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Francisco DeGarte unloads oysters from a Bevans Oyster Co. boat at a packing company in Colonial Beach.
Native Virginia oysters planted three years ago on leased grounds are doing well and are now being harvested.
Dewey Chatham arrives at Rusty Curley's pier in Colonial Beach after dredging oysters in the Potomac yesterday. |
By RUSTY DENNEN
Like ghosts from the past, boats heavy with Potomac River oysters have been pulling up to Rusty Curley's pier in Colonial Beach most mornings for several weeks.
Crews of the Stephanie Cheryl, Five Daughters II and a smaller boat yesterday shoveled mounds of the shellfish onto a conveyor belt and into the back of a waiting truck.
At a time when the river's oysters are all but gone, what gives?
It's a combination of entrepreneurial spirit, luck and help from Mother Nature, Curley said as he watched the scene unfold on Monroe Bay.
Curley leases acres of river bottom just outside the bay. Three years ago, he and Ronnie Bevans planted several thousand bushels of "seed" oysters there. Bevans owns Bevans Oyster Co. in Kinsale.
Those thumbnail-size oysters, grown in the Great Wicomico River in Northumberland County, are now fat and ready for harvest.
"They are living and doing great. Oh, my gosh, they're big, nice oysters," said Curley, who plans to plant more this fall or next spring.
Curley says he and Bevans should bring in a total of 5,000 to 6,000 bushels--each worth about $40. The oysters are shucked and packed by Bevans and another processor in the Northern Neck.
Their grounds are not to be confused with the Potomac's public oyster grounds--administered by the Potomac River Fisheries Commission--which have all but succumbed to a pair of oyster diseases and over harvesting.
Last season's public harvest, river wide, yielded only about 500 bushels.
Private growers like Bevans and Curley plant their oysters on leased grounds where they have exclusive rights to harvest them. Bevans' boats scoop the oysters from the bottom with a heavy metal dredge.
It takes oysters two to three years to grow from seed to marketable size. But in the Potomac, as watermen, scientists and regulatory agencies have discovered, nothing is guaranteed.
Curley and Bevans took a financial risk buying and planting the seed, knowing that the diseases--MSX and Dermo--could kill the tiny oysters or hinder their growth. Or that a hurricane or tropical storm could dump enough fresh water in the river to kill them outright.
A tropical storm hit three years ago, several months after the oysters were planted. They survived.
"I was worried," said Curley, who, like his father, owned an oyster-packing plant on Monroe Bay. That closed in 2003 after flooding from Hurricane Isabel swamped parts of the town and delivered a devastating blow to the river's shellfish.
He added wistfully, "My mainstay was choice Potomac River oysters--a fat, beautiful oyster. Not with a briny skin like you get down South" from the Gulf of Mexico.
Curley owns a marina but still keeps his hand in the oyster business, indirectly.
There was a time in the 1960s when the scene playing out here was the norm at wharves all along the lower Potomac. Through the autumn and winter, hundreds of oyster boats and dozens of large "buy" boats worked within sight of Colonial Beach.
During the best seasons, Virginia and Maryland watermen harvested a million bushels or more.
Curley says he's "tickled" by the presence of oyster boats once again at the dock.
"It tells me that oysters will live and thrive in the Potomac River, and even do it during adverse circumstances."
He suggests that Maryland and Virginia do their own planting on public grounds.
That was done by the bistate fisheries commission until several years ago, but the panel was concerned that importing seed oysters from other areas might spread the diseases.
Oysters are so scarce that the commission considered a harvest moratorium but last week opted to study alternatives to re-establish them.
The Army Corps of Engineers recently decided against introducing nonnative Asian oysters after a long environmental impact review.
Kirby A. Carpenter, executive secretary of the fisheries commission headquartered in Colonial Beach, said the Potomac benefits by the presence of even small numbers of oysters because they filter large amounts of water.
And oysters grown on leased beds, if they spawn before being harvested, could help build stocks.
"But in the wild, you need both young and old oysters, and oysters on leased bottoms are of a single year class most of the time," Carpenter said.
Rusty Dennen: 540/374-5431
Email: rdennen@freelancestar.com
