Parts of the Apalachicola Bay reopened for limited wild oyster harvesting after a five-year pause. Oyster eaters and fishermen are delighted.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
North Florida’s Apalachicola Bay was once a major source of oysters. A combination of droughts, disasters, and over-harvesting led to the fisheries collapse and a five-year closure. Now parts of the bay are open again, at least temporarily. Regan McCarthy of member station WSFU reports.
REGAN MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Roger Mathis has been working on the water since he was 6 years old. Now, at 68, it’s still the way he prefers to make his living, but for almost a decade, he says he hasn’t been able to.
ROGER MATHIS: 2017 – the last time I come out in ’17, the oysters were just gone. So I just quit – come over here and started cleaning houses for my wife.
MCCARTHY: He not only helped his wife clean houses, he also worked as a handyman and took jobs with researchers who studied the bay to make ends meet. Now some of the oyster populations are beginning to recover, so much so that through the end of this month, the bay is open to wild harvest again. That means Mathis is back out on the water. And this time, he says, there are a lot more oysters.
MATHIS: But it’s so thick down there right now. You see, it’ll take just a second to get it. It just takes longer to cull it than it does anything.
MCCARTHY: He’s using oyster tongs – think 12-foot-long poles with garden rakes attached at the end to scoop the oysters up from the reef.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUMPING OYSTERS)
MATHIS: And that, my friend, is oystering.
MCCARTHY: After dumping a load of oysters onto the boat, Mathis gets to work culling. Yeah. He’s sorting through the oysters, whacking them with a long metal tool to separate the shells from the rocks. Those rocks were dumped here by researchers for baby oysters to attach to. And in this part of the bay, it worked. They grew a lot.
MATHIS: This is as big as oysters – most oysters I’ve seen out here in a long, long time.
KAYLA GRIFFIN: They are big. They’ve been in that water growing for so long.
MCCARTHY: Kayla Griffin (ph) is a server at the Red Pirate Oyster Bar in the small town of East Point. She says oystering is an important part of her community’s culture.
GRIFFIN: And it’s nice being able to have our oystermen back on the bay and our oystermen being able to be seen, going over the bridges. That’s good for our hearts.
MCCARTHY: She says this two-month window for wild oysters has been good for business, too.
GRIFFIN: People are calling all day – are y’all serving the wild-caught oysters?
MCCARTHY: Wildlife officials are closely watching the temporary harvest, as much of the bay is still in recovery mode. Sandra Brooke is a researcher at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Lab. She says it will take careful management for the oyster populations to survive and thrive.
SANDRA BROOKE: From a scientific ecological perspective, my personal preference would have been that they left it closed for another five or so years to let the populations become a little bit less vulnerable.
MCCARTHY: But Brooke recognizes temporarily opening parts of the bay is important to protect the future of the fishery and the culture here.
BROOKE: People got out of the fishery. I mean, you see people that have been in it for generations, but most of them, their kids are not going to be oyster fishermen.
MCCARTHY: For Mathis, that’s true. While he and his son have been out tonging during the recent opening, that’s not how his son makes his living. Mathis says it all reminds him of an old song an old friend wrote.
MATHIS: You ever heard that song, “Oyster Man Blues”? A friend of mine named Mack Novak wrote it back when he was 18 years old. (Singing) Well, his day starts at 5 a.m. He hits the bar, got his Maxwell House coffee in a Bama mayonnaise jar.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “OYSTER MAN BLUES”)
MACK NOVAK: (Singing) Out goes the anchor, and then over goes the tongs.
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