example, I plan to buy more of the necessary staples that are made or grown locally, or catch, grow or shoot it myself.

What led me to zero in on this was the hunk of smoked goose passed down the bench in the blind. Infused with hints of orange, teriyaki, Old Bay and a few other spices, it was delicious, making the phrase “eat local” have real meaning – that goose was shot over the very field we were gunning. And over the holidays, my family and I enjoyed grilled oysters from the Choptank River, freshly caught Chesapeake rockfish, and plump crabmeat taken from the Wye.

(I could almost imagine being there - Oysterman).

While there is a practical reason for my undertaking – to save money of course – it has a philosophical bent as well. As the world struggles to untangle the financial mess ensnaring virtually every sector of the economy, I often wonder what compels some people to soar to new heights of avarice. What inspires them to squeeze out every extra ounce of resource just because they can?

Finish reading this excellent article here:

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The Proper Way to Eat a Virginia Oyster

2009-01-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

By PENELOPE CORCORAN

When it comes to oyster-eating here in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a bit of a purist. I believe that if you really want to taste and appreciate the beauty of our local oysters, there's only one way to do it: naked.

That is to say, to slurp oysters straight off the half-shell, unencumbered and free of such accoutrements as a reflexive squeeze of lemon, strings of fresh-grated horseradish, a dollop of zippy cocktail sauce or a drop or two of red wide vinegar-and-shallot mignonette.

OK. Wanna know how I really feel? I say save the Tabasco and cocktail sauce and salsa and shooters for oysters consumed in some other region of the country -- say, New Orleans, for instance. Someplace where maybe you don't want to taste oysters as much as do them. You know what I mean?

But, I digress.

The simple three-step method described below is a fairly foolproof way to eat raw oysters. Even if you're a newbie, you'll look like you know what you're doing.

Using your shellfish fork, make sure the oyster is completely detached from its shell. While admiring the beauty, grace and freshness of my oyster, I like to gently move it around a little to ascertain that it's ready to be gracefully slurped.

Grasp the oyster shell comfortably, cradling it in the nook between your thumb and first two fingers. Look for the best "sipping lip" on the shell. Alter your grasp, if you need to, so you can easily slurp both your oyster and its liquid from this point on the shell.

Lift the shell to your lips and, in one swift move, tip shell up and slurp both the oyster and juices into your mouth.

Relax.

Savor the high note of briny freshness.

Think of the ocean.

Don't try to swallow your oyster whole.

While oysters don't require vigorous chewing, like squid or octopus, they do need to be caressed with your molars a few times. As you do this, you may notice other flavors (cucumber, melon, toasted almonds) emerge.

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Oysters Carry a Special Promise

2009-01-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

A single oyster filters as much as 50 gallons of water per day.

Oysters are delicious to our taste buds, economy and environment. This is the take-home message of a three-page profile of oystering in the current year-end special issue of the authoritative Economist magazine.

Still a big deal in Willapa and Netarts bays, oysters offer some surprising benefits, as The Economist makes clear. Primarily focusing on Chesapeake Bay on the Atlantic Coast, this article heightens our feelings of gratitude and protectiveness for oystering as it is practiced around here.

For one thing, oystermen in the Chesapeake have always relied on a sort of natural propagation process and public ownership of oyster beds. In contrast, here on the West Coast the practice has been to proactively farm-raise oysters on privately owned or leased grounds. Our relatively sophisticated aquaculture techniques are now being taken up in Maryland, where oysters are increasingly being recognized as playing a critical role in purifying water.

A senior scientist on the Chesapeake told The Economist, "The oyster is pretty particular about what it eats, but it's not particular about what it filters." This means that water contaminants, especially things like nitrogen-based fertilizers, are taken out of the water column by oysters and processed back into a form that returns to the atmosphere. Phytoplankton that oysters eat would otherwise die and be consumed by bacteria, which use up oxygen needed by fish and crab. A single oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day.

All is not well for Oregon and Washington oysters. Changes in ocean chemistry, climatic conditions and possibly other factors are making it harder to grow fat and healthy oysters here. There hasn't been a robust natural reproductive seed-set process in nearly five years in Willapa Bay. We're obviously better off here than in Chesapeake, where the oyster population stands at only one percent of its pre-1980 level. But we still need to get our scientific and political assets fully engaged in making sure that oysters remain a key part of our economy and gastronomy.

"Oyster farming," the magazine noted, " is one of the few situations in which both economics and the environment win."

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Shuck U - Using The Right Tool

2009-01-02T05:57:00.001-08:00

by: Robb Walsh

The big brute of the oyster-shucking world is called a "Galveston knife" (on the left). It's an eight-inch knife with a stout four-inch blade designed for opening large oysters like the five-inch Espiritu Santo Bay oyster shown beside it. (Espritu Santo Bay is down around Port O'Connor.) The knife shown is an inexpensive plastic model available at restaurant supply stores for under $10.

America's best-known oyster shucking knife is the "Chesapeake stabber" (in the middle) which is a seven-inch knife with a bulb-shaped handle and a tapered four-inch blade. The pointy tip and thinner blade makes it easier to open normal-sized oysters like the three-inch Apalachicola Bay oyster shown beside it. Most serious oysters shuckers have a wooden-handled version of this knife in their toolbox. The plastic version is under $10 at a restaurant suppy store.

A tiny sharp oyster knive (right) is sometimes called a "Frenchman." They are made to open smaller and more fragile oysters like the Pacific oyster (left) and Kumamoto (right). The purple knife in the picture came free with a box of Beausoleil oysters, a tiny Virginica from New Brunswick, Canada.

I used to have some nice wooden-handled oyster knives, but they were confiscated by airport security at the Little Rock airport a couple of years ago. Oyster knife collectors pay big bucks for vintage specimens, so don't throw your old ones away.

Good article by: Robb Walsh

I have a couple of antique oyster knives that were my grand dad's. What could they be worth? Hmmm.

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Locally Grown: Oyster stew - A Christmas Eve tradition

2008-12-25T09:50:00.000-08:00

For as long as I can remember, my family has had oyster stew on Christmas Eve. That's a tradition that makes sense if you live near the Chesapeake Bay, where oysters are a treasured natural resource.

Not so much in land-locked South Dakota. (Sorry for you - Oysterman).

As a shy kid, I didn't poll the neighbors to see whether they were slurping down bivalves while they waited for Santa. But I never once heard anyone else mention oyster stew.

Since most of the area was Scandinavian, I looked to my German roots.

When I asked my dad about it, he was no help at all.

"As far back as I can remember, we ate oyster stew on Christmas Eve," he said.

Tell me something I don't know. "Was it a German tradition?"

I could feel him pondering over the phone. "I don't think so. I don't think it came from the Old Country. I think it might have something to do with Wisconsin. It came from the branch of the family that stopped in Wisconsin first."

Hoping for more details than that, I contacted the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington to see if they could shed any light on this tradition. Anja Badura, who handles press, information and public affairs, sent along some interesting links and articles for reference.

Roger M. Grace, who wrote "Reminiscing" for the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, pondered the origins of oyster stew on Christmas Eve in a June 17, 2004, column. Mr. Grace referenced a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article from 2002, in which Jerry Apps, an author of Wisconsin history and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus, was quoted: "By 1900, 50 different ethnic groups were here and each brought along its own costumes, recipes, approaches to the celebration. German celebrations always included, on Christmas Eve, oyster stew."

I found the original article in George Mason University's History News Network. Unfortunately, the piece by Jackie Loohauis was on Christmas history, so it did not expound on the topic of oyster stew. And the library doesn't carry any books by Jerry Apps, so I have a confirmation, but not an explation. In the "Reminiscing" column, though, Mr. Grace did go on to say "that tradition did not emanate from Germany, the waters there being too cold for oysters to dwell in them."

Anja also sent along a thread from the Germanna Colonies online archives, in which descendants of German immigrants discuss the tradition of oyster stew on Christmas Eve. After following the conversation, most participants concluded it was not a German tradition, but a ritual picked up along the coast regions of America.

I turned to "The Big Oyster" by Mark Kurlansky to see if I could find any German oyster connection. The only reference in the index - I confess, I haven't read the whole book yet. I've been making Christmas cookies! - was this, from around 1883: "Oysters were being shipped from New York not only to Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff and Glasgow, but also to Le Havre, Bremen and Hamburg." Apparently someone in Germany was eating oysters.

In Mr. Kurlansky's book, the earlier recipes were for stewed oysters, where you'd "set them over the fire in their own liquor with a glass of wine, a lump of butter, some salt, pepper and mace."

He later quotes from "Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery," 1851 edition, by Eliza Leslie, which has instructions for both oyster soup and oyster stew. The oyster stew starts by stewing in the liquor with pepper, mace, grated nutmeg and butter. When done, buttered thin slices of toast are put in the bottom of a deep dish, and the oysters and the liquor are poured over. Miss Leslie instructs "The liquor of oysters should never be thickened by stirring in flour. It spoils the taste, and gives them a sodden and disagreeable appearance.... A little cream is a fine improvement to stewed oysters."

Mr. Grace's article, as well as others written by Karen Herzog of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1999 and Cathy Benson of Roanoke Times & World News in 2003, concludes that the tradition of oyster stew on Christmas Eve came from the Irish. As Catholics, they were not allowed to eat meat the day before a religious feast. In their native country, they had prepared a stew with a chewy fish called ling, which wasn't available in the United States. Oysters were substituted because of a similar taste.

Maybe my German Catholic descendants in Wisconsin had some Irish Catholic neighbors....

Growing up, the Roos family always made traditional Maryland oyster stew (sans seafood seasoning); we just didn't know it. Milk, butter, oysters and salt and pepper were all we used. This recipe is from the Maryland Department of Agriculture.

TRADITIONAL MARYLAND OYSTER STEW

1 pint shucked Maryland oysters, with liquor

1 quart milk

1/4 cup butter or margarine

Salt and pepper to taste

Seafood seasoning, if desired

In 4-quart pan, cook oysters, with liquor, over low heat until edges of oysters just begin to curl. Add milk, margarine or butter, salt and pepper. Heat slowly until hot; do not boil. For an extra "zip" sprinkle seafood seasoning on each serving. Makes about 6 cups stew.

I have to admit that I've gone beyond traditional with my oyster stew since I've moved to Maryland and oysters are more readily available. I've added a few things to "enhance" the milk, while not detracting from the flavor of the oysters. This is something that I cook from feel, depending on my mood and the number of servings I am preparing. But a typical Christmas Eve oyster stew at my house now starts by sauteeing some pancetta (or bacon) in pan large enough to accommodate the amount of milk you plan on adding. When it's done, remove the pancetta and add diced leek to the skillet, adding butter according to taste. When the leek is tender but not crisp, pour in the oysters with liquor, and cook over low until edges just begin to curl. Add milk and a dash or two of RedHot, salt and pepper, according to taste. Heat slowly.

If you need more specific instructions, here's a very similar recipe from a friend, Erin Colomb Henson, who is the deputy director of public affairs for the Maryland Department of Transportation.

It has been described as "killer." (Oysterman agrees).

ERIN'S OYSTER STEW:

SERVES 2 for a large bowl each with a little leftover or SERVES 4 for a small appetizer

PREP TIME: 20 minutes

COOK TIME: 15 minutes

1 pint oysters

1 cup milk (we use Lactaid, but any kind is fine.)

1 cup heavy cream

3 strips bacon

1/4 vidalia onion (or other onion)

1/2 bunch green onions/scallions

FOR GARNISH ONLY WHEN SERVING

another 1/2 bunch of green onions

1 garlic clove

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teasoon pepper

1/8 teaspoon cayenne

2 dashes hot sauce

Butter (optional)

PREP:

Chop onion and green onions (all green and white parts). Set 1/2 bunch of green onions aside for garnish.

Finely chop garlic clove (leave separate from onion and green onions).

Put all spices in small bowl except for hot sauce.

Chop uncooked bacon in small pieces and set aside.

Put cream and milk in bowl or measuring cup.

Drain oyster liquor from pint of oysters carefully not to lose any oysters.

COOK:

Cook chopped bacon until fat renders, but not anywhere near crisp. DO NOT DRAIN. Leave fat in pan that is your cooking base and flavor. Add garlic first, until it begins to turn brown. Add onion and green onions (except for garnish). You may want to add some butter at this time depending on how moist the onions are. Cook until translucent.

Add spices and a few dashes of hot sauce. Add cream/milk mixture and oyster liquor. Bring to a near boil and add oysters. Immediately bring to a low simmer to four or five minutes until the oysters curl.

Serve with scallions on top, a little black pepper and a small bit of butter is optional.

Serve with hot French bread.

Erin's note at the end: "ENJOY … And say a small prayer to the oyster gods, and "Save the Bay"!

If you've got a favorite food tradition you'd like to share, or if you're looking for a recipe, please e-mail Locally Grown at food@capitalgazette.com.

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Oysters - Gem of the ocean

2008-12-22T21:09:00.001-08:00

A Dozen Oysters and a Pint of Guinness, Please

From The Economist print edition

Bridgeman Art Library

I would love to own this painting.

JUST as household trash tells you a lot about a family, so mankind’s rubbish heaps reveal much about the species. One of the best lies in the waters around Manhattan. There, archaeologists have found mounds of oyster shells, known as middens, dating back to 6950BC.

People have fed on oysters so long that the man whom Jonathan Swift called brave for first eating one is quite out of range of history’s eye. Sergius Orata, a Roman engineer who lived in the first century BC, cultivated oysters in southern Italian lakes by bringing them to spawn on rock piles that he surrounded with twigs. Larval oysters settled on the twigs, which the cultivator could monitor easily; when the oysters grew to marketable size, they were plucked off and sold.

In Manhattan the oyster trade really took off with the arrival of Europeans: as Mark Kurlansky writes in the opening to “The Big Oyster”, his marvellous examination of the dark and salty crossroads where bivalency and humanity meet, “To anyone who is familiar with New Yorkers, it should not be surprising to learn that they were once famous for eating their food live.” Yet had the Europeans examined those shell mounds more closely, they would have found something ominous: the shells grow larger toward the bottom. Left alone, oysters never stop growing. The largest ones were taken first. As more people arrived, the average oyster’s lifespan fell: even in pre-European America, overfishing threatened.

Those ancient New Yorkers and the Dutch and English who followed plundered the area’s oyster supply without a second thought. The waters around New York once teemed with oysters, as did those around London. Both cities were built on estuaries, allowing the constant yet changing mixture of fresh and salty water that oysters love. Both cities progressed rapidly from manufacturing to industrial to financial capitals, and in the process, voraciously abetted by the appetites of their citizenry, both killed their oysters (Paris, the third great oyster metropolis, protected its beds far more successfully, and to this day shuckers presiding over crates of oysters packed in ice remain a common sight on the city’s corners in winter). In so doing, New York and London may have destroyed something far more than a delicious source of protein: oysters are not only among the strangest and tastiest creatures in the sea, but as far as the health of marine ecosystems go, they may also be the most important.

Edible oysters fall into one of five main species: Ostrea edulis, the European oyster, is the most regular, rounded and attractive in appearance; they are most often sold as Galway or Mersey flats in Britain and Ireland and belons in France (like wine, oysters take on characteristics of the terroir, so to speak, in which they are raised; the wildly different tastes result not from biology but from the variant diets, temperatures and salinity offered by the water in which the individual oysters spend their lives). Ostrea lurida, sold most often as the Olympia, is the only species native to America’s west coast; it is small, sweet and tastes of grass and earth rather than the sea.

Crassostrea sikaema, known as Kumamotos, are small and quite deep-shelled; they were brought to America’ s west coast from Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture, and have a crisp texture and a taste that is reminiscent of melons or cucumbers. Crassostrea gigas are native to the Pacific but grown around the world—notably in France as the green-tinged Marennes-Oléron and the fine de claire.

Gigas are closely related to Crassostrea angulata, formerly known as the Portuguese oyster. The story goes that C. angulata were introduced to northern Europe, particularly France and Britain, when a ship carrying a cargo of Portuguese oysters, took shelter from a storm in southwestern France. Believing his oysters ruined, the captain jettisoned them. They flourished. It was either these or O. edulis that M.F.K. Fisher, an American food writer, had in mind when she recounted an old recipe for a single roasted oyster: “You start with an oyster. You put it inside a large olive. Then you put the olive inside an ortolan (a wee bird called ‘the garden bunting’, in case you are among the underprivileged), and the ortolan inside a lark, and so on and so on. In the end you have a roasted oyster. Or perhaps a social revolution.”

The teardrop-shaped Crassostrea virginica thrive on America’s east coast, and can appear in guises as diverse as the small, intensely briny Malpeque, from Prince Edward Island, to the large and sweetly bland Apalachicola, from Florida. Historically, however, most virginicas—a significant portion, if not an outright majority, of oysters eaten in America, from the time of the Civil War until the mid 1980s—came from the Chesapeake Bay, situated mostly in Maryland but with a watershed stretching 64,000 square miles across six states and the District of Columbia.

Although the Chesapeake region might be best known for its blue crabs, in fact oyster harvesting and processing formed the most commercially viable operation in the region as far back as the Civil War. And the waters teemed with oysters long before that: when John Smith first sailed into the Chesapeake in 1608, he wrote that they “lay as thick as stones”—so profuse, in fact, that they made navigation difficult.

The stone-thickness of the oyster beds that Smith saw attest not just to the Chesapeake’s ideal salinity—situated as it is just in from the Atlantic, and fed by dozens of rivers from across the watershed—but also to the beds’ age: left undisturbed, oyster beds would indeed thicken impressively, because oysters like setting their shell nowhere as much as on the back of another oyster shell, because they grow larger the longer they live, and because proximity aids successful spawning. Spawning occurs in the warmer part of the year—hence the historic injunction against eating oysters in months that lack an R. This has nothing to do with illness (though obviously oysters, like other raw meat, spoil faster in warm weather), but because, as Ms Fisher reminds us, “oysters, like all men, are somewhat weaker after they have done their best at reproducing”—the meat tends to be thin and flat-tasting. They spawn by releasing gametes into the water: a female Atlantic oyster tends to release clouds of eggs in a series of wet puffs, while males send sperm forth in a stream. But male oysters can spawn in the style of females, and vice versa; and hermaphroditism, in which eggs and sperm shoot out of the same oyster at the same time, also occurs, albeit rarely.

Fertilisation occurs when opposite gametes meet in the water: hence the advantage offered by proximity. Generally, the male releases his gametes first, which acts as a signal to any females nearby. The spawning process takes about 45 minutes, during which a female will emit anywhere from 10,000 to around 60m eggs, only a small fraction of which will be lucky enough to meet their mates. Once the pair of gametes connect, they become a larva that drifts and swims in the tidal current, propelling itself by means of a little organ ringed with cilia called a velium. This is an oyster’s only taste of free movement. When the larva grows to around 300 microns (roughly one-third of a millimetre), it extends its foot and seeks a suitable surface on which to set. Having found one, it grows into a spat, which when seen beneath a microscope already resembles a tiny oyster, with the shape of a shell already visible. It prefers settling on hard, chalky surfaces. Farms often use tiles as the foundations of their beds, but when given a choice spat seem to prefer oyster shells.

And there’s the rub: most of the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster operations have been public fisheries rather than aquaculture—anyone with a license could take oysters from state-owned bars, and though size and number limits were set, often they were more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Once a tipping point was reached, oysters were too far apart for enough of their gametes to meet, so the population could not sustain itself. And those few larvae that were lucky enough to live long enough to extend a probing foot too often found only silt. The oyster population in the Chesapeake today stands at just 1% of its pre-1980 levels.

It wasn’t just overfishing that depleted the oyster population. Between 1950 and 2000 the human population of the Chesapeake Bay watershed region has more than doubled, from 8m to over 16.7m. The Eastern Shore, long a relatively isolated patch of America’s east coast best known for the odd quasi-Elizabethan English spoken by its inhabitants, became an increasingly popular weekend and second-home destination. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have weekend homes in the harbour town of St Michaels. Mr Rumsfeld’s is called Mount Misery: Frederick Douglass, a renowned American abolitionist and statesman, was enslaved there in the early 19th century.

Scraping the sea bed in Chesapeake Bay

The charm is obvious enough: rather like the Norfolk Broads, it contains few breathtaking vistas but, taken as a whole, its quiet, undulating, slithery beauty and ramshackle little towns leave few unmoved, and if your correspondent had to choose a place to see his last sunrise, this might be it. Of course, every golf course, condo development and chain restaurant chips away at the very thing that made people want to move there in the first place. And they inevitably bring environmental problems: sewage, agricultural run-off and increased burning of fossil fuels, all of which produce large quantities of pollutants, which find their way into the bay.

As far as the health of marine ecosystems go, perhaps no single pollutant does more harm than nitrogen. It occurs naturally in human and animal waste. Fossil-fuel combustion produces nitrogen oxides, which rise into the atmosphere and come down in rainfall as nitric acid. And fertilisers often contain large quantities of nitrogen, which seeps into the groundwater and is washed into the bay. In the water, nitrogen serves as a major nutrient for microscopic organisms called phytoplankton. Individually, they are invisible to the naked eye, but when present in large quantities they cause massive blooms, clouding the water reddish, green, yellow or brown and preventing sunlight from filtering through the water. Also, as these phytoplankton die, they, like all organic matter, are eaten by bacteria, which, also like all organic matter, breathe, using up valuable oxygen in the water. Nitrogen thus harms aquatic life in two ways: by allowing phytoplankton to live, it keeps sunlight from reaching underwater plants and grasses, which removes an important source of food and habitat for numerous marine species. And the bacteria that feed on dying phytoplankton use oxygen, leaving less for fish and crabs.

Fortunately, few species filter nitrogen from the water as effectively as oysters—as Bill Goldsboro, a senior scientist with an environmental advocacy group called the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, explains, “The oyster is pretty particular about what it eats, but it’s not particular about what it filters.” A single oyster can filter about 50 gallons of water per day. A few decades ago, the Chesapeake had enough oysters to filter the entire bay every week: that same task would take its existing population a full year. As an oyster eats plankton, it draws in everything else around it, including nitrogen; what it does not eat it expels into the water as solid pellets of waste, which eventually decompose and bubble up into the atmosphere as nitrogen.

In oyster-farming, both economics and the environment winThe efficacy with which an oyster expels everything that displeases it puts paid to a long-standing myth: that pearls are formed when a grain of sand gets into an oyster (or other bivalve), and it protects itself by forming shell material around the intruder. Oysters live in sandy beds; they constantly ingest and expel the stuff. A pearl actually begins from a parasite adhering to an oyster’s mantle, which is a thin organ that surrounds the inside of its shell. The mantle secretes nacre, or mother-of-pearl, by synthesising calcium carbonate from materials in the water. If a parasite tears off a bit of the mantle and carries it to another part of the oyster’s body, that piece of mantle will still secrete nacre, forming a pearl sac around the parasite, which, over years, turns into what people consider a jewel.

This happens very rarely, and so, on a blustery Saturday morning on the Eastern Shore, when the wheezing remnants of Hurricane Gustav turned sky and water alike pearl grey and your correspondent held 6m oysters in the palm of his hand, he was, alas, fairly certain that none of them would facilitate his early retirement. The oysters were being grown in a hatchery run by the University of Maryland just off the Choptank River, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Like most rivers in Maryland, the Choptank flows into the Chesapeake. Its mixture of salty water from the bay and ocean and fresh water from streams in the mountainous west of the state make it a perfect habitat for oysters, and thus an ideal testing ground for a theory: it is not so much that oysters live in clean water, as that water with an abundance of oysters in it will be clean. In other words, dirty water doesn’t drive away the bivalves; rather a lack of bivalves invites the filth.

Predators going after the oysters

Don Meritt, a bluff, burly, deeply-tanned PhD waterman who runs the hatchery (and whom everyone—university president and beaker-scrubber alike—calls Mutt) explains that this is a gross oversimplification, but it contains a grain of truth. “Oysters aren’t the magic bullet, but they’re an important bullet,” he says. Dr Meritt has been studying oysters for the university since 1972. His kingdom is a warren of green-roofed institutional buildings hulking alongside a winding two-lane road, near enough to the Choptank to use its water, which flows in through underground pipes. Inside, oysters spawn in black plastic tubs; algae in every shade of drab seethe and multiply in glass jugs; and cheery young students hunch over notebooks. The future of the bay—and more than just the bay, if the experiments work—may depend on what happens here, for oysters are a keystone species: if they thrive, others will too.

Oysters filter nitrogen, and their beds offer the same multispecies home as hard coral in the tropics. Oysters have relatively few natural predators: mainly starfish, which attach themselves to the shell with multitudinous teeth and patiently chew through, and the oyster drill, a species of carnivorous snail that attaches itself to a mollusc shell with a multi-toothed organ and inserts its proboscis, which releases enzymes that digest the creature in its home, making it easy to hoover up. Watermen once tried to defeat starfish by cutting each one they dragged up in half; unfortunately, since they regenerate, this doubled the starfish population. Even a few predators, however, attract predators of their own. And as the oysters remove both plankton and nitrogen from the water, it grows clearer, allowing eelgrass and other species of marine plants to return, which provide comfortable shelter for crabs, scallops and other aquatic life.

In the hatchery, oysters grow from larvae to spat; a group called the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP) then carries the spat out to the Chesapeake or one of its tributaries and places them in an oyster bed. In 2008 the ORP planted over 450m hatchery-raised oysters. Not all will live, of course, but many do: over 200m through the ORP’s efforts alone, since 2007, totalling around 1,100 acres of new oyster reefs (historically Maryland held about 200,000 acres of oyster reefs; today it has about 36,000). Half of the oysters have been seeded in sanctuaries and cannot be harvested; the other half are in managed-reserve beds, which watermen tend and can harvest from once they reach marketable size. Only a small portion of available oysters will be harvested, whether publicly or privately; most will be left in situ for the environmental benefits they provide.

And Maryland will likely turn away from public fisheries and toward private ownership of beds—after all, people tend to take better care of what they own. Fortunately, farmed oysters, unlike other seafood, suffer no decline in taste. They grow, breed, eat and filter just as they do wild. Indeed, oyster farming is one of the few situations in which both economics and the environment win: any body of water that can support a vibrant oyster industry will almost certainly be cleaner and more vital than one that cannot. Farmed salmon may turn flabby, bland and, without the addition of dye to its diet, dully grey, but eating an oyster will always be, as Léon-Paul Fargue, a Symbolist poet, said, “like kissing the sea on the lips”.

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Shell Recycling Provides a New Home for Oysters

2008-12-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

By: Andrea Moran

These oyster bags contain oyster shells loaded with spat and ready for planting on a restoration reef. CBF's spat on shell restoration method requires tons of recycled oyster shells each year. Photo by John Bildahl

CBF volunteer Walter Zadan delivers another load of oyster shells to the recycling curing site in Williamsburg, Va. Photo by Andrea Moran/CBF Staff

A re-energized Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) shell recycling program is not only keeping thousands of oyster shells out of Hampton Roads landfills, it's also providing future habitat for new oysters. "Save Oyster Shells," commonly referred to as "SOS," is the ultimate "win-win" recycling effort, says CBF Oyster Specialist Jackie Harmon who is coordinating the effort.

Although it's only been under way for about a month on the Virginia Peninsula, the program is gaining momentum as restaurants, volunteers, and community oyster roast organizers get on board. So far, Williamsburg's Berret's Seafood and LaYaca restaurants and Yorktown's waterfront Riverwalk Café are saving oyster shell for later use in CBF's spat on shell restoration projects.

How it works

SOS is simple. CBF provides containers to restaurants, which collect used oyster and clam shells from finished meals. The containers are picked up by CBF volunteers such as Walter Zadan of Williamsburg. Zadan picks up the shell from LaYaca and Berret's and takes them to a curing site provided by Colonial Williamsburg. Zadan says he enjoys doing this and feels good about helping the oyster restoration efforts. And, although it's an extra step for restaurant staff, Harmon says they know it's helping restore the oysters that people love to eat, so it's well worth the effort.

Althea Moore and other students from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) pick up shells from the Riverwalk Café and take them to another CBF curing site at VIMS' Gloucester Point Hatchery. Curing shells allows bacteria and organic matter to decompose before the shells are washed and reintroduced to the water. Each and every saved shell can provide a home for baby oysters, which prefer shells to settle upon.

Loss of shell reefs has made it difficult for oysters to find a foothold and grow, which is why shell recycling for restoration is so important.

After curing and washing, the shells are submerged in wire cages in big tanks at VIMS. Next, baby oyster larvae are released into the tanks and attach themselves to the shells. Several baby oysters will attach to each shell and grow into a cluster, enabling the oysters, now called spat, to be better protected from predators and disease. Later, CBF places the shell clusters on sanctuary oyster reefs throughout Hampton Roads waterways, giving oyster restoration efforts a big boost. In 2008, approximately 10 million oysters were added to local Virginia rivers by using the spat-on-shell method.

From oyster roast to the Bay

Other states have enjoyed great success with shell recycling programs. CBF was one of the local pioneers of shell recycling when the Hampton Roads pilot project began in 2005. SOS is an expansion of that project. Other groups such as Norfolk Environmental Commission and Lynnhaven River NOW also recycle shells. Still, the vast majority of oyster shells end up in landfills.

"We want this resource coming back to us so it can help save the Bay through oyster restoration," Harmon said. "I'm excited about this program because it incorporates green practices in restaurants and provides more shells for restoration. This is good for the Bay and the oyster consumer, so everyone is a winner."

Harmon plans to double the number of participating restaurants in 2009, and collect thousands more shell from community oyster roasts. In order to reach CBF's restoration goals for the next couple of years, she says CBF needs much more shell and many more volunteers to collect them.

If you know of upcoming oyster roasts in 2009, or if you want to become a Save Oyster Shells volunteer, please contact Jackie at jharmon@cbf.org or call 757/622-1964.

Find out more about other CBF Virginia oyster restoration efforts and how you can participate.

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2008-2009 Oyster Season Off to Slow Start

2008-11-26T05:52:00.001-08:00

Watermen say demand is down

Oystering is off to a slow start this fall for watermen and the seafood industry in Virginia and Maryland.

While there's the longstanding issue of the declining number of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, people in the seafood business are finding another problem: There's little demand from consumers.

Even though the holiday season from Thanksgiving through Christmas is prime time for eating oysters in stuffing and stew, few people are buying.

"It's off from last year," said Joe Morotti, owner of Joe's Seafood, a carryout shop in Severna Park. He wouldn't speculate why sales were slow, but hoped last-minute Thanksgiving customers would come in today and tomorrow.

Mr. Morotti was selling pints of shucked oysters for $12.99 for bay oysters and $16.99 for Chincoteagues.

Some watermen can't find much work oystering, because they can't sell what they catch.

"The economy is so bad, they're only working two to three days a week," said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen's Association.

Waterman Joe Kubert of Kent Island said oystering already is a tough business because watermen are limited by law to working five days per week. Add to that the depressed market and the days that are lost to bad weather and "It's the worst it's been in years," he said.

Mr. Simns encourages the public to give oysters a try and not to worry too much about the depleted oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay.

While the oyster population is low due to past overharvesting and pollution and diseases that don't affect humans, the species is carefully watched to avoid a complete wipeout. The population is estimated to be at just 1 or 2 percent of historic levels.

Though watermen and the state regulators often disagree over how the oyster harvest is managed, they have the same goal of making sure oysters aren't overharvested, Mr. Simns said.

"If it's on the market, it's good. Don't try to manage the market yourself by not buying," because that only hurts watermen, seafood processors, retailers and restaurants, he said.

The oyster season opened Oct. 1 and runs through the end of March.

Oysterman says: I already have a couple of pints of shucked to make the stuffing for the turkey - HERE IS THE RECIPIE:

Today I think I'll go out and stimulate the economy and help the local producers by buying a couple of dozen to open tonight. There is nothing like oysters that were just harvested! Cheers.

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State Seeks Ways to Back Aquaculture Industry

2008-11-14T06:06:00.000-08:00

Proposal would help businesses, individuals raise oysters in bay

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Seeking to boost Maryland's fledgling aquaculture industry, the O'Malley administration plans to introduce legislation to make it easier for people and businesses to raise oysters or other shellfish in the Chesapeake Bay.

The administration has drafted a bill that would overhaul the state's law that now limits leasing of the water and the bay bottom to private entities that want to raise oysters or clams. The measure was presented last night at the state's Aquaculture Coordinating Council meeting in Annapolis. (AWESOME!)

Natural Resources Secretary John R. Griffin said the state needs to cut away the red tape and legal limitations on leasing in the Chesapeake if the state's once-prolific oyster industry is going to recover from the diseases that have devastated the Chesapeake's oyster population over the past two decades.

"If you look worldwide, the only places where oysters seem to be thriving is in aquaculture settings," Griffin said yesterday. "There's very few public fisheries left."

The Principle of Oyster Aquaculture - CLICK HERE:

The initiative comes as Maryland, Virginia and the federal government weigh how to go about restoring the bay's disease-depleted oyster stocks as well as its industry, which once harvested millions of bushels of bivalves annually. Harvests in recent years have been a fraction of historical levels, though, as a pair of parasitic diseases have killed off the oysters before they can grow to marketable size. Scientists have said that the bay's once-abundant oysters helped filter pollution from the estuary.

A small but growing cadre of people, including some watermen, are trying their hand at raising oysters. Some say they are finding ways to beat the diseases but remain hampered by legal and bureaucratic hurdles - with the state's leasing restrictions among the most nettlesome.

"We have 100-plus years of cobbled-together, piecemeal" leasing law, said Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell, the minority leader from Southern Maryland and a member of the aquaculture council. He said the law "doesn't make sense in today's world."

There are currently 7,276 acres leased in Maryland waters, with about 300 individuals holding 700 20-year leases. However, relatively little of that is being used to raise oysters, state officials say.

State law prohibits leasing where oysters grow naturally. But those restrictions are based on century-old surveys, when oysters were much more abundant, so much of the bay is off-limits. Leasing also is completely banned in a handful of counties.

"We've got to clear away some of that underbrush and help to build our industry here," Griffin said.

The administration bill proposes to reserve for wild harvest only those waters where oysters recently were caught and to remove limitations on the size and location of leases. It also would remove the ban on corporations holding leases.

The measure would also establish a pair of "aquaculture enterprise zones" in the Patuxent and Rhode rivers. In those 50-acre tracts, leasing would be streamlined and essentially "pre-permitted" to make it easier to start raising oysters - either on the bottom or in floats on the water. Though given rights to use the bay for 20 years, leaseholders would be required to use their leases or risk losing them.

The bay's watermen traditionally have opposed any significant expansion of private leasing of the bay, fearing it would deprive them of the ability to pluck wild oysters from the most productive reefs. But with most wild oysters gone, at least some watermen are beginning to eye private aquaculture as a means of continuing to make a living from the bay.

"We don't have nowhere else to turn," said Larry W. Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen's Association. With the decline of the public fishery, and the state's ability to support it, he said that "if we don't do something ourselves, it ain't going to happen."

Simns said watermen remain wary. They want an opportunity or even guarantee they'll be able to get good leases, he said. They also want to be shown that they can make money raising oysters rather than roaming the bay to harvest what nature produces. He argued that the oyster diseases remain the biggest hurdle to large-scale aquaculture.

Waterfront property owners also may resist an expansion of aquaculture. Some have objected at times to private oyster floats or clam beds along the shore, where they complain they are unsightly and impede boating.

State officials say the legislation would bar leases within 50 feet of the shoreline or a pier, or in narrow creeks, coves or inlets - a provision meant to address landowner complaints.

Oysterman's take on this:

"I still think about how cool it would be to have a couple of oyster floats in my backyard. Any time the desire strikes, I could walk down to the floats and collect a dozen or two. Then, walk back to the house and put them on the grill.

That's the problem with living on fresh water. Oh well".

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Three Methods Vie to Restore Oysters to Chesapeake Bay

2008-11-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

By Scott Harper
Link to original article:

Virginians are weighing in with their choices for a preferred grand strategy for restoring oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, and so far, the winner seems to be an old favorite - sticking with the native species.

A side-by-side comparison of an Asian oyster, left, and a native oyster. The Asian species grow faster and are more resistant to disease. (Hyunsoo Leo Kim | The Virginian-Pilot)

At public meetings last week in Newport News and Colonial Beach, most speakers said they think an Asian oyster is too biologically risky to introduce directly into the Bay.

This majority includes scientists, environmentalists and watermen. They instead want government to step up its efforts at bringing back the native Eastern oyster from near extinction, despite minimal success over the past 15 years at doing so.

The Asian animal, also known as ariakensis or the Suminoe oyster, is not a silver bullet, said Jay O'Dell, a scientist with The Nature Conservancy, at a three-hour public hearing Friday night in Newport News.

Other Atlantic coastal states, he said, are opposed to the foreign species as well, fearing it could spread into their waters and carry new problems if Virginia and Maryland decide to give the China Sea import an adopted home in the Bay.

"It's just way too early to give up on the Eastern oyster," O'Dell said.

He said federal, state and local governments have spent "only about $58 million" on native recovery efforts since the mid-1990s. "That's decimal dust in the federal budget," O'Dell said.

A meaningful program, he and others said, would cost $520 million over 10 years.

The hearings last week stem from the release of a major environmental study on restoration alternatives for Chesapeake oysters.

Native stocks have sunk to historic lows because of disease, pollution, overfishing and lost habitat. This has left the Bay without a key natural filter of pollutants and has decimated a once-powerful oyster industry.

Led by the Army Corps of Engineers and taking five years and nearly $15 million to complete, the study reached no conclusions about a top strategy, but it suggested three combination plans.

All three call for increased funding and attention to the native species, one supports careful cultivation of sterile Asians in controlled settings, and one includes a direct introduction of reproducing Asian oysters.

In advance of choosing a path, the corps scheduled six public meetings, three in Virginia and three in Maryland.

The corps expects to announce a final plan by June.

The third and final public hearing in Virginia is tonight on the Eastern Shore, where interest in farming native oysters is gaining momentum.

The biggest champions of an Asian introduction are seafood merchants and other business interests that have watched shucking houses close, jobs disappear and profits fall for several decades.

More recently, they have trumpeted successes with the Asian oyster in controlled field tests. The animals grow to market size faster than natives, taste about the same and, most important, do not die of local diseases.

"Until we get an organism that beats the disease, we're not going to have any success, no matter how much money we throw at it," said Robert Johnson, a Suffolk seafood executive, at Friday night's hearing.

Johnson said private industry would pay for most of the Asian work, while native restoration relies mostly on taxpayer money.

A.J. Erskine, president of the Virginia Seafood Council, said the long debate Friday night - and for the past decade - misses a key point.

"No one is saying we should stop one thing and do another," he said. "We're saying do both - continue working with natives as well as with ariakensis. Why can't we look at both?"

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Brady's Oysters

2008-10-31T15:05:00.000-07:00

I found this site while surfing the internet. If I am ever in Aberdeen WA, I am going to stop by. Cute bumper sticker too.

Brady's Oyster Website:

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Chesapeake Bay Oyster History Lesson

2008-10-27T05:13:00.000-07:00

Here is some Oyster history:

Beyond mere food, oysters are history. Oysters made Chesapeake Bay and the tidewater culture that embraces it. Chesapeake itself means “Great Shellfish Bay”. Archeologists can spot a pre- European contact Indian village site by the overgrown piles of discarded shells. Visit old tobacco plantations from Mount Vernon to Cape Charles; each has tucked away, amid the poison ivy and kudzu, a mound of old oyster shells quietly dissolving back into the soil. Indentured servants and slaves were fed oysters; cheap protein and free for the harvesting in the shallows. One of the first labor strikes in American history rose from indentured servants complaining about having to eat oysters day in and day out.

When John Smith explored the Bay in the 1500’s, he found oysters so extensive that they formed reefs, breaking the surface at low tide and a hazzard to navigation. The European settlers adapted the Indian appetites and watercraft. Soon, schooners called bugeyes, sporting two raked masts and hulls built from nine old-growth pitch pine logs, were hauling dredges across the reefs. After centuries of onslaught, the reefs soon dwindled to bars; smaller, shorter, and harder to get at, but still chock full of oysters. Bugeyes gave way to skipjacks—single masted plank-built sloops that could handle the new conditions. These graceful craft began the evolution of clipper ships, the acme of sailing ship development.

Oysters are vital to Chesapeake Bay, in large part responsible for its teeming biodiversity and are the Bay’s filtering system. Oysters are what ecologists call a “keystone species”. Keystone species are defined, like the Cheshire Cat, by what’s left when they are gone. Pull a keystone species out of the environmental pyramid, and you get a resulting cascade of unforeseen changes and extinctions of species that, at first glance, have nothing to do with oysters drop in abundance and associated ecosystem function. Ecologists estimate that, at the turn of the 20th century, a volume water equivalent to that of the entire Chesapeake Bay was filtered through an oyster every three days. A single oyster runs 50 gallons of water a day through its gills, feeding on and removing algae and bacteria.

Restored Oyster Reef

Oysters’ prodigious filtering capacity was the major influence on submerged vegetation. Oysters filter feed on one celled algae, keeping the water clear enough for sunlight to penetrate to the bottom, allowing aquatic grasses to thrive. The grasses formed nurseries for crabs and fish of all sorts.

In the 19th Century, sail switched to steam and gasoline engines and the plunder became serious. Maryland made feeble attempts at conservation, such as limiting dredging to sail only, but to little avail. It is an adage among fisheries management people that governments don’t enact management plans until the resource has already dwindled to critical levels. After being pounded for 400 years, the oysters have seemingly given up. Down to one percent of their former populations, they are no longer a major functional part of Chesapeake ecology.

Eastport once had nearly 20 oyster shucking houses and watermen tied up at nearby Annapolis City Dock to off load their bushels of bivalves. Skipjacks and smaller working craft were common in the harbor.

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Shells Reveal Change in Oysters

2008-10-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

400-year-old remnants show that creatures grew faster than they do today

By PAULA NEELY

A study of 400-year-old oyster shells discovered in a Jamestown well used by colonists shows that eastern oysters grew significantly faster then than oysters today, a clue that may help shed light on the plight of the modern oyster.

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science study provides the first documented evidence that oysters function differently than they did in the early 1600s.

They were larger than modern oysters the same age, which probably would have made them "exponentially more capable of reproducing, filtering water and making shell," said Juliana Harding, senior marine scientist at VIMS.

Roger Mann, professor of marine science at VIMS, said the slower growth rate of modern oysters may be the result of changes in water quality or sedimentation -- which can bury oyster habitat -- diseases, or a combination of these factors.

Researchers studied shells unearthed in a 1609-1616 well discovered inside the James Fort site at Historic Jamestowne in 2006. Archaeologists contacted VIMS and other organizations to find out what shells and other organic artifacts preserved in the watery environment could reveal about the Chesapeake before the impact of European colonization.

As they produce their shells, oysters, clams and other mollusks record biological information about their age and growth just like trees store information in growth rings. They also incorporate minerals from the water and lay down a record about their environment that can potentially provide information about water temperature and salinity levels.

"They're like a million environmental barometers spread all over the place that have recorded everything that's happened at that spot throughout their entire life history," Mann said.

To select shells suitable for comparison, Harding sorted through about 3,000 oyster shells deposited in the well after colonists began using it as a trash pit.

To determine changes in growth rate, researchers measured the shell lengths and compared the historic oysters with modern oysters of the same age from similar sites in the James River that had the same salinity level as Jamestown in the early 1600s.

Studies of mineral deposits in the 400-year-old shells of tiny crustaceans and marine protozoans from the Chesapeake Bay were used to determine that salinity levels around Jamestown were 10-15 parts per thousand higher than they are now.

In 1617, oyster reefs in the James River near Jamestown were large enough to be navigational hazards, indicated as small islands on a 17th century map drawn by Johannes Vingboons, a Dutch cartographer. Harding said they would have been visible at low tide.

Although oysters can live 10 to 20 years, Harding said most modern oysters die before they are two or three years old, mainly because of diseases, harvesting and habitat degradation.

"Restoring them is not simply a matter of putting more oysters in, leaving them alone and expecting the same results we had 400 years ago," she said. "You need to plan and accommodate for things that are out there now that were not there then. That's a step that has not always been acknowledged."
Results from the study will be published in the Journal of Shellfish Research in December. For further information, visit www.vims.edu/mollusc/research/mehoyJT.htm

Old Wilson Bridge Finds New Life As Artificial Reef for Baby Oysters

2008-10-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

By Christy Goodman
Washington Post Staff Writer

SEE THE VIDEO OF THE OYSTERS BEING DELIVERED:

Marine biologists and divers hand-delivered 500,000 baby oysters to the first of five new artificial reefs created from the rubble of the old Woodrow Wilson Bridge this week, part of a broader effort to restore the badly depleted oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay.

On Thursday, a six-person diving crew planted the native oyster spat on 80 acres of concrete slabs on the bay's sandy bottom about 10 miles southwest of Chesapeake Beach in Calvert County. The artificial reef is also providing a habitat for rockfish, black sea bass and other fish.

The project, known as the Dominion Reef at the Gooses, is a "small-scale example" of what Maryland officials could propose to the 2009 General Assembly as part of the state's oyster restoration effort, said Martin Gary, a fisheries biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

This week, state and federal environmental officials released a major study addressing ways to revive the bay's oysters. Possible fixes include a temporary harvest moratorium and the introduction of nonnative Asian oysters.

The reef project, estimated to cost $1.4 million for the five sites, represents a far less sweeping but important step, state officials said. "It is not a perfect program, but with what we are trying to do, our hearts are in the right place," Gary said.

The project is one of the largest undertaken by the Maryland Artificial Reef Initiative, a coalition of groups sharing an interest in improving the environment below the surface of Maryland waters.

Earlier this year, the coalition was involved in dumping old New York subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean to house marine life near Ocean City, and next week it will use old Bay Bridge decks to build an oyster reef in the Severn River.

The latest reef project -- named after the Dominion utility, which donated $275,000 -- attracted about 60 partners, including scientists, corporations, environmental groups and sport fishermen, Gary said.

Before the Wilson Bridge's concrete deck was placed into the water, the bay's floor "was a barren desert," Gary said. "There was no reason for marine life to be there."

In the mid-1800s, an average of 15 million bushels of oysters were caught annually in Maryland waters. The yearly harvest dropped below 1 million bushels in the late 1980s because of disease and pollution, according to experts. In addition, about 2,000 acres of natural oyster habitat disappear each year, said Stephan R. Abel, executive director of the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

On Thursday, Nick Caloyianis, an Oscar-winning underwater filmmaker from Catonsville who has been documenting the reef project, said there was "an amazing array" of other marine life at the site already.

"It is definitely doing its job as an artificial reef. We are seeing a lot of health down there," he said.

Brian Keehn, president of the Maryland Charter Boat Association and captain of the Canvasback, a boat that transported the divers, biologists and others to the reef, praised the oyster-planting effort.

"This is a win-win for all users of the bay, the fish and the habitat," said Keehn, whose organization had been advocating for artificial reefs for five years.

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Groups Support Bid to Revive Native Bay Oysters

2008-10-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like the native bay oyster. the Asian oysters have a different taste. AFI

Article By Timothy B. Wheeler

Two leading environmental groups voiced their support yesterday for trying to revive the Chesapeake Bay's native oyster rather than introducing Asian oysters into the estuary.

Delicious Chesapeake Bay Oysters (Last Night's Dinner)

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Nature Conservancy said they believe that native oyster restoration still holds promise - both ecologically and for the seafood industry - and does not pose the risks associated with putting Asian oysters into the bay.

"Given the available information, the combination of native oyster aquaculture and enhanced native restoration clearly provides the best potential for progress with the least amount of risk," said foundation President William C. Baker.

Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Maryland and Virginia released a 1,500-page draft environmental impact statement yesterday evaluating different strategies for restoring the bay's oyster population, which has shrunk to 1 percent of historic levels because of disease and overharvesting.

Native oyster restoration efforts to date have yielded meager results.

While studies have found that Asian oysters hold promise because they resist the diseases killing native oysters, the foreign species poses several risks, including hurting what's left of the native oysters or introducing yet another shellfish disease to the bay.

The study made no recommendations. Officials say they want public input on the alternatives to help them determine the right course.

Gov. Martin O'Malley issued a statement declaring that while the study "does not offer a definitive recommendation" on whether to put Asian oysters in the bay, "I remain concerned that the risk of such an irrevocable step could well outweigh any benefit." (Tell it brother).

Virginia officials have backed controlled experiments with sterile Asian oysters in their waters.

Six public meetings will be held to get input.

The Maryland sessions will be on Nov. 12 in Solomons, Nov. 13 in Annapolis and Nov. 14 in Cambridge.

A decision is expected next spring.

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Asian Oyster Holds Promise, Risk

2008-10-10T08:34:00.001-07:00

Species could re-establish depleted bay fishery, study says
By Timothy B. Wheeler

State officials say they want to hear public views on the Asian oyster. Some environmentalists fear decisions will be based on politics, not science.

Photo courtesy of Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Seeding the Chesapeake Bay with disease-resistant Asian oysters could significantly boost the bay's depleted population of the water-cleaning shellfish, according to a federal study to be released next week.

But the study, a copy of which was obtained by The Baltimore Sun, warns that the foreign species also could harm what's left of the bay's native oyster population - and perhaps spread to threaten ecosystems all along the East Coast.

The draft environmental impact statement by the Army Corps of Engineers lists pros and cons of the controversial proposal to put Asian oysters in the bay, an idea that had been pushed hard by the Ehrlich administration to revive a flagging seafood industry.

But after more than four years of research and debate among scientists, the $17 million study does not make a recommendation about what route would be best for the bay. Officials say they want to hear public views on the matter first.

That stance bothers some environmentalists, who say the decision should be based on science - not a political desire to help the seafood industry.

Jamie King, a former federal scientist who coordinated much of the research that went into the study, called the lack of a recommendation "an abdication of responsibility." She said state and federal agencies had pledged to base their decision on science, but she suspects they will rely on "the court of public opinion."

"They want to see who screams the loudest," she said.

But an O'Malley administration official said restoring the bay's oyster population is a public policy issue that goes beyond science.

"It's not going to be put to a vote, but we're very interested in hearing the public's feedback on the options before us," said Tom O'Connell, fisheries director for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. O'Connell said officials want to know how committed people are to restoring the native oyster, and how willing they are to take a chance on an Asian oyster that could cause other problems.

The study, funded by Maryland, Virginia and federal agencies, was launched four years ago to settle a growing debate about the environmental risks of putting non-native oysters in the bay to supplement a native oyster population decimated by parasitic diseases and overharvesting.

The O'Malley administration, unlike Ehrlich's, is "skeptical" about the wisdom of introducing Asian oyster, O'Connell said. After six public meetings over the next two months, the two states and the Army Corps hope to agree early next year on whether to introduce Asian oysters, continue working to restore native oysters, or both.

Oysters are seen by many as a key to the bay's health. Scientists have suggested that the bay's water-quality woes may be linked in part to the drastic decline in bay oysters, since by some estimates they were once so abundant they filtered all the Chesapeake's water every three or four days.

Efforts to restore the native oyster by propagating millions of them in government hatcheries have produced only mixed results to date - though critics point out that in Maryland, watermen are still allowed to harvest many of the publicly produced oysters.

Urged on by its seafood industry, Virginia has been growing sterilized batches of the Asian oyster in its portion of the bay for years to see how they fare. Seafood processors and watermen in both states argue that their livelihood is doomed without a new oyster capable of fending off the parasitic diseases that kill native oysters before they can grow large enough to market.

The study looks not only at seeding the bay with billions of Asian oysters, but at growing sterilized Asian oysters in the bay for commercial use. It also evaluates several options for stepping up efforts to restore native oysters - including a baywide moratorium on harvesting them.

It found that doing everything at once - introducing sterile and reproducing Asian oysters, and boosting native oyster work - offers the best prospects for rebuilding an oyster population in the bay. But that approach also carries the greatest risks of environmental harm, the study warned, and it still may not succeed at restoring oysters to the abundance they had until about 40 years ago.

"I think there's some serious promise" with the Asian oyster, said Kennedy Paynter, a University of Maryland oyster biologist who has worked with both species. "But I think that the potential for serious negative impact that we don't understand yet is still quite high."

Asian oysters have proven fast-growing and resistant to the two parasitic diseases killing native bay oysters. But research in recent years has found that the imports are more vulnerable to predators and poor water quality. They die off relatively quickly when oxygen levels drop in the water - a serious issue, some scientists say, because of the "dead zone" that spreads across the bay bottom in summer.

They also seem to be vulnerable to another parasite than the ones killing native oysters. A batch of Asian oysters being tested in North Carolina died off after becoming infected with Bonamia, an organism not seen in the bay now but capable of surviving in its saltier waters.

If Asian oysters do take hold in the bay, the study says, research has shown that they may compete with native oysters for food and habitat, raising concerns that the import could crowd out the native.

Seafood industry leaders have indicated they'd like to practice aquaculture with sterile Asian oysters, which would grow especially fast and large. But scientists have warned that reproducing Asian oysters could eventually end up in the bay, and then spread. The study says that if that happened, it would take many years.

"That's the ultimate question: How much risk are you willing to accept?" said Jack Travelstead, fisheries director for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

Stan Allen, an oyster researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, argues that the risks of using sterile Asian oysters are manageable, and that any escape of reproducing oysters could be detected and cleaned up before they could spread. He suggested that risk ought to be weighed against the prospect of reviving the region's struggling oyster industry.

Other scientists and environmentalists urge caution.

"The burden of proof needs to be on the [advocates of ] introduction to show that it will not result in significant problems," said William Goldsborough, senior scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

"If the Asian oyster is introduced successfully to Chesapeake Bay, that's an irreversible decision ... that still has very uncertain consequences, in terms of risk and benefits," said Denise Breitburg, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater.

"Given that," she said, "we should exhaust all possibilities for native oyster restoration before we do what I consider a drastic step."

2008-10-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

Oyster season opened in Virginia a few days ago, October 1st. Tonight I will be steaming three dozen Chesapeake Bay oysters for myself. AAAAHHHHHH.

Welcome Oysterfest 2008!!!

Oyster - #4 of the 10 Eco-best Fish to Eat

2008-10-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

The oyster landed in the #4 spot of the 10 Eco-best fish to eat (by the Environmental Defense Fund).

Very interesting.

Here is a link to the original article:

I guess the picture credit is MSN? Oh well.

Original article text:

Oysters (Farmed)

Three species -- Eastern or American oyster, edible oyster and Pacific oysters (covered here) -- are farmed in the U.S.

Originally from Japan, the Pacific or Japanese oyster (a.k.a. Crassostrea gigas, Japanese oyster, Pacific giant oyster) was first introduced on the West Coast from larval seed oysters brought from Japan to British Columbia, where fisheries based on the slow-growing Olympia oyster were in decline. The Pacific oyster is now the most commonly farmed shellfish both in the United States and worldwide. This fast-growing oyster may reach 12 inches (30 cm) long.

Commercial Sources

Pacific oysters are native to northeastern Asia. However, they have been introduced into Europe, North America, East Asia and Oceania.

The main sources of Pacific oysters are China, Japan, South Korea and France. Oysters sold in the U.S. market are primarily from the United States, South Korea, Japan and China.

Capture Methods

Pacific oysters come from shellfish farms. Farmed oysters are raised with suspended systems.

Eco Details

Pacific oysters are not native to North America, but are commonly found in the wild. As filter feeders, they feed on suspended biological matter, helping to keep the water clean. Pacific oysters are raised on suspended ropes, trays, or the ocean floor.

Health Details

Adults and children can safely eat more than 4 meals per month.
Oysters contain low to no contaminant levels.
Oysters are high in heart-healthy omega-3s.

Flavor and Texture

Cook oysters very lightly, only until the mantle curls. Oyster meat has a mild flavor, but the texture can be rubbery.

Buying Tips

Be sure you buy (and cook) them live! Tap on shells to see whether they close; the smell should be natural sea smell, not sulfurous. Store at 34-38 degrees F, in a breathable container. Don't put them in fresh water; it will kill them.

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Virginia Watermen Take on Oyster Farming

2008-09-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

By SCOTT HARPER | The Virginian-Pilot

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - With fewer and fewer wild oysters left to harvest in the Chesapeake Bay, two local watermen are trying their hand at a similar, but altogether different, trade - oyster farming.

With help from an environmental group, the watermen built their own holding tank out of fiberglass, bought 12 million specially bred baby oysters from a hatchery, got them to attach to recycled oyster shells and, on Monday, planted them in mesh bags on the bottom of the Lynnhaven River.

"I made a lot of money crabbing, but that's pretty much gone away," said Pete Nixon, a lifelong commercial fisherman from Norfolk, as he stacked dozens of shell-stuffed oyster bags onto his work boat. "You can't sit still in this business. I've got to keep moving, keep trying something new."

The experiment is the first of its kind on the Lynnhaven, a Virginia Beach waterway once renowned for its big, salty oysters. It also is the first time that such a seafood-farming venture has been directly overseen by watermen themselves, instead of orchestrated by a large company.

"It's a way to keep these guys working," said Tommy Leggett, an oyster scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Virginia, which provided technical assistance and access to grant money for the project.

Nixon and his partner, John Meekins, could earn as much as $100,000 when the baby oysters grow into adults and are sold to restaurants and market houses--"hopefully by next Christmas, or maybe by the Super Bowl," Nixon said with a grin.

The watermen are using a different kind of native oyster, known as "spat-on-shell." Instead of floating freely, the babies, or spat, are allowed to attach to old shells before being planted into a waterway. This way, the larvae stand a better chance of survival in an environment dominated by disease, pollution and cow-nosed rays, sea creatures that can gobble hundreds of baby oysters for breakfast.

The babies also are sterile. This means they can grow to market size faster than regular oysters, which spend much of their energy on spawning.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and state marine officials have proven that sterile, spat-on-shell varieties can grow to maturity in 12 to 18 months, instead of the usual two or three years. When left in the water for so long, most native oysters will have died, succumbing to the diseases MSX and Dermo, which have ravaged Bay stocks to near extinction during the past 50 years.

Successful spat-on-shell experiments by seafood companies in waters off the Potomac River have led to a new wave of oyster farming, or aquaculture, in Virginia. But those ventures involved watermen as simple laborers and boat captains; the Lynnhaven experiment puts the watermen in charge.

"We want to see if the little guys can do it, too," Nixon said Monday. "Can we be profitable on small plots of river bottom, and with few resources at our disposal? That's the key to seeing other guys jump into this."

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Circle C Oyster Ranch

2008-09-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Circle C Oyster Ranch is nestled in the heart of St. Mary's County on St. Jerome Creek.

Utilizing 200 ft of dock and 3.2 acres of surface water, Circle C raises oysters from free swimming, microscopic larvae all the way to market size. The dock supports 14 upwellers for seed production as well as a lift system for boat access and oyster harvest. The ranch currently boasts a shed for storage, office space and an indoor workshop. With 10 acres of land and 65 acres of water bottom rights, Circle C fully plans to expand further. In fact, there are several projects currently in the works. A hatchery to produce our own oyster larvae, giving us full control of all stages of our Lineback©'s life.

The Floating Oyster ReefTM

At the heart of Circle C's operation is the Floating Oyster ReefTM. Designed by CEO/President Richard Pelz, it is at the forefront of oyster aquaculture technology. One reef contains approximately 1000-1500 oysters and holds them just inches below the surface of the creek. 1000 oyster in only 30 square feet compares wonderfully to the Chesapeake average of 12 1/2 oysters per acre in the wild! Why does this system work? It works because it puts the oysters where the food is. Oysters eat algae that grows in Bay waters. The lions share of fresh algae, and the oxygen it produces, is found in the first 12-18 inches of water. By placing the oysters in that zone of food and oxygen, even a wild oyster's growth rate is bound to increase. In fact, Circle C has shown that wild oysters will as much as double their growth by placing them in our system. This is incredible enough, but when you couple the Floating Oyster ReefTM with Circle C's specially bred Lineback© oyster, the results are phenomenal. We have actually grown oysters from larvae to 4" in only 9 months and to 6" monsters in only 18!

The Oyster

The Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica) has long been considered to be the Chesapeake Bay's claim to fame and is a true delicacy in most cultures.

Over the last 15 years, Circle C has been perfecting its strain of eastern oyster, the Lineback©. We took several different genetic lines of oysters, chosen for growth rate, disease resistance and shape, and bred them into our original line. All things said and done, there is about 40 years of selective breeding behind our oyster! The result is the Lineback© oyster, the best oyster in the Bay. The Lineback© has been bred to have an extremely thin shell, to grow extremely fast, and to have a deep cup to it. The oyster grows so fast in fact, that when used in conjunction with the Floating Oyster ReefTM and our seed production system, we can take it from spawn to market in under 18 months! That is less than half the time for a wild oyster to get that big. In fact, every year we get more and more that grow to over five inches! A wild oyster would need five or six years to do that. The deep cup and extra thin shell means a higher meat to shell ratio. In fact, our oysters average about 32% more meat than the same size wild oyster. The thin shell also makes Circle C's Lineback© super easy to open. Instead of shucking the old fashioned way, just take a pair of scissors, snip off the bill, stick in a kitchen knife and presto, half shell oyster!

Good stuff!!!

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CHESAPEAKE BAY: Waterman claims solution to bay's oyster problem

2008-09-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

By ANATH HARTMANN • Capital News Service

Richard Pelz, president of Circle C Oyster Ranch at St. Jerome Creek in Ridge, has a better idea for restoring the Chesapeake Bay's oyster population.

"(Maryland's) restoration efforts are going awful because they keep trying to do it the wrong way," Pelz said.

Oysters, decimated in the Chesapeake by pollution and disease, are best grown near the water's surface, he said, so they clear up turbidity and allow light to penetrate.

"If you put oysters in the bottom, or worse yet, in rocks on the bottom, they're removing oxygen, and therefore expanding the dead zone," he said. Dead zones are areas of the bay without oxygen.

Circle C Oyster Ranch

At Circle C Oyster Ranch, Pelz grows the Lineback, a breed of the native Eastern oyster he developed about 15 years ago. The company uses a system of floating oyster reefs that keep the shellfish just inches below the water's surface rather than on the bay floor, where most of the state sanctuaries keep their oysters.

But his ideas have not caught on, and scientists and environmentalists stood by Maryland's restoration methods during a Sept. 10 update before the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Oceans and Wildlife.

"Oyster restoration is complex in a large ecosystem like the Chesapeake Bay," Peyton Robertson, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chesapeake Bay office, said in his hearing testimony. "Increasing the size and number of sanctuaries is appropriate."

The Eastern oyster has been declining in the bay since the mid-1980s because of past overharvesting, declining water quality and the appearance of MSX and Dermo, two parasitic diseases.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources operates 24 oyster sanctuaries in the bay, ranging in size from 5 acres to more than 5,000 acres. Yet the waterway's number of Eastern oysters is 1 percent of what it was just 50 years ago, according to the department.

Pelz has another contrarian view: The size limit imposed on watermen is contributing to the oyster's decline. Oysters smaller than three inches when harvested must be returned to the water.

"Oysters are funny critters -- they change sex when they reach maturity," Pelz said. At a growth rate of roughly an inch per year, the smaller oysters are all males, then after a year or so they become females, he said.

"So what . . . they're putting back in the beds are male (and) diseased. If you do that to any population -- take out the best every time -- it's going to go downhill."

Though Pelz said he is having no trouble making a living harvesting the Lineback oyster, which grows faster than some others, other Maryland watermen say they are struggling.

Mike Hamilton, once a successful bay waterman with his own seafood wholesale business, several years ago abandoned fishing and oyster-harvesting in favor of general contract work.

"There was not enough money in it," said Hamilton, owner of M. Hamilton & Sons. "I still buy seafood every now and then, I still sell it but . . . I very seldom go out and get it myself. I got kids in college. I need a certain amount of money."

Pelz said he has long believed the state's methods of oyster-restoration were doomed to failure but has not held out hope that the Lineback would become widely grown.

"It's embarrassing (for the state)," he said. "I'm not a scientist. I'm just a farmer."

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2008-08-26T10:19:00.001-07:00

It's oyster time!

Lynnhaven Oysters Make a Comeback

2008-07-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

By: Lee Webb - CBN News
CBNNews.com - VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia

If you had come to the Dockside Raw Bar and Grille a few months ago and ordered oysters on the menu, the oysters the restaurant would have served you would have been flown in from Florida or from some other part of the country.

That's a shame. Because the oysters that once came out of the waters behind the restaurant were once a world-famous delicacy. They were known as Lynnhaven oysters and were served in the finest restaurants across the country. They were also specifically requested by presidents and kings.

Local Group's Goal: Clean Up River

The oysters' name is derived from the Lynnhaven River, an estuary in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay.

When English settlers first colonized the area in the early 1600's, the Lynnhaven was teaming with oysters. But by the mid-1900's, over harvesting and polluted water had decimated the popular delicacy.

Karen Forget leads the volunteer group known as Lynnhaven River Now, that's committed to cleaning up this historic body of water.

Virginia Beach is the state's most populated city. Thirty-five percent of the land surrounding the river is covered by hard surfaces like rooftops, driveways and roads.

"So on 35 percent of our watershed, when it rains the water goes directly into the storm water system, which goes directly back into the river and it carries with it whatever is on that surface," Forget explained.

Forget's group has rallied governmental agencies to address the problem. The city agreed to increase street sweeping in neighborhoods surrounding the river.

But Forget says it's local residents that can make the biggest difference by doing little things. Like hooking up rain barrels to down spouts to keep water from going directly into the drainage system and into the river.

"And then you capture some of the runoff from your roof when it rains and that water is available for you to use for your plants for your garden," she said. "You can fill up a watering can with it.".

It's now against the law to dump any sewage from a boat into the Lynnhaven River. Many of the local marinas, as well the sanitation department, provide a pumping service.

"But a major factor in the clean-up has been the oyster itself," Forget told CBN News. "Believe it or not, one adult oyster like this can filter about 50-gallons of water a day. That's why volunteers have built 36 acres of conservation reefs like that one to provide new habitat for the oyster. If we had a little aquarium here," she continued, like a little ten-gallon aquarium, and I put the dirtiest water you've ever seen in it and put a couple of oysters in it for about an hour, at the end of the hour the water would be clear."

Harvesting Oysters

The Lynnhaven isn't clear, but it's much cleaner than it was. Three years ago, only one-percent of the river was open to oyster harvesting. Now, that's up to almost 30 percent and the Lynnhaven oyster is making a comeback.

"These are mature and ready to go to market," Oyster farmer Cameron Chalmers explained. "They're anywhere from three to six inches."

Chalmers sold his landscaping business to become a full-time oyster farmer. He has about 250 of baskets in the water with a few hundred more that will be ready for market next year. Chalmers says he is grateful for the work forget and her volunteers are doing.

Local restaurants like the Dockside Inn agree. They began selling Lynnhaven oysters last fall. They're not cheap at about ten dollars for a dozen. That's because there isn't a big supply yet and the demand is big.

Environmental Stewardship

Reverend Ralph Weitz is with the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of religious leaders and scientists committed to bringing a balanced biblical view of environmental stewardship. He applauds the strategy being used in Virginia Beach.

"It's very practical application of environmental concern and that's where we Christians can be very hands-on and be involved in it," Weitz said. "And it creates employment and I think that's an important part, not only for the local economy, but our economy in general."

CBN News asked Weitz why he thought so many people are comfortable about getting involved with the Lynnhaven oyster project. Weitz says it has to do with people wanting to get involved to help the local community.

"It's really hard for people to relate to big global issues like global warming," he said. "But this is their own back yard, this is their community. And we've enjoyed tremendous support from the people in Virginia Beach who are really behind this effort to clean up their river."

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Future of Oystering in Va may lie with Private Sector

2008-06-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

Hatcheries may be able to supply enough seed to re-establish industry

Aquaculture oysters
By LAWRENCE LATANE III

With sales jumping almost sixfold in the past three years, private oyster farmers might be the key to rebuilding Virginia's oyster population.

"We can have more oysters on the bottom if somebody's being profitable," said James Wesson, the leader of the state's battle to bring back dead or depleted oyster reefs.

In the past 16 years, Wesson, oyster manager for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, has overseen the spending of $18.9 million in state and federal funds with little or no reward because of disease pressure and predatory cownosed rays.

"We may be holding our own," he said, "but we've not seen much evidence of improvement in the long term."

But at the end of a sun-drenched dock on the Northern Neck's Coan River, 4 million baby seed oysters are the latest crop in a contraption that force-feeds them algae so they will grow quickly.

The fingernail-sized bivalves soon will be placed overboard in predator-proof cages that will be constantly cleaned and tended. Once the shellfish reach 3 inches long, in 12 to 18 months, they will be harvested.

Growing oysters this way is costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive, said A.J. Erskine, aquaculturalist for two of the state's biggest oyster-processing companies. But it's effective.

. . .

The few surviving Virginia oyster businesses are especially motivated to get oysters to market. As Chesapeake Bay oysters began crashing in the 1980s, the state's oyster packers turned to out-of-state sources, such as Louisiana.

With diesel-fuel prices rising, oyster packers are looking for a source of supply closer to home.

For Erskine, that means possibly building a hatchery on the Northern Neck under a proposal presented by his bosses, Cowart Seafood Co. and Bevans Oyster Co., and Kellum Seafood and the Northern Neck Planning District Commission.

The commission is negotiating with a consultant to study the plan.

"We think a hatchery will be very instrumental in bringing the oyster back," said Jerry Davis, the commission's director. He expects that a hatchery would cost at least $1 million.

Lake Cowart Jr., who runs Cowart Seafood in Northumberland County, said the oyster industry's future may depend on it.

"We're absolutely at the point we cannot get enough [seed oysters] out of Virginia," he said.

A handful of hatcheries operate in the state, but such businesses as Cowart, Bevans of Westmoreland County and Kellum in Lancaster County that grow their own oysters on bottom leased from the state need more seed than they can find.

"I'd say the demand is double or triple [the supply] at this point," Cowart said.

A Virginia Institute of Marine Science Sea Grant Extension study released in May reinforces Cowart's claim.

It showed that private oyster growers in the state almost tripled the hatchery oysters they planted in 2006 -- 16 million compared with 6 million the year before. In 2007, though, the rate of increase slowed. They planted 18.4 million hatchery oysters. The study blamed a lack of hatchery seed.

"The need for hatcheries is immense," said Mike Oesterling, a VIMS aquaculture specialist who co-wrote the report.

Virginia once measured its annual oyster harvest in the tens of millions of bushels. Years of overharvest sent stocks slowly down until the mid-1980s, when diseases Dermo and MSX infiltrated the bay and killed oysters.

The annual catch reached its nadir of 17,691 bushels in 1996. It climbed briefly to 100,000 and subsided.

. . .

Hatcheries are gaining support. A Virginia study group recommended last year that the state encourage private business to build them.

Problems with disease and predation give hatchery production the advantage over wild oysters.

VIMS has developed genetically selected strains of oysters that resist diseases that continue to wipe out wild oysters. Hatcheries also can produce sterile oysters that put all their energy into growth, instead of reproduction.

Erskine noted that a hatchery can produce a reliable supply of baby oysters, or spat, year after year.

Hatcheries may also combat the latest threat to Virginia's frail oyster population: cownosed rays.

Hatchers and the marine resources commission are experimenting with a technique that allows disease-resistant oyster larvae to attach to oyster shells. The resulting cluster is often too much of a mouthful for rays.

Contact Lawrence Latané III at (804) 333-3461 or llatane@timesdispatch.com.

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CBF seeks oyster gardeners

2008-05-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

Hampton Roads -

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) needs volunteer gardeners throughout Hampton Roads this summer to help restore the oyster population and improve the water quality of the bay, its rivers and streams. The program provides individuals with the opportunity to help bring back the species by using the area beside their docks. One oyster can filter 50 gallons of polluted water a day. Oyster reefs also provide much needed habitat for other marine life.

Oyster gardening volunteers in Gloucester can receive instruction from CBF experts at a training seminar on July 29, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. The seminar will be at Waterman's Hall on the Virginia Institute of Marine Science campus, located on Route 1208, Greate Road, Gloucester Point. There is a $25 fee and participants will be provided with 1,000 baby "seed" oysters and asked to nurture them for one year until the oysters reach maturity. At that time, CBF will collect the oysters and place them on state-protected oyster reefs in rivers around Virginia.

Participants must have access to water with the proper salinity. One simple test is that if salt can be tasted in the creek or river water, it generally means there is enough salt to grow oysters. For more information, contact Charlene Ihrig, 757-622-1964 or e-mail, hamptonroads@cbf.org.

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Urbanna Oyster Festival 2008

2008-05-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Keeping you posted for details on Oyster Festival 2008!!!
Stay tuned.

Good Times!

Governors call for deep cuts to blue crab harvest

2008-04-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine says the crab is in peril but feels a reduced harvest will last only two or three years.

By Patrick Lynch

COLONIAL BEACH - The governors of Virginia and Maryland stood together on the banks of the Potomac River Tuesday and demanded the two states enforce a deep cut to the Chesapeake Bay blue crab harvest to pull the species out of its stagnated depths.

Making a rare step into the nuts and bolts of commercial fishing regulations, the governors called for a 34 percent bay wide reduction in this year's female blue crab harvest. The blue crab has been overfished eight of the past 11 years, and the governors learned on Tuesday that in 2007 the species was more heavily targeted than usual — every six out of 10 adult crabs were plucked from the Chesapeake during the year, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

"The blue crab is in peril," Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said. "We sit today at the bottom of a very precipitous fall."

Kaine and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley acknowledged the cut will cause financial pain to watermen in the Chesapeake's most lucrative fishery. But they said the crab industry will suffer more if the crabs aren't given a chance to recover from near historic low numbers.

"We're at a point on the crab harvest that the price of inaction is greater than the price of action," Kaine said. "We do not want to wake up five to 10 years from now and realize we lost this very important part of who we are."

Kaine and O'Malley's joint appearance marked what some called a historic moment. The states have worked together before on bay issues, but rarely with this much attention focused so urgently on one of the icons of the Chesapeake.
With oysters barely surviving, blue crabs have been the primary target for watermen in both states who still seek to make a living solely on the water.

The hardy crab has sustained itself through years of overfishing and severe degradation of the bay's water quality and prime crab habitat.

But in the past decade the blue crab has shown no signs of its typical, vital resurgence after a period of decline.

The population has always gone up and down in cycles, but the cycle has seemed to stop — at the bottom.

The governors' call for reducing the female crab harvest by a third is also a dramatic step for two states that have, throughout the decline of the bay's quality and fisheries, taken a measured approach to save the seafood industry and the environment.

Kaine and O'Malley said the stricter regulations should only be short-term measures. The blue crab is a highly fecund species with a short life-span that can reproduce rapidly in the right conditions. As the stock rebounds, so should the industry, Kaine said.

"The industry can rebound," he said. "When positive steps are taken, this is a very resilient species."

The governors made their remarks after hearing the latest results from the annual winter survey of the Chesapeake's blue crab population. The study found about 120 million adult crabs — a number scientists say should be 200 million at a minimum — and 280 million crabs of all ages.

Biologists say no more than 46 percent of the bay's crabs should be harvested each year. But in 2007, 60 percent were caught, even though there were fewer watermen as they continue to leave the water for steadier jobs.

Lynn Fegley, crab biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said it is important to reduce the number of females caught because they are more heavily fished and because they are more important to the stock's ability to reproduce.

"More moms, more babies," Fegley said.

Kaine said that if the regulations work the way they should, the crab stock could rebound to healthier levels in two to three years.

The governors did not lay out policy options to achieve their goal, but said they would leave those decisions to the state's regulatory bodies. The Virginia Marine Resources Commission has already passed a spate of new measures this year, but will take more significant steps next Tuesday.

Jack Travelstead, VMRC deputy commissioner, pointed to a handful of new regulations that together could add up to part of a 34 percent cut in females caught.

The option to eliminate winter dredging — where fishermen drag the bottom to catch hibernating, pregnant females — would cut about 17 percent of the female harvest, he said. Closing the hard and peeler pot fisheries early, around Oct. 27, would cut about 6 percent. New regulations on cull rings and size limits that the VMRC already passed will comprise an 11 percent reduction, he said.

Depending on what the VMRC board decides, any difference toward the goal could be made up by closing the season on females earlier in October, Travelstead said.

"This is pretty severe," said Ken Smith, vice president of the Virginia Waterman's Association.

Smith said the new restrictions could force a few more watermen off the water.

"There's going to be some of that," he said. "The way crabbing's going anyways, you're going to see crabbers fall every year."

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ILLEGAL CATCH: Court date set for Shore man with undersized oysters

2008-03-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

Throw the book at him!

A Daily Times Staff Report

EASTON — A Wittman man accused of trying to smuggle undersized oysters on a vessel near St. Michaels is scheduled to appear May 15 in Talbot County District Court.

Joseph Bruce Janda, 22, is accused of navigating a vessel through a Chesapeake Bay waterway with no lights, while hauling 11 bushels of oysters of which up to 30 percent were undersized, according to the Maryland Natural Resources Police.

The undersized oysters were discovered in a locked area of the vessel about 5 a.m. on Feb. 21, as Janda headed toward Wittman Landing, according to the NRP. Authorities secured a search and seizure warrant after Janda refused to unlock a door that blocked access to the bow or trunk cabin area, the agency said.

In all, the suspect is charged with 11 counts of possession of undersized oysters, as well as possession during a prohibited time and operating a vessel between sunset and sunrise without proper navigation lights and with expired visual distress signals, the NRP said.

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"Knock-Off" Oysters Bingo Recipe

2008-03-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yum

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1/2 teaspoon sea salt (or to taste)

freshly ground black pepper

1 baguette cut in slices and toasted till crisp outside, still tender inside (I use a whole grain baguette)

4 cups baby spinach or baby greens

24 shucked oysters with their liquor or 1/2 pint if you are buying them already shucked (I would use the smaller standards or selects)

5 shallots peeled and chopped fine

2 tablespoons butter

Melt butter in medium sauté pan.

Add chopped shallots and cook over medium-low heat until transparent. Add vinegar, and then add oysters with their liquor.

Stir gently until oysters are just cooked (the fringes of the oyster will look like ruffles). Do not overcook. Add salt and pepper to taste.

To assemble: On a salad plate, place a handful of greens, then place 2-3 toast slices on top of greens.

Ladle the oyster-shallot mixture with liquid over the bread and greens and serve immediately.

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How to Handle and Prepare Unshucked Oysters in the Shell

2008-03-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

First, handle very carefully with gloves at all times.

Second, there are five things that can be done with unshucked oysters.

1. Shuck or open them fresh.

2. Bake them in the oven, ready to eat.

3. Barbecue them, ready to eat.

4. Steam them open, ready to eat.

5. Steam them open partially cooked then finish by preparing by stewing, frying, etc.

First, it may be necessary to cull or break apart the oysters if they are in clusters of more than two or three. If you will notice, the backs are usually joined together on a dead shell. That's the seed shell on which the baby oysters cemented themselves to as free-swimming larvae. Use a bar to break this seed shell or to pry oysters apart at this point, down to singles or doubles.

1. Shucked Oysters. It is very hard to shuck oysters. Knife and shell cuts can happen easily. However, if you are daring, here's how. A regular oyster knife is required. Sharpen to a point and cut a cutting edge on both sides, up one full inch from the point. The oyster has a back, where the hinge or pointed end is; a front, the rounded end; a top, the flatter shell; a bottom, the more cupped shell. Using a pair of pliers, break off a half-inch or more of the front shell. This will create a small gap between the top and bottom shell, just enough to slip in the knife. Now that the tip of the knife is in the oyster at the front, wiggle and slide it toward the center of the oyster. There is a muscle attached at the middle to both the top and bottom shells. When you cut the muscle, the shells will easily spread. Then finish prying them apart and cut the oyster completely off the shells. In order to not cut up the meat then you slide the knife inward, slide close against the surface of the bottom shell so as not to murder the poor creature, that is until you are ready to cook them or just "eat 'em alive". Next, wash off the meat and refrigerate or freeze. For complete detailed tutoring, visit your local oyster farm..

2. Baked Oysters. Wash off the shells, place on a cookie sheet to catch the liquid and bake at 500 degrees for 15-35 minutes, depending on the size. Some shells will not be opened, so some prying will be necessary. You may eat them plain or dip them in a favorite butter sauce. HINT: Oysters cooked "cup up" will hold the liquid, making a jucier meat. "Cup down" results in the juice draining out, causing a drier oyster.

3. Barbequed Oysters. Wash the shells and place "cup up" on the barbeque for 15-45 minutes, depending on oyster size. Watch for oysters starting to open to indicate doneness. Again, some shells will not be opened, so some prying will be necessary.

4. Steamed Oysters. Wash the shells and place in a steamer for 10-20 minutes, depending on size. You will notice some oysters opening and that should indicate doneness.

5. Partially Steamed then Fried or Stewed Oysters. Wash and scrub the shells very good if you plan to save the nectar. Place oysters in a pan and steam using the usual steaming methods. After most of the oysters are open one-half inch, remove the meat. Either prepare and cook in the usual methods or freeze until later.

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Another Crisis for the Bay

2008-03-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

The blue crab and the Chesapeake Bay are synonymous.

Callinectes sapidus is the crab's mellifluous scientific name. Callinectes means beautiful swimmer in Greek, and sapidus is Latin for tasty.

The blue crab has enormous symbolic and actual importance.

The green, yellow, orange and blue crustacean supplies a livelihood for watermen who ply the bay in search of the elusive prey, and sport for amateurs armed with mesh nets and chicken necks dangled from strings. Millions of bay aficionados relish extracting the delicate meat from steamed hard shells, while soft shells, whose molting heralds summer, are to die for. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the blue crab is in jeopardy ["Paucity of Crabs Prompts Plan to Reduce Harvests," Metro, Feb. 29].

Scientists are increasingly concerned that the crab may be the next threatened bay species. First, it was the rockfish, which rebounded from scarcity in the 1980s only after Maryland and Virginia heavily regulated commercial fishing. Then, over the past few decades, oysters were decimated by overharvesting, pollution and parasites. In the 1970s, the annual harvest averaged 15 million bushels; in 2003, it was 53,000. Finally, in the '80s and '90s, a severe depletion of shad led Maryland and Virginia to impose commercial fishing moratoriums that have slowed the decline.

In the 1990s, the annual blue crab catch was 140 million crabs, but that was last year's total bay population. This prompted the creation of a blue crab regulatory review committee, which analyzed the crab's status, evaluated the potential of 22 regulatory measures imposed in 1994 to reverse low abundance and spawning potential, and proposed improvements.

The committee, composed mainly of crab experts from Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, discovered no evidence that the strictures had increased bay-wide stocks or harvests. It did, however, blame water pollution, continuing losses in underwater grasses and overharvesting. The committee proposed short-term measures: decreasing the season by a month and the time that no-harvest zones can be fished, requiring larger escape hatches in most crab pots and restricting the winter dredge fishery. It also offered long-term proposals, such as a procedure for tagging crab pots.

At last month's meeting of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, the agency that regulates crabbing, members agreed that the Chesapeake icon's state was dire. It voted unanimously to impose the near-term limitations. The debate emphasized concerns for crab health and the watermen, who are already devastated by losing oysters and shad, and it reflected the intrinsic tension involved in the agency's statutory mandate to restore the bay and revive its seafood fisheries.

The restrictions may be another nail in the coffin for watermen. However, juvenile crabs' sharp decline suggests that they might go the way of oysters, requiring dramatic action to restore the legendary crustacean. Only time, the crabs, the watermen and the bay will tell.

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AutoInsider.blogspot.com

2008-03-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

Check out a new blog I found:

River Mud Blog
Adventures and debacles from the urban & natural Chesapeake Bay

I am linking to their site. Check it out at: http://rivermud.blogspot.com

Lady Maryland

2008-03-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

By William Pfingsten, March 8, 2008

1. Living Classrooms Foundation Marker

The Lady Maryland is an authentic replica of a pungy schooner, a Chesapeake Bay workboat that sailed the Bay in the 1700s and 1800s. Pungies were fast sailing vessels and were primarily used to transport perishable cargo such as watermelons, tomatoes, fish, oysters, and other items that needed speedy delivery to prevent spoilage. Pungy schooners were traditionally painted pink and green and their flat, wide decks made them very efficient cargo vessels. Pungies sailed the Chesapeake for over 150 years and were considered to be the best and most beautiful of all craft native to the Chesapeake. Today Lady Maryland is the only pungy in the world.

The Lady Maryland sails daily with area school children who learn about the history, ecology and economics of the Chesapeake Bay in a hands on educational program that provides leadership development and team building skills. Lady Maryland was built by Living Classrooms Foundation shipwrights and students at Baltimore's Inner Harbor in 1985.

Mildred Belle

The Mildred Belle is a Chesapeake Bay buyboat, a motor vessel whose function was to purchase oysters, crabs, and fish directly from the fishing fleet and transport the catch to the market. Built in 1948, Mildred Belle also dredged for crabs, trawl fished, and was used for sport fishing. Today, the Mildred Belle serves as one of the Living Classroom Foundation's research vessels, where students can use state-of-the-art scientific equipment as part of their learning.

Sigsbee

The Sigsbee is an authentic Chesapeake Bay skipjack, a sailing vessel designed and built to dredge for oysters. In the late 1800s thousands of skipjacks fished in the Bay. Today, less than thirty skipjacks comprise the last commercial sailing fleet in the nation. Originally built in 1901, Sigsbee served in the oystering fleet for 88 years before becoming disabled. Students and shipwrights in the Living Classrooms Foundation's Save Our Skipjacks program spent ten months reconstructing the vessel. Today Sigsbee sails as part of the Foundations educational fleet and is instrumental in Living Classroom's oyster restoration project.

The Living Classrooms Foundation is a non-profit organization providing hands-on education and job training that motivates and empowers youth to learn by doing so that they may succeed academically, in the work place, and in their lives.

The Foundation's challenging outdoor education involves over 25,000 students each year. Living Classrooms Foundation vessels visit more than 25 ports in the region from Philadelphia to Norfolk and thousands of youth also experience innovative programs at the Living Classrooms Maritime Institute in Fells Point.

The Living Classrooms Foundation owes its success to its many benefactors, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland.

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A polluted Chesapeake Bay kills creatures and chokes plants

2008-03-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

We must Endow the Bay to clean it up

The Virginian-Pilot

A polluted Chesapeake Bay kills creatures and chokes plants. It also destroys human lives, a fact made all too clear during a Virginia Marine Resources Commission deliberation on how to save the blue crab.

The VMRC instituted regulations on Feb. 26 to limit the crabs watermen take from the estuary. "We're not going to survive this," said Charles Pruitt from Tangier Island. "You might as well throw us out now; we've been regulated to death already."

That has been the all-too familiar reaction from fishermen and oystermen on a Bay decimated by pollution and disease.

Everyone knows the stories about the first explorers finding a Chesapeake Bay so crowded with wildlife that they could walk across on the backs of rockfish, eating oysters the size of dinner plates.

The modern Bay is a different place. Starved of oxygen for months at a time, filled with nutrients and pollutants, the oysters are almost gone, and the crabs are in trouble. After decades of effort, the rockfish have rebounded, thanks to the same kind of draconian management the watermen now decry for crabs and oysters.

The Bay has been destroyed by suburban sprawl, by overtaxed sewer systems, by destructive farming techniques. Its enormously complex, and badly understood, ecosystem has been knocked completely out of whack.

There's no way to be precise, but estimates blame two-thirds of the nutrient pollution in the Bay - nitrogen and phosphorus - on sloppy crop farming, on suburban runoff, on animal waste. Fertilizer and other nutrients wash into the watershed, essentially from any place it rains.

The stuff causes algae blooms, which rob waterways of oxygen. Which in turn kills the Bay and the animals and plants in it, and everything that depends on them.

"Water quality is the key," said Kelly Price, an Eastern Shore crabber, at the VMRC meeting. "Without that, you lose habitat. And without habitat, you're done."

The state has spent and is spending money to deal with the ancient and faulty municipal sewer systems that surround the Bay. That is a significant part of the Bay's problem - probably a third or more. But Virginia has yet to deal in a meaningful way with runoff from farmers and homeowners.

The reason is simple: Such "nonpoint source" pollution is hard to control. The state would have to do expensive things like help more farmers put up fences to keep animals out of creeks and rivers. It would have to do unpopular things like force farmers to maintain buffers to collect field runoff, or find a way to get homeowners to stop putting fertilizer on their lawns. The state would have to find a better way to control stormwater runoff, which washes fertilizer and pollutants directly into the Bay.

And it would have to pass laws to punish people and cities that don't or won't do those things.

All of which would be politically difficult - at a time when the state budget needs to be trimmed. But the effort is undeniably necessary at a time when 170,000 people move into the Chesapeake watershed each year, bringing more pollution and more damage.

"For all of the progress we have made upgrading sewage treatment plant technologies, we're losing ground on impervious surfaces: rooftops, driveways, roads - all of which carry sediment," said Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant Jr. "I would say we're having a hard time now achieving the environmental protections to offset that kind of rapid growth. We can't conserve land fast enough to offset some of the other stuff."

General Assembly committees this year passed a bill to spend $100 million, but the bill died, a casualty of the economic slowdown. So, once again, Virginia faced a budgetary choice, and the choice was to spend money on things other than the Bay.

Under the threat of federal sanctions, the state committed years ago to cleaning up the Chesapeake by 2010. Virginia will not meet that deadline, and a gutted Environmental Protection Agency is unlikely to punish Richmond. But that doesn't invalidate the state's obligation.

Virginia's spending on the Bay must begin to meet its promises, no matter what happens to its finances. The solution to economic vagaries is to remove Richmond's choices, to create an irrevocable fund devoted permanently to Chesapeake cleanup. Maybe it's a penny of the sales tax, as has been proposed in the past. Maybe it's a new flush tax. But it should be something that can't be revoked.

If it wants to get serious about saving the crabs, the oysters and the watermen, Virginia must dedicate real money to the cause of the Chesapeake Bay, money that can't and won't be the first to disappear when the economy heads down the tubes.
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Oystering: A hard life in hard times

2008-03-04T10:12:00.001-08:00

Skipjack restrictions, bay restoration efforts take their toll on watermen
By Kim Mitchell

DEAL ISLAND -- Decades ago, more than a thousand skipjacks dotted the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Today, only three venture out from the Eastern Shore.

Most return with little to show for their hours of hard work.

Their crews wake up between 3:30 and 5 a.m., their workday wake-up call, even if they don't go out on the water.

"It's habit," said Walt Benton, a skipjack captain.

Factors that dictate whether to disembark each morning are about the same for every boat. If the weather is good, with sunny skies and little wind, they'll head out. It's a hard enough job as it is without adding extra risks, they say.

"It doesn't take much to keep you in when oysters are scarce," said Terry Daniels Sr., waterman.

They may get one day of work a week with the way the winds have blown this winter.

Even when the skies are clear and the winds and water are calm, there are no guarantees for good returns.

"We know where the spots are," Benton said. "There are some good, some bad. But you've got to try, you never know. You may not get any, but you know where not to go next time."

When the government saw hundreds of skipjacks taking their fill daily, a law was introduced in 1965 limiting the skipjacks to only two days of powered dredging.

Even though watermen say there are only about five operational skipjacks, the two-day law remains in effect. And, with only two days, the watermen don't like to waste them.

They can go out more days using sails, but said it's not worth the effort.

"It's barely worth going out there on power," said Delmas Benton, a skipjack captain.

"You can't keep a skipjack working on two days a week," Webster said. "The math is not there."

A skipjack brings in about 30 bushels of oyster a day, the average the last couple of years. And even with a decreased supply, it doesn't necessarily mean demand drives up the price.

The crews get about $32 per bushel. With a six-man crew, gasoline, maintenance work and other expenses, the men are lucky if they earn $130 a day.

The skipjack runs on two motors -- a push motor to move the boat and a winder to run the dredge. Delmas Benton said the two consume between 40 gallons and 50 gallons of fuel in a day of work. At $3 a gallon, they spend at least $120 for gasoline.

Just to remove the boat from water and have it painted costs $2,500, while a single dredging cable costs $1,000.

It costs between $5,000 and $10,000 a year to keep the boat up, Delmas Benton said.

"You better have a wife who works," Walt Benton said.

But the boats don't even leave the dock if the conditions aren't just right. By 8 a.m. most know whether they'll be on the water that day.

Days off

On their days off, which average about six days a week, the men do house and yard work and get their boats and crab pots ready for summer. On days when there is a chance of work, they can be found at Arby's convenience store across from Wenona Harbor waiting for the call.

They drink coffee, play cards, watch TV and talk.

"We're worse than women," Delmas Benton said. "We talk about everything."

This is how the watermen live during oyster season -- November through March.

The end of the oyster season signals the start of crab season in which they hope they will begin to make enough money to live. They barely break even from oystering; sometimes they don't.

Some make enough money for the year doing charter fishing expeditions and crabbing. Crabbing, they say, is what is keeping the watermen alive.

Some have given up the oyster trade, like Dickie Webster. He got tired of chasing after a crew, putting in the time only to dock each day with few bushels on board.

But others, like the Benton brothers, continue to go out year after year.

"I plan on going out until the day I die," Delmas Benton said. "I don't know how to do nothing else."

They can't live off the oysters any longer. In fact, they haven't lived off the oysters for at least two decades.

After years of bringing in upward of 160 bushels a day, Walt Benton remembers when he ended his last good season, already having 128 bushels on board.

In the summer of 1985, a parasite killed large numbers of Maryland's oyster population. The oysters never recovered, as toxins, chemicals and diseases killed a majority of the sexually mature adults.

The next fall, when Walt Benton returned to the same spot, he dipped three times, only getting a single oyster.

"I threw it back," he said. "If he survived disease, I wasn't going to kill him. You never take the last oyster."

They haven't had a harvest of any significance since, and watermen aren't sure of how to bring back the oyster population.

"They blame it on disease. It's easier to attack the disease than the real problem," Walt Benton said. "That's pollution. You have to be dumb not to know that."

Livelihoods come second
Seven options for restoring the bay and its native oysters are being discussed and researched by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Virginia Marine Resources Commission and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They include supplementing native oysters with nonnative oysters, expanding native restoration, aquaculture native and nonnative species, discontinue native restoration efforts and implementing a temporary harvest moratorium on native oysters.

The watermen said that some of those efforts may eventually help, but a moratorium is not the best option.

"If it hasn't changed in 20 years, an extra (few years) won't help anything," Walt Benton said.

Webster said the bay may have a lot of young oysters, but there's no guarantee they'll live and grow to harvest size. The oysters typically do not live past three years of age because of disease and other toxic conditions so, he said, a moratorium would "do no good."

Sherman Baynard of Coastal Conservation Association Maryland, and a member of the Oyster Advisory Commission, said the only thing the moratorium would do is allow a chance to wait and see if oysters rebound. They would see if the few oysters that survive the diseases and conditions would be strong enough to become viable and reproduce.

"It's a sad situation. The commercial fishermen are barely hanging on but they have other opportunities; they can get other jobs on land and water (like with an oyster aquaculture program). But the oysters have no choice. They have to stay and hope for the best," he said. "That's why the moratorium is an option."

Baynard said the decision lies in what is best for the oyster, whether it ends up on our plates or survives to live in the bay.

"Thirty dollars a bushel is not the best use of this resource for the citizens of Maryland," he said. "It's more important that they are an ecological engineer, build reefs, filter water and give habitats than they are as products. Where's the best value?"

With diseases, toxic algae blooms and poor water conditions, the oysters have the fight of their lives every day --and they're losing, Baynard said.

"Everything in nature is trying to kill (the oyster). The only defense the oyster has against everything is that it has to be able to out-reproduce the mortality that is put upon it. That's what it has to do and it can't do it," he said.

An Environmental Impact Statement outlining the options and possible repercussions will be finished in May with the Oyster Advisory Commission writing a report for the state and federal governments to decide on a course of action.

But, the outlook is grim.

"The moratorium is the last resort," Baynard said. "We don't even know if the moratorium would allow the oysters to regenerate. There's so much going on that's bad. Even with man's best efforts, we're not sure we can get them to regenerate and be self-sustaining. If you look solely at science it doesn't look pretty."

The oyster will never be extinct, Baynard said, offering no such assurances for the fate of the watermen. For most, they remain on the water because they know no other life.

"If you're a skipjack (captain), it's because your father was one and his father was one," Walt Benton said.

They struggle ceaselessly to stay afloat.

"We're just trying to survive," Walt Benton said. "We just need to get to summer."

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HOW TO ... SHUCK AN OYSTER

2008-03-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

HOW TO ... SHUCK AN OYSTER

By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON | Daily Press

One of the most delectable joys of living on the Chesapeake Bay lies inside the shell of the eastern oyster. Tough enough to deflect a hammer and sharp enough to rip a glove -- this crusty natural armor must be breached before you can slide the freshest of these mollusks past your lips and into your stomach. So many die-hard fans learn to shuck for themselves.

Even champions differ about the best method. Some of the fastest employ the "side-door" approach. Others attack the front lip in a style that has earned the nickname: "Chesapeake stabber." Simpler, more popular and still speedy is the "hinge" method favored by almost everyone else. World record-holder Patrick McMurray of Toronto has used it to shuck 33 oysters in 60 seconds.

Here's how these "butt shuckers" do it:

* Toss the departed. Dead oysters taste bad. They can and sometimes do make you sick. So chuck out any shells that have already opened.

* Clean'em up. Go over the rest with running water and a stiff brush as if your health depended on it -- because it does.

* Get a grip. Using a thick glove or a folded wash towel, hold the oyster cupped-side down with the hinge or butt end facing toward you.

* Set the blade. Take an oyster knife -- the best blade is short, thick and relatively dull -- and push the point in between the shells near the hinge.

* Take it easy. Brute force is counterproductive here. You could break the shell or shove the knife through your palm if you slip. So finesse it in with a little pressure and some wiggle.

* Turn 'n' pop. Once the blade is well set, give it a more pronounced twist and you should feel the shell pop open.

* Cut the muscle. Slide the knife in and scrape its edge along the inner surface of the top shell, aiming for the muscle located at about 2 o'clock. Do the same with the bottom and you should have an oyster ready to slurp -- plump, free of unappetizing scars, with no broken shell.

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Fishery proposes largest trial yet of asian oysters

2008-03-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

Posted to: Newport News News
By Scott Harper

The Virginia Seafood Council, a trade group, is proposing its biggest experiment with Asian oysters to date, asking to grow 1.3 million of the exotic species in the Chesapeake Bay and on the Eastern Shore, beginning June 1.

It would be the seventh experiment sponsored by the seafood council since 2000, and comes as Virginia and Maryland are struggling to restore native oyster populations in the Bay.

In addition to providing jobs, revenue and restaurant fare, oysters are key natural filters in the Bay's ecosystem.

Without them, water quality suffers from too much algae and sediments, which collectively are choking the Bay.

In controlled trials so far, the seafood council has determined that the Asian species - known as ariakensis or the Chinese oyster - does not succumb to the same diseases that have nearly wiped out native stocks in recent decades.

The Asian variety, originally from waters off China, Japan and Korea, is larger than the native type and grows to market size much quicker. Its taste, meanwhile, has proven comparable to the salty flair of Bay oysters.

This week, state regulators at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission agreed to vote on the new request following a public hearing next month in Newport News. The Army Corps of Engineers in Norfolk also must approve the experiment.

"We are very determined to continue forward with this," said Frances Porter, executive director of the Virginia Seafood Council, based in Newport News. "It's good for our industry as we continue to develop our markets for the Asian oyster."

As proposed, the 1.3 million Chinese oysters would be grown in protective cages or bags at 13 sites in coastal waters. The animals would have to be certified as sexually sterile before they could be deployed in the water. They would have to be removed by June 1, 2009.

Two of the proposed sites are in Hampton Roads, including one in the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach.

Cameron Chalmers, who started his own Lynnhaven oyster company, expects to grow about 100,000 of the Asian species on leased bottom in waters near First Landing State Park.

Chalmers has similarly raised non-natives the past two years at the same locale. He has sold them to an oyster shucking business in Gloucester.

"They grow almost twice as fast" as natives, Chalmers said. "And they don't need as much attention. They're pretty amazing."

Scientists and environmentalists, however, remain uncertain about the Asian oyster and its possible introduction in the Bay. They worry the foreign species might spawn a new disease, compete with other aquatic life, or spark some other unforeseen problem.

The Army Corps of Engineers is leading an environmental study of the Asian oyster and its potential impacts on the Bay. But the study has been delayed at least five times and may not be completed until late this year or next, according to the latest estimates.

"We've been expecting the results for two and a half years now, and once again, we still don't have them," said Porter, the seafood council head.

All of the Asian oysters used in the council experiments have been reared at a hatchery run by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, a branch of the College of William and Mary.

The government requires the babies come from the hatchery, given its adherence to mandatory safeguards and quarantines, designed to keep the Asian oysters from somehow escaping into the wild, according to the institute.

The first batch of babies, deployed in 2000, did not come from Asia, but instead from adult oysters flown to Virginia from Oregon.

Chinese oysters arrived in Oregon several decades ago as part of experiments with non-native species in that state, wildlife officials said.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com

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Eastern Oyster - Crassostrea virginica

2008-02-29T15:44:00.000-08:00

The eastern oyster is a bivalve mollusk with rough shells that vary in color from grayish to white.

The right, or top, valve is flat.

The left, or bottom, valve is cupped and has a purple muscle scar on the inside.
The size and shape of the shells varies depending on the oyster's environment, but they generally grow to about 3 to 4 inches.

Where does the eastern oyster live?

Oysters can be found in subtidal areas in the Bay and its tributaries, from depths of 8 to 35 feet.

Range from brackish waters to the high-salinity lower Bay.

Concentrated in areas with shell, hard sand or firm mud bottoms. These areas are called oyster bars, beds or rocks.

Oysters attach to one another, forming dense reefs that provide habitat for many other fish and invertebrates.

What does the eastern oyster eat?

Oysters are filter feeders. They feed by opening their shells and pumping water through their gills to filter out plankton and other particles.

How does the eastern oyster reproduce?

Oysters spawn in early summer in response to rising water temperatures.

Adults release eggs and sperm into the water, where they are fertilized. Females can produce about 100 million eggs per year.

After spawning, oysters are thin and watery because they have used up their stored food reserves. They grow larger and stronger as the weather cools.

In less than 24 hours the fertilized eggs develop into larvae.

For the next two to three weeks the free-swimming larvae grow until they are ready to settle. During this time they develop a foot, which is used to crawl and “explore” a surface before settlement.

When they find a suitable surface to settle on, the larvae secrete a liquid cement-like substance, which fixes the left valve into place. Attached juvenile oysters are called spat.

Oysters are able to change gender. During their first few months they are bisexual. By their first winter, most become male; in another year, most become female.
Other facts about the eastern oyster:

Also known as the American oyster and the Virginia oyster.

In addition to its many natural predators, including crabs, worms and fish, oysters are prone to infection by the parasites that cause the aquatic diseases MSX and Dermo.

The cavity inside the oyster's shells is always filled with seawater, so an oyster can survive for a long period of time without having to open its shells to feed. During cooler months, oysters can live out of the water for extended amounts of time.

Historically, oysters were only eaten during months whose names contain an “R.” This was because oysters would spoil without refrigeration during warm-weather months. Also, oyster quality is poor during the summer because the oysters have just finished spawning.

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Keeping the Maritime City’s legacy

2008-02-21T07:10:00.001-08:00

Gig Harbor will host a free ship caulking demonstration
Susan Schell

Photo courtesy of the City of Gig Harbor

Former intern Connor Beliveau shows off his mastery of ship caulking. Capt. Michael Vlahovich will demonstrate tricks of the trade and answer questions at Friday’s event at the Gig Harbor Civic Center.

Who says nothing is free?

The City of Gig Harbor will host a free demonstration of ship caulking from 5 to 6 p.m. Friday at the Gig Harbor Civic Center.

Laureen Lund, city marketing director, said the purpose of the demonstration is to get some apprentices interested in the trade of preserving wooden vessels.

“Ship caulking is becoming a lost trade,” she said. “Yet we have boats right here and fishing vessels that still require this kind of work. Any wooden boat built in the traditional style needs this work.”

“There’s only a handful of these boats left,” he said. “They’re part of an endangered culture.”

“One of our projects is the stabilization and documentation of the vessel,” he said. “An awful lot of our work happens in museums and other non-profit maritime organizations.”

During Friday’s public demonstration, Vlahovich will use caulking made of cotton and Oakum.

“Those two materials have been used for hundreds of years,” he said. “They’ve been a bit refined, but not much. It’s a natural fiber to drive in between the planks to make vessels watertight. And if anyone wants to try their hand at it, they’re welcome.”

Vlahovich is currently working on the campus of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, restoring a skipjack, a vessel that dredges oysters under sail power.

“Believe it or not, there’s still a call for this,” he said. “Ship caulking is a unique craft, and you can definitely make a good living if you work hard and you’re good at it. But people need to be willing to travel.”

“Our organization trains apprentices in ship caulking and historic fishing vessel restoration,” the captain said. “We mainly operate in the states of Washington and Maryland. This summer we’ll be in Bristol Bay, Alaska. We look for opportunities to train people in the real world, and Alaska offers that opportunity to be within an active fishing community.

Baltimore remains a national center for historic boat restoration, which is also used as a major tourist attraction. Vlahovich believes Gig Harbor could be poised for something very similar.

“With the old time residents, it’s changed so much they don’t really know how to get it back,” he added. “We would like to play a leadership role in working with the public, and use our culture and history as a tool to enhance heritage education through tourism.”

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Museum harvests oyster memories

2008-02-21T07:02:00.000-08:00

By WENDI WINTERS, For The Capital

Memories of the oyster trade are fading away faster than a photograph left out in the sun, but it is the job of Epping Forest resident Sharie Valerio to find and capture them on film and audiotape.
Then, she presents them for current and future generations.
"The Annapolis Maritime Museum has a grant from the Four Rivers Heritage Area to record 12 oral histories for this exhibit. It will be the key attraction in the museum," she said. "We've gotten some names and interviews, but we know there's more people out there. People think they don't have anything and then the memories just spill out."

Today there are local residents who have never met an oysterman, have never watched an oyster being shucked, and who didn't know oyster beds used to be so healthy and numerous that they'd block the highways and byways of the Chesapeake Bay.

Ms. Valerio is the artistic director and a partner in Remember Inc., a group that brings memories to life through re-enactments. She is also the Severn School's theater director.

As part of the "Oysters on the Half Shell," an "immersive-experience" exhibit planned for the Annapolis Maritime Museum, Ms. Valerio finds and captures the memories of men and women who harvested oysters on the bay or who processed them in oyster-packing houses that were once as numerous in Annapolis as Starbucks Coffee shops are now.

The museum is located on the Back Creek site of McNasby's, the last oyster-packing plant in the Annapolis area to close.

The old Eastport building was severely damaged during Tropical Storm Isabel, but plans are on track to make it a first-rate educational experience about life on the bay.

"The cultural and natural history of the oyster is, perhaps, the most important story the museum can relate," said museum director Jeff Holland. "Because upon that single bivalve hinged the very history of the people and culture of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County."

"Anyone who walks into McNasby's once it reopens will get a sensory experience of the life of the oysterman," said Ms. Valerio, fleshing out the plans of the exhibit architects.

Eventually, visitors to the museum will interact with reenactors portraying the oystermen who toiled in the plant or out on the bay. Standing in front of interactive exhibits, beneath special speakers, visitors will be able to hear the stories of the people who worked in the oyster trade.

Remember Inc. is looking for memories from the 1930s through the 1960s. They are also seeking photos and artifacts of that time.

"We want to tell all the story, not just one perspective. We want the conflict and humor, all the things that make it feel human," said Ms. Valerio.

Ms. Valerio's father was Selden Lacey, a well known local actor who died in 1987. Her interest in collecting audio-memories sprang from the realization she didn't have any recordings of her father's voice. "I missed hearing it," she said.

Those who are interested in contributing their memories to the project should contact Ms. Valerio at the museum by calling 410-295-0104.

On March 13, during an evening at Barge House, Ms. Valerio is presenting preliminary results of Remember Inc.'s research with a seminar, "Shuckin' and Tongin': A Day's Work at McNasby's."

Oral histories of some of the people already interviewed have been culled and developed into short theatrical presentations by professional actors that bring the era back to life.

A glimpse of the format was presented by actor Tim King. He interpreted the memories of Eastport native Art Teurs during the December Grand Ole Osprey event.

At the March 13 seminar, performers will present more of the colorful first-person memories. "We'll also show how a memory gets transcribed and goes from the printed page to a script, and then comes alive with enactors Tim King and Candace Clark," she said.

Ms. Valerio interviewed Marva Smith Henson, for the project. Mrs. Henson, whose grandfather was an oysterman, was born and raised at 135 Eastern Ave., right behind McNasby's.

"Back in the day, I remember his hands were so cold when he came in. They had burst open," she said. "I remember when I was a child … (they were) bleeding and we had to rub the hands because he couldn't put them near the heat. It was unbearable."

Former mayor Roger "Pip" Moyer told his memories of the area, too. "When I was growin' up in the 30s and 40s, everything you did, the water was a part of it. Most of the streets of Eastport up until World War II were oyster shell," he said.

"Everybody made their living off the water. And, when you're out there, sailin' together, the color of your skin didn't mean any more than the size of your shoes. We were all human beings. It was what you had inside, not on the outside."

Ms. Valerio grew up in Eastport, near Bay Ridge. "We were across from Duckett Farm, where the Eastport Shopping Center is now," she said. "I went to Eastport Elementary, but it's interesting to find stories of that time. As a child, I was not aware of the life that revolved around the oyster. I didn't go to that part of Eastport."

According to Art Tuers, it was another world entirely. "See, we'd be down by McNasby's playing football or softball or something. Or sometimes I'd just be setting there listening to the shuckers sing," he told Ms. Valerio. "They used to sing while they were shucking. They sang, they sang and I mean it was unbelievable - unbelievable! There were about 60 shuckers and they were all mostly black women and they'd never miss a step. ... Every time they'd go down they'd shuck, back they'd duck the shell. Down they'd shuck, back, that's how quick they were. Just like that, buddy!"

Lyle Smith told Ms. Valerio how he gotten onto the popular Carr's and Sparrow's Beaches across the creek without paying the admission fees: " ... We used to swim from McNasby, 'cross the creek to Bemsey (Bembe Beach) and walk the shores and go to Carr's Beach and Sparrow's Beach," he told her. "We just walked right in. I didn't have to pay nothing. I could go right through the gate."

The March 13 seminar at Barge House is $15 per person, $12 for museum members. To reserve a seat, call the museum at 410-295-0104.

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the Shell Game

2008-02-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

By G.A. Benton

"Down a dozen oysters and you start to feel a surge of well-being. It's not subtle; you feel as if you could run a marathon — or pin your dining companion to the wall," writes Rowan Jacobsen in his book A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur's Guide to Oyster Eating in North America.

I consider this fair warning that should one encounter Rowan in the flesh with a face full of mollusk and eyes wild with desire, then gang way!

On the page, though, Jacobsen — a staff writer for The Art of Eating, a top-notch food periodical — is generally in full control. His facile writing, with its heady mix of literary allusions, humor, observations of an expert palate, cultural anthropology and sound science, reminds me of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) — a high compliment.

As Jacobsen explains, oysters have been at the head of the class when it comes to aphrodisiacs since at least Roman times. A gaze at Alive's interviews with local chefs (page 18) shows half of them included oysters in their ideal romantic menus. Why?

Jacobsen has several theories for the "Viagra in a Shell" perception. One has to do with an oyster's off-the-charts supply of zinc (zinc promotes human sexual hormone production).

In another, Jacobsen comments on the fact that oysters are "copious reproducers [who] expend themselves fully during reproduction." Fans of this sort of behavior, Jacobsen's thinking goes, might try swallowing a few in order to borrow some of that oyster mojo.

Flatiron Bar & Kitchen

129 E. Nationwide Blvd., Downtown

614-461-0033

Web: flatironcolumbus.com

The Clarmont Restaurant

684 S. High St., German Village

614-443-1125

Web: clarmontrestaurant.com

Columbus Fish Market

1245 Olentangy River Rd., Grandview

614-291-3474

Web: columbusfishmarket.com

McCormick & Schmick's

3965 New Bond St., Easton

614-476-3663

Web: mccormickandschmicks.com
The hot-n-heavy Jacobsen theory I most readily buy is that oyster-eaters are by nature "risk-takers." As Jacobsen writes, "Just go to an oyster bar, look around and know that you are among other sensualists, those who love delight and aren't bashful about embracing it."

Count me in that avid oyster-loving club. In the spirit of Valentine's Day and unabashed sensualism, then, I let the city be my oyster and slurped down some inspiring, briny bites in various guises. Here's a few notes.

Rich and poor

As Jacobsen suggests, oysters should never be fully cooked, just gently warmed through. The Flatiron achieves this with its outstanding Oyster Po'Boy sandwich. The Flatiron flash-fries loosely cornmeal-crusted mild Chesapeake Bay oysters so they remain tender and juicy.

About a half dozen get piled onto a good baguette dressed with lettuce, tomato and house-made remoulade sauce (mayo with a spicy pickle relish). This delicious combo might be oysters with training wheels, but it's still rich, satisfying, crunchy and an effective intro to oyster-eating.

Rock of Ages

Where else would I tuck into an old-fashioned dish such as Oysters Rockefeller than that blast-from-the-past Columbus classic, The Clarmont? Oysters Rockefeller is a preparation for people ready for the half-shell but reluctant to go raw. Fortunately, the Clarmont is careful not to overcook its Blue Points; it rapidly broils them in their craggy pearly castles, but first covers them in a suit of armor of sharp Swiss cheese, spinach and a bit of bacon.

The result is a nice char flavor on four medium-sized oysters (they get par-cooked, but don't go tough) under a heavy coat of melted cheese and seared spinach. It's another great oyster dish for relative beginners.

Alive & Unedited

Unquestionably, the most delectable way to savor oysters is in the raw. Are they still alive? Sometimes, but if so, they're deeply dormant.

In restaurants, raw oysters are generally served with cocktail sauce (clobbers their subtle flavors) and the preferred mignonette (vinegar, pepper and shallots). I don't use either.

Since nothing in the world tastes more like the place it came from than an oyster, it's best to order raw ones from a restaurant that sources them. With their geographically precise, daily-changing menus, the Columbus Fish Market and McCormick & Schmick's both qualify.

Expect East Coasters (like those from Prince Edward Island) to drop an exciting salt bomb on your tongue, while Pacifics (like Quilcenes) tend to be softer, sweeter and have a lovely cucumber finish. I recommend sampler plates from each place — they're like joyful wine flights but of pristine seafood. Now if you see Rowan roaming about while you're there, you've already been warned.

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'Ghost' crab pots litter bay bottom

2008-02-12T20:31:00.000-08:00

By PAMELA WOOD

Thousands of old crab pots are stuck in the muck at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, catching and killing fish and crabs.
It sounds like a dramatic problem for the ailing bay, but scientists are just starting to come to grips with how much of a problem it is and whether it's even worth trying to do something about it.

"We're still trying to answer the question, 'Is this a problem?'" said Steve Giordano, a fisheries program manager for the Chesapeake Bay office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The administration's staff has been working with Maryland and Virginia officials and Versar, a private contractor, to gauge the scope of the problem of derelict and abandoned crab pots and crab traps, better known as "ghost pots."

Mr. Giordano gave an update in Annapolis last night to about 30 people, a group that was split between watermen, recreational fishermen and boaters and environmentalists.

Mr. Giordano's team sampled nearly 300 areas of the bay with a side-scan sonar, which is a torpedo-shaped device that's dragged behind a boat to map the bottom of the water. Then using formulas, the team determined that there might be 42,000 ghost pots sitting on the bottom of Maryland's portion of the bay, give or take a few thousand.

That's an impressive number, but even if each and every ghost pot was killing a large number of crabs each year, it would only amount to less than 1 percent of the crab population.

Considering that the annual crab harvest often wipes out nearly half of the population, 1 percent doesn't add up to much, said Lynn Fegley, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources crab scientist.

With that in mind, waterman CJ Canby of Pasadena questioned what all the fuss was about - especially when there are larger threats to crabs, such as development and polluted stormwater runoff.

Mr. Giordano and DNR officials acknowledged that the ghost-pot problem perhaps has been overstated in some quarters. But they said it's possible that there could be some localized problem areas - for example, a mess of old pots at the entrance to a river that's important for crab migration.

Scientists also don't have a good handle on how many fish are being killed in ghost pots.

Crab pots are cube-shaped structures made from mesh, about 2 feet high per side. Watermen place bait inside and crabs scurry in, but the escape routes only allow undersized crabs to get out. In season, watermen empty their pots regularly, keeping the crabs and tossing back anything else.

But when pots sink to the bottom or drift off, there's no one to pull out the crabs and anything else caught inside.

The crabs that die in the ghost pots, in turn, attract more crabs and fish. Sometimes the white perch try so hard to get out that they scrape holes in their heads.

"We often find traps with lively white perch trying to get out," Mr. Giordano said.

There are several reasons why crab pots can be lost in the murky waters of the bay. They can get caught up in the propellers of careless powerboaters or dragged by the keels of sailboats. The winds and tides can carry them off course.

And occasionally, a less scrupulous waterman might cut loose the line that attaches a rival's pot to its float on the surface.

Several watermen at the meeting agreed they certainly are careful with their pots. It costs $30 to $35 in material per pot, plus the time it takes to assemble them.

For now, there's no plan of action for removing ghost post from the bay. Mr. Giordano said he needs to get a handle on whether removing pots would do more harm than good.

"We're not going to go out and police up 42,000 lost traps in the bay. That's just not reasonable," he said.

Pulling up ghost pots generally involves dragging large grappling hooks on the bay bottom, which can stir up sediment or ruin oyster bars. And sending divers down can be dangerous.

Plus, Gina Hunt from the DNR said legal issues need to be ironed out. In Maryland, there's not a clear legal definition of what's an abandoned pot versus what might be just a lost pot that belongs to someone. And it's not legal for regular boaters or fishermen to pull commercial gear from the water.

That said, Ms. Hunt and Mr. Giordano don't want to discourage anyone from pulling up ghost pots when they encounter them. It's a good idea, though, to contact the DNR when they do.

Not only will the scientists appreciate information about the ghost pot, but they can also make sure that the person doesn't get into any legal hot water with the Natural Resources Police.

"We don't want people to encounter problems when they're trying to do a good thing," Ms. Hunt said.

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About Native Oysters

2008-02-10T19:30:00.001-08:00

The range of the oyster native to the Chesapeake Bay—the American or eastern oyster—extends all along the east coast of North America from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to Key Biscayne, Florida, and south through the Caribbean to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and to Venezuela. The Chesapeake Bay provides optimal environmental conditions for the species; however, oyster productivity varies within the Bay depending on salinity, water quality, habitat conditions, and disease.

Although the native oyster is an extremely resilient species, able to tolerate wide variations in salinity and temperature, it has not been immune to the pressures of disease, overharvesting, and pollution. As a result, native oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay are at less than 1% of historic levels. This tremendous decline in the oyster population has dramatically changed the ecology of the Bay as well as the oyster fishery and the cultural tradition of watermen who harvest seafood from the Bay for a living. Please read on for more information about the basic biology of the eastern oyster including information about the diseases that have decimated the oyster population in the Bay, as well as what is being done to better understand and combat these diseases.

Native Oyster Restoration

The NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office is working with federal, state, and local partners in Maryland and Virginia to implement large-scale restoration projects and to support research that will help us understand how to better manage around oyster disease. NOAA’s financial and technical support toward oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay has grown from one project in 1995 to more than 24 in 2004. Since 2002, more than 550 acres of bottom have been restored or reconditioned in Maryland and Virginia thanks to NOAA funding. This page contains an overview of oyster restoration efforts and techniques, including the use of alternative substrates.

The Oyster Fishery

When the first ships sailed up the Chesapeake Bay in the 1600s, they had to navigate around large reefs created by oysters that had been settling and growing on top of each other for thousands of years. Today, these reefs have been decimated by overharvest, disease, loss of habitat, and poor water quality. Oyster production in the Chesapeake Bay has declined to the point that the industry has nearly collapsed. Please read on for more information about the management of Maryland and Virginia's oyster fisheries, as well as NCBO's support of aquaculture.

Policy on Oysters

The Chesapeake Bay Program has drafted a Comprehensive Oyster Management Plan in an effort to better coordinate oyster restoration efforts Bay-wide. The Army Corps of Engineers have also outlined policies for their oyster restoration activities in Virginia

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About Native Oysters

2008-02-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

The Native Oyster

2008-02-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

For hundreds of years the native oyster, Crassostrea virginica, has played a key role in the ecological and economic health of the Bay. Over-harvesting, habitat destruction, and disease have reduced oyster populations to less than 1% of historic levels. The dramatic decline in oysters has had devastating effects on the ecology, economy, and culture of the Bay.

The NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office (NCBO) is working to restore a healthy oyster population to the Bay. In 2006, NCBO provided $4 million in funding for native oyster restoration and almost $2 million for oyster disease research. Please see our native oyster web pages for more information on this ecologically and commercially important Bay species.

The Asian Oyster

Due to dramatic declines in Chesapeake Bay oyster populations, the states of Maryland and Virginia are considering an introduction of a non-native oyster species, Crassostrea ariakensis, to their tidal waters including the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic coastal bays. C. ariakensis appears to be more resistant to the diseases that have devastated the native oyster population, and some hope that this Asian oyster will be able to revitalize the oyster industry and improve water quality in the Bay.

Maryland Oyster Advisory Commission
Established September 2007, the group is charged with developing new strategies for rebuilding and managing the Chesapeake Bay's oyster population.

Virginia Oyster Heritage Program's Oyster Management Plan for the Lower Rappahannock River

Virginia Blue Ribbon Oyster Panel's Final Report and Recommendations
The Panel's May 2007 Report to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission on pursuing innovative methods to restore the native oyster population and better manage its fishery.

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Satellite Offices:
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NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office
410 Severn Avenue
Annapolis, MD 21403
Phone: (410) 267-5660
Fax: (410) 267-5666

Cooperative Oxford Lab
904 South Morris Street
Oxford, MD 21654
Phone: (410) 226-5193
Fax: (410) 226-5925

Nauticus
1 Waterside Drive
Norfolk, VA 23510
Phone: (757) 627-3823
Fax: (757) 627-3827

Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Route 1208, Greate Road
Gloucester Point, VA 23062
Phone: (804) 684-7382
Fax: (804) 684-7910

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Fifth generation waterman follows forefathers on the bay

2008-02-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

Fifth generation waterman Tommy Lou Hallock stands beside his 42-foot boat called Grace, at Discovery Village

By E.B. FURGURSON III, Staff Writer
Published February 09, 2008
The only thing Tommy Lou Hallock ever wanted to do was work the water. After all, it is in his blood.
He is the fifth generation of Hallocks working as watermen out of Shady Side.
Mr. Hallock's great-great grandfather Joshua Thomas Hallock moved from Long Island to Shady Side after the Civil War at the behest of an old friend, Captain Salem Avery, whose home now houses the local historic society.

It was there at a winter luncheon of the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society that Mr. Hallock told tales of his life as a waterman. One of little more than a handful who ply local waters for a living anymore.

"I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a waterman," he told the packed room on Wednesday. "I just wanted to be out there fishing."

Mr. Hallock said he recalled being about 3 years old, hanging over the top of the rail on his father's boat.

But his father died too young, when Tommy Lou was in eighth-grade.

"They let me out of school. And I have been on the water ever since."

In the 30 years since, he said he has seen lamentable changes both out on the water and in his beloved Shady Side.

Early on he crabbed, oystered and fished. Now he just does the latter, pound netting mostly with some gill netting in winter. It's loads of rockfish, white perch, alewives, and other fish.

At about 4 a.m. Mr. Hallock is out, aboard his 42-foot boat, Grace, named from the Bible passage Ephesians 2:8 - "For by grace are ye saved through faith ... ."

He tends his pound nets, set with poles in the same spots on the bay that Hallocks have set nets for generations. With a crew of four in peak season from spring through summer, he will usually be done by 2 p.m.

"It's hard out there, you have to love it," Mr. Hallock said. Finding young help is a challenge he said. "They go out once and learn they don't want to do it."

When he was younger, just coming up, he was able to learn from the old timers. "I learned the old-school way. How to fish, navigate," he said. "But most of all they taught me how to work."

In Shady Side virtually everyone worked the water or farmed what had been know as the Great Swamp. A few had city jobs.

"Everybody knew everybody. Not like it is now," Mr. Hallock said. "It used to be you would hear a car coming down the road and you knew who it was by the sound. It was the same with boats coming in Parrish Creek. It's not like that now."

It was a relatively sleepy Huckleberry Finn sort of existence that has since changed into today's bedroom community with all the new folks moving in. "They move here from the city and then expect to have everything they had back there," Mr. Hallock said.

Mr. Hallock is a big history buff. Part of that might come from being able to trace his family roots back to Peter Hallock, born in 1585 in England, who moved to Long Island in the mid-1600s, settling in what is now called Hallock's Neck.

And he can rattle them off too. "Peter had a son William, who had a son Peter, then there was Peter II, who had a son William. William's son was Benjamin Franklin Hallock. His son was Thomas Jefferson Hallock. His son, Joshua Thomas Hallock, was the one who moved to Shady Side."

He would love to find correspondence between Joshua and his friend Capt. Salem Avery, who coaxed Hallock to move down to Shady Side, and to it's plentiful oysters.

"I can imagine him writing to Joshua Thomas telling him to come help him take all the oysters that were coming out of these waters."

A few generations kept after those oysters until they were depleted. Heavy harvesting, pollution then disease wreaked havoc on the prized mollusk.

Now, although he is able to catch plenty of fish, enough to eke out a living, he wonders if the Chesapeake Bay is beyond repair.

"We still are adding all that runoff, and sewage, and they continue to let them build, build, build, without the infrastructure to handle it," he said. "It's like they use a Band-Aid instead of fixing the problem."

Demographic changes, environmental degradation and other changes make it harder to connect to the life he and his recent relatives came to know as a way of living - not a lifestyle.

But he will never give it up because his life on the water helps keep him in touch with those roots.

"I get to see the sun rise about 300 days a year, and that is good," he said. "If you don't love it you can't do it. And I look forward to getting to work every day."

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Plan for Chesapeake Bay Trust Fund money goes before Senate committee

2008-02-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

By Kate Elizabeth Queram
Capital News Service

ANNAPOLIS — Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal to allow the BayStat program to allocate the recently created $50 million Chesapeake Bay Trust Fund received generally positive reviews at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

A handful of activists testified before the Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee, all saying they approved of the bill, but expressing concerns about where the money would go.

As is, S.B. 213 stipulates that the annual $50 million fund - first established during November's special session - must be used to reduce non-point source pollution, or the kind of stuff that cannot be traced to one drainage pipe or power plant.

The specifics of the funding would fall to a BayStat group made up of the secretaries of agriculture, the environment, natural resources and planning, as well as the president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The group would be assisted by a scientific advisory board.

BayStat is the latest incarnation of O'Malley's CitiStat program, created during his tenure as mayor of Baltimore. The "Stat" systems promote accountability among state agencies by regularly holding meetings between agency heads and the governor to monitor progress.

Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources John Griffin presented the bill to the Senate committee, noting that bay restoration is an ongoing process that has yet to really be effective.

"We've been at this for 25 years and we?re not getting the results we want," Griffin said. "If we don't focus on non-point source pollution reduction projects, it's not going to change."

Griffin highlighted the bill's key components, including identifying areas where non-point source pollution is most dire - tributaries and smaller waterways, like backyard streams - and then inviting local entities to engage in a competitive grant bidding process.

Griffin also pointed out that the bill gives the BayStat group the flexibility to reallocate funds on a yearly basis if programs aren't performing well.

Mike Phipps, president of the Maryland Farm Bureau, worried about the BayStat group's ability to reallocate funding from year to year.

Some pollution reduction projects may take more than a year to produce results, he said, citing the cover crops program, where farmers plant crops in the off-season to soak up nutrients left in the soil from previous harvests.

Will Baker of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation had other concerns about the funding flexibility.

"We want to make sure 'flexibility' doesn't mean opening the money to other uses," Baker said. He also recommended amendments that would ensure that state agencies are held accountable for the implemented programs, and that they're cost effective.

Other proposed amendments included nods to forest preservation, oyster restoration and poultry farm pollution reduction projects.

Despite some reservations, those testifying seemed optimistic that the trust fund could provide the solution to the long-debated bay restoration problem.

"History might say, 'This is where we marked the point of starting to do something about the bay,'" Baker said.

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Saving Virginia's Oysters

2008-02-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

Perhaps a better question would be: Does the oyster industry deserve to be saved? Certainly, but the track record of those in the industry and those responsible for the health and well-being of the once-prolific native oyster have missed the mark.

Aquaculture with genetically altered native and exotic oysters is being pursued by a small number of growers with limited success.

To save the oyster industry in Virginia, you get on the right horse –– one that has developed new technology and reef design. One that has built, and starting in 1994 deployed, experimental artificial Harvestable Oyster Reef Modules (HORMS) at permitted sites in the Rappahannock River and Chesapeake Bay. This work was funded entirely by the private sector.

The native oyster can regain economic viability, and the entrepreneurs that do it will whistle and hum all the way to the bank.

Robert W. Jensen

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Oysters - History and Preparation

2008-02-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

OYSTERS

The cultivation of oysters began more than 2,000 years ago when Romans collected oyster seed stock near the mouth of the Adriatic Sea and transported them to another part of Italy for grow-out. The Romans had such a passion for oysters that they imported them from all over the Mediterranean and European coasts.

Oysters flourish in estuaries where nutrient-rich fresh water meets the salt water and feed mainly on single-cell plants. When feeding, the oyster can pump and filter 25 gallons of water in 24 hours. Florida's estuaries provide suitable conditions and a plentiful food supply for Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) to grow rapidly. They can reach marketable size in less than two years; whereas, it may take oysters up to six years to reach marketable size in colder northern waters. When traveling along the Gulf Coast, you may see oysters being harvested commercially from small boats by fishermen using large, long handled tongs to scoop clumps of oysters from the bottom.

OYSTER ATTRIBUTES
Tender to firm texture, flavor varies from salty to bland. Extra lean.

HOW MUCH TO BUY
• In-shell oysters: 6 whole oysters per serving.
• Shucked oysters: 1/3 to 1/2 pint per serving

BUYING, STORAGE AND HANDLING

Live Oysters:
• Remember to purchase seafood last and keep it cold during the trip home.
• Live oysters should close tightly when tapped.
• Discard any oysters that don't close; this is an indication that the shellfish are dead.
• They should have a mild odor, similar to the ocean.
• Live oysters should be free of cracks.
• They will remain alive for up to seven days in the refrigerator when stored at a constant 41 degrees F in a container with the lid slightly open.
• Drain excess liquid daily.

Shucked Oysters:

• Remember to purchase seafood last and keep it cold during the trip home.
• Oysters have a fresh odor when freshly shucked.
• A clear, slightly milky or gray liquid should surround freshly shucked oysters.
• Freshly shucked scallops should have very little liquid in the package
• Refrigerate shellfish in a sealed container on ice or in the coldest part of the refrigerator.
• Store shucked oysters up to five days.

PREPARATION

• Keep raw and cooked seafood separate to prevent bacterial cross-contamination.
• After handling raw seafood thoroughly wash knives, cutting surfaces, sponges and your hands with hot soapy water.
• Always marinate seafood in the refrigerator.
• Discard marinade; it contains raw juices which may harbor bacteria.
• When marinade is needed for basting reserve a portion before adding raw seafood.

COOKING

• Wash live oysters thoroughly under cold running water prior to cooking.
• Steamed or grilled: cook until shell opens.
• Shucked oysters: bread and fry in oil for 3 to 4 minutes at 375 degrees F.
• Shucked oysters: bake for 10 minutes at 450 degrees F.

NUTRITION

Nutritional values for approximately 4 ounces (114 grams) of raw, edible portions
Calories 80
Calories From Fat 20
Total Fat 2 g
Saturated Fat .5 g
Cholesterol 55 mg
Sodium 190 mg
Total Carbohydrates 4 g
Protein 9 g

HEALTH ADVISORY

If you eat raw oysters you need to be aware that certain health conditions put some people at risk of serious illness or death and these people should not eat raw oysters. Vibrio vulnificus is a bacterium that occurs naturally in marine waters. It is not a threat to most healthy people, but Vibrio vulnificus can cause sudden chills, fever, nausea, vomiting, blood poisoning and death within two days in people with certain medical conditions. The presence of the bacteria is not a result of pollution or poor product handling. Eating oysters from "clean" waters or in reputable restaurants with high product turnover does not provide protection.

Fully cooking oysters completely kills the bacteria, so you can continue to enjoy oysters in many cooked preparations. When dining at restaurants, order oysters fully cooked if you have one of the risk conditions. Eating raw oysters with hot sauce or while drinking alcohol does NOT kill the bacteria.

You are at risk of being infected by Vibrio vulnificus if you have any of the following conditions:
-- Liver disease, either from an excessive alcohol intake (two to three drinks daily), viral hepatitis or other causes. (Liver disease will put you at increased risk for Vibrio vulnificus infection from raw oysters. The risk of infection is 200 times greater for individuals with liver disease than those without liver disease.)
-- Iron disorder hemochromatosis.
-- Diabetes.
-- Cancer.
-- Stomach problems, including previous stomach surgery and low stomach acid (for example, from antacid use).
-- Immune disorders, including HIV infection long-term steroid use, e.g., asthma and arthritis

If you are an older adult, you may be at greater risk of having these conditions than a younger person. If you are or think you may be in any of these risk categories, you should not eat raw oysters. If you are unsure of your risk check with your doctor.

Visit the Virginia Oyster Store!

Health Benefits Of Oysters

2008-02-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

Oysters are not only delicious, but they’re also one of the most nutritionally well-balanced foods. They’re high in protein, low in fat and loaded with essential minerals.

Ounce for ounce, oysters have fewer calories and about the same level of cholesterol as white-fleshed fish; and are much lower in fat, cholesterol and calories when compared to poultry.

The National Heart and Lung Institute suggests oysters as an ideal food for inclusion in low-cholesterol diets.

Oysters are an excellent source of vitamins A, B1 (thiamin) B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), C (ascorbic acid) and D (calciferol). Four or five medium-size oysters supply the recommended daily allowance of calcium, copper, iodine, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus and zinc.

One entire cup of oyster meat is just 160 calories. Figure 10 calories per medium oyster, or 20 calories per ounce of oyster meat.

Whether you enjoy them raw or cooked, you can enjoy them in abundance.

Visit the Virginia Oyster Store!

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A Guide to Enjoying Prime Oyster Season

2008-02-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

Slurp
A Guide to Enjoying Prime Oyster Season

Deanna Staffo By Anisha Jagtap

This winter in Baltimore may seem mild, but the raw beauties we call oysters are cold and in-season. Local bars and restaurants around the city offer an abundance of oysters from all over the country and the Chesapeake Bay during this prime harvest time when cold waters slow down the oyster's metabolic process, preserving its flavor.

Oysters are bivalve filter-feeders that separate food and foreign matter from water, improving water quality in some areas due to their algae intake. A number of factors affect the flavor of oysters, but most influential are water (temperature and algae/mineral content) and region (East Coast, West Coast, and the Gulf).

On the East Coast, oysters grow completely underwater, resulting in a smooth shell and a salty, sharp finish. West Coast oysters are only submerged during high tide, giving them a coarse shell and a milder flavor. Oysters in the Gulf of Mexico grow rampant, so the quality of water and the harvest area are hard to maintain. They are generally used as generic oysters for cooking.

"I find that the East Coast oysters are big, full, and saltier than the West Coast oysters," says Benjamin Erjavec, executive chef at the Oceanaire Seafood Room at Harbor East, where between seven and nine types of oysters are served a day "Oysters from the West have hints of melon and cucumber, which are nice and somewhat sweeter," Erjavec says.

Patrick Morrow, executive chef at Ryleigh's Oyster in Federal Hill, orders seven varieties daily to serve on the half shell (served in one shell, still attached, on ice). "I order three basic ones people in Maryland love--Chincoteagues from Virginia, Blue Points from Long Island, and Wellfleets from Cape Cod," Morrow says. "They are full, plump, and somewhat salty." The other four choices are usually boutique varieties from specialized harvesting areas that are fresh at the time. These rare oysters generally have distinct flavors. "I always order one [Prince Edward Island] type from the Malpeque Bay. Those oysters are sweeter, and colder, with a good salt," Morrow says.

Woodberry Kitchen at Clipper Mill provides locals with mixtures of oysters strictly from the Chesapeake region. Among the medley: plump Choptank Sweets. These aquacultured oysters (oysters grown in floats on the surface of the water, away from the bottom) are on the menu to support sustainable harvests. Eaters can assume these aquacultured oysters are clean and fresh because they are constantly monitored.

Because oysters seal themselves tightly when removed from water, prying an oyster open can be tricky. A short, thick-bladed shucking knife is used to separate the shells by cracking at the hinge and slowly moving forward along the edge to release the top muscle.

At the annual National Oyster Shucking Competition in St. Mary's County, the fastest shuckers from the East and West coasts show up to test their skills. George Hastings of Nick's Inner Harbor Seafood at Cross Street Market has won the title twice for Maryland. "We house a number of oyster shuckers who compete," says Nick's manager and chef Paul Bartlett. "George can shuck about a dozen oysters a minute." Despite his accolades, Hastings can still be seen shucking oysters at Nick's during weekend and game-day rushes.

So where do all the shells go? Most go straight to the dump, but Bartlett encourages oyster purveyors to donate their shells to recycling programs. Nick's has started an oyster-shell recycling program in an effort to help the restoration of the Chesapeake. "We are trying to figure out how to get these used shells and broken pieces to the University of Maryland Horn Point hatchery on the Eastern Shore." Hatcheries propagate oysters, place them in the old shells, and then situate them on reefs.

Oysters can be pricey, but many restaurants offer specials that allow you to get a taste without emptying your wallet. Ryleigh's Oyster serves $1 oysters all day Monday and Tuesday, with the same deal during happy hour Wednesday through Friday. If you don't go for the slimy, yet tasty raw assortment, try them grilled. Oceanaire also runs a happy hour special of a half-dozen oysters for $6.95 between 5 and 7.

With so many varieties served at these and other restaurants around town, selecting the right oyster can seem like a daunting task. Don't be afraid to ask the generally well-informed staffs to explain the distinctions, or, as Morrow suggests, "try a bunch of different ones and see what suits you the best."

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Feasting on Oysters

2008-02-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

Rogov's Ramblings
Feasting on Oysters

Every year, from fall to mid-winter, I am inundated with phone calls, letters, faxes and email communications from readers. Some want to know why I write so lovingly about oysters. Others want me to list the places in the world I consider best for feasting on them. The time has obviously come for me to write my definitive paean of praise for these not-at-all humble creatures of the sea.

First of all, I adore oysters because I find something simultaneously sexual and sensual about eating them. Second of all, considering the logic of what novelist, playwright Alexander Dumas had to say, there is something pathetic about oysters and eating them is the only way to pay them tribute. Dumas reminded us that the oyster, which is incapable of moving, has no head, no organs of sight, taste, hearing or smell. "Worst of all", Dumas remarked, "because it is hermaphroditic, it does not even know the pleasure of being in company with a member of the opposite sex". In short, the oyster's only exercise is sleep and its only pleasure eating the algae and other minuscule creatures that are foolish enough to swim into its "mouth".

Few people concern themselves with the monotonous lifestyle of the oyster, but a great many people do not hesitate to spend an enormous amount of time and money in their search to find the most succulent of these treats. Roman general Lucullus is said to have spent enormous sums to have live oysters brought to him from the coast of Brittany and Brindisi and, on at least one occasion, Japanese emperor Hirohito sent a fleet of five navy ships to the Philippine Islands, there to purchase oysters for the royal household. As to going to excess, the Duke of Luynes, who was so fat that he had a semi-circle cut out of the edge of his dining table to fit his huge stomach, considered himself an ascetic because he never ate more than thirty-six oysters at a time and Ernest Hemingway boasted that he could consume 50 oysters and then go on to a five course dinner.

Even nutritionists have little to complain about, for the oyster, which is extraordinarily rich in protein, also contains Vitamins A, B, B-2, B-2 and C, as well as healthful amounts of phosphorous, iron, copper and manganese. The oyster is said to be the only food known that does not cause indigestion and, to add to their charm, many people are firmly (but incorrectly) convinced that oysters have aphrodisiac powers.

Although oysters are in season eight months in the northern hemisphere every year, they are the gastronomic and social rage in September and October. Right now, from Paris to San Francisco and from Boston to Osaka, as well as in Tel Aviv and the Gulf Emirates, devotees are pouring into their favorite oyster bars and seafood restaurants, there to part with a good part of their salaries to enjoy these delicate treats.

As to my personal prejudices, although oysters can be poached, grilled, fried or cooked in a dozen other ways, purists (including this writer) the world over insist that oysters are at their best when eaten raw. They also know that oysters must be opened just before they are served and that they must be served very cold. There is no better way to serve a freshly opened oyster than by laying it on a bed of crushed ice and serving it with fresh lemon or a light sauce of lemon juice, shallot vinegar and coarsely ground pepper. In most places, such oysters will also be served with a small bowl of finely chopped onion and a plate of lightly buttered dark or white bread.

As to what wine is appropriate, I remain convinced that the most perfect marriage ever made on earth is that between raw oysters and grand cru Chablis. I confess, however, that at times I am perfectly willing to settle for a good Champagne, Pouilly Fuisse or Muscadet. In times of emergency, I am willing to drink California, Pays d'Oc or Australian Chardonnay with my oysters.

If You Insist on Cooking Oysters

Despite my perhaps exaggerated sense of purism, there is a place in the heart of gastronomes for oysters that have been cooked and, if the absolute truth need be told, each of the following dishes have given me enormous pleasure over the years.

Creamed Oyster Canapes - A recipe from Cuba

1/2 liter oysters and their liquid
16 bread rounds (about 5 cm. in diameter), toasted and buttered
about 1/2 cup chicken stock
2 Tbsp. each butter, flour, dry sherry and chopped parsley
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. paprika or cayenne pepper

To the oyster liquor add enough chicken stock to make 1 cup.

In a saucepan melt 2 Tbsp. of the butter and add the flour, stirring until blended. Stir in slowly, over a low flame, the oyster liquor and stock mixture and to this add the salt and paprika. When the sauce is smooth and hot (but not boiling) add the oysters. Heat just to the boiling point but do not allow to boil. When the oysters are heated through remove from the flame and season with the dry sherry, mixing well. Spoon at once onto the toasted bread rounds, sprinkle over with parsley and serve immediately.

(Serves 6 - 8).

Oysters Rockefeller - A classic American recipe

500 gr. spinach, with stems removed
1 clove garlic, halved
6 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. onion, very finely chopped
1 Tbsp. flour
1/4 cup sweet cream
salt and pepper to taste
24 large oysters, in their shells
1 tsp. each sugar and onion juice
1 Tbsp. parsley, very finely chopped
hot paprika or cayenne pepper as needed
225 gr. bacon, minced
1/2 cup dried bread crumbs

Wash the spinach well under cold running water and the immerse it in 2 cups of rapidly boiling water. Reduce the flame, cover and simmer until the spinach is tender (about 15 minutes). Drain and discard the water. With a sharp knife cut the spinach until it is nearly pureed.

In a skillet which has been rubbed with the garlic clove, melt 2 Tbsp. of the butter and in this saute the onion until golden. Stir in and blend well the flour and then add, slowly stirring constantly, the cream. Continue stirring until the sauce is smooth and heated through. Add the spinach and cook 3 - 4 minutes longer. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Open the oysters and remove them from their shells. Distribute the spinach mixture on the shells On the spinach lay the oysters and on them add, in this order, a pat of butter, a drop of onion juice, a pinch of parsley, a few grains of cayenne pepper and the minced bacon. Sprinkle over with the bread crumbs and on each shell place a generous dot of butter. Bake in a very hot oven for 10 minutes and then transfer to a hot broiler to brown. Serve immediately.

(Serves 4 - 6).

Deep Fried Oysters

3 eggs
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1/2 tsp .each salt and pepper
24 large oysters, removed from their shells
deep oil for frying
lemon wedges for serving

In a small mixing bowl beat together the eggs with 4 Tbsp. water.

On a small plate combine the bread crumbs, salt and pepper.

With plastic toothpicks skewer the oysters through the muscle portion and dip each first in the egg and then in the bread crumbs. Repeat and dip again first in the egg and then in the bread crumbs, coating well. Remove from the toothpick and let the oysters stand on a rack for 1 -2 hours.

Fry the oysters in deep oil that has been heated to 190 degrees Celsius for 4 - 5 minutes. Serve hot with the lemon wedges.

(Serves 4).

Spiced Oysters - A recipe from Costa Rica

3 cloves garlic
36 large oysters, removed from their shells
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 1/2 Tbsp. salt
4 medium onions
1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup vinegar
1 tsp. each allspice and pepper
1 Jalapeno or other hot chili pepper, canned or jarred, chopped coarsely
1 tsp. liquid from the Jalapeno peppers

In a small saucepan bring to the boil about 1/2 cup of water and into this plunge the garlic cloves. Let boil for about 5 minutes. Drain and chop the garlic coarsely.

Place the oysters in a saucepan, add 1 cup of water, the lemon juice and 1 Tbsp. of the salt and simmer just until the oysters become plump (about 5 minutes). Set aside to cool for 30 minutes.

Bring to the boil a large amount of water. When a rolling boil is attained, remove from the flame, add the remaining salt and plunge in the onions. Let soak for 5 minutes, drain and slice the onions. Dry on paper toweling. In a heavy skillet heat the oil and in this saute the onions just until translucent. Pour the onions and oil over the cooled oysters, add the remaining ingredients, cover and let stand, refrigerated for 24 hours. Serve well chilled.

(Serves 6).

Baked Oysters - A recipe from Massachusetts

24 oysters, on their shells, with the liquids reserved
5 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. flour
about 1/2 cup sweet cream
1/2 tsp.salt
pinch or two of cayenne pepper
2 cups oysters, removed from their shells and in their liquids
3 - 4 Tbsp. dry sherry
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 cup cooked shrimp, chopped
1/2 cup dried bread crumbs

Drain and dry the 24 opened oysters, reserving the liquid. In a saucepan melt 2 Tbsp. of the butter and to this add the flour, stirring constantly until well blended. Combine the oyster liquid with enough sweet cream to make 1 cup and slowly stir this into the saucepan. Add the salt and paprika and, over a low flame, stir regularly and continue to cook until the sauce is smooth and hot. Add the oysters that have been removed from their shells and the shrimp and heat the mixture just to boiling point. Remove from the flame and season with the sherry and lemon juice. Add the chopped shrimp and mix well.

Prepare the oysters on the half shell and over these divide the mixture. Sprinkle over the bread crumbs and cover with generous dots of the remaining butter. Bake in a very hot oven until the crusts are golden. Serve hot

(Serves 4 - 6).

Oyster Pancakes - A Japanese recipe

1/2 liter oysters, removed from their shells, in their liquor
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup spring onions, chopped finely
1 Tbsp. parsley, chopped
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp.black pepper
1/2 cup each flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder corn or peanut oil as required
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. Japanese hot pepper sauce or Tabasco

Strain the oysters and chop them coarsely, reserving the liquor. Combine the oysters, eggs, green onions, parsley, salt and pepper. Sift the flour and baking powder together and stir this into the oyster mixture. Add enough of the oyster liquor to thin the mixture out (about 1/2 cup).

Heat a pancake griddle, oil it lightly with corn oil or peanut oil and make 7 cm. pancakes by dropping the batter from a tablespoon. When one side has turned golden turn the pancakes (allow about 1 minute for each side). Set aside to keep warm.

Combine the vinegar, hot pepper sauce and soy sauce and serve as a dip with the pancakes.

(Serves 4).

Visit the Virginia Oyster store!

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