Maryland’s Oyster Season Closes on a High Note by Dennis Forney

Frank Schultz knows something about oystering in Chesapeake Bay waters.  He’s been at it now for 52 years..

“Just getting started,” he said with a laugh as he motored away from the loading wharf at PT Hambleton’s operation in Bozman.

The stern of his vessel carries its name, Some Day, with its hailing port, Ridgely, Md., scripted below.

When he told me he lives in Caroline County, it struck me as odd.  Caroline is the only county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore without bayfront land.  When I saw Ridgely, that confirmed the oddity. Tucked between the upper reaches of the Choptank River and Tuckahoe Creek, Ridgely is far from navigable water.

“I used to have a house in St. Michaels,” said Schultz. “But somebody wanted it more than I did. Business, you know.”

Supply and demand. Push and pull.

Phil stood by, raising and lowering the stainless-steel, bushel-sized bucket into Some Day to take off the day’s catch. A young man on the boat emptied heavy plastic boxes filled with oysters into the bucket. Once filled, Phil hauled it up and emptied it, in turn, into a four foot by four foot by four foot container ultimately bound for a major shucking house in Virginia. From there, the oysters will make their way to restaurants and grocery stores up and down the East Coast.

“That’s Frank’s grandson,” said Phil.  “The next generation of watermen.  Taylor Moran.”

On the next to the last day of the 2021-2022 wild oystering season, Frank and Taylor had worked waters in San Domingo Creek to get their day’s limit of twelve bushels each. “Right around Willey’s Island,” said Frank.

San Domingo Creek runs off of Broad Creek to the back side – Choptank River side – of St.  Michael’s.

I am familiar with San Domingo Creek. Poet and novelist Gilbert Byron spent decades there in his hand-built cabin on Old House Cove.  But Willey’s Island rang no familiar bell.

“Hambleton Island?” I asked.

“Same thing,” said Phil, himself a Hambleton.

“I always call it Willey’s Island,” said Frank as he handed the day’s last box of oysters to Taylor for emptying into the bucket.  “It used to be owned by the Willey family.”

Today the island is owned by Chesapeake Bay Foundation. I’m guessing it might have been owned at one time by Hambletons, a family with deep Eastern Shore roots.

Frank added his name to the many watermen calling this year’s season, now ending, very good.

“Getting your limits like this every day?” I asked.

“Just about,” he said.  “We needed it after last year.  Usually only two days of market then and prices low. But we made it through.  This year has been a big turnaround.”

As the season ended on March 31, oysters were bringing $44 per bushel to the harvesters. A good year means watermen will be able to afford to get their boats in good shape for the crabbing season that opened April 1, get caught up on bills that stacked up during last year’s bad season, purchase new equipment, maybe even put some money aside. With high productivity of baby oysters – called the spat set – over the past two years, the outlook for the next few years also looks good so long as no natural disaster like a hurricane or disease wreaks havoc in the Chesapeake’s natural system.

In Frank’s 52 years of oystering, annual harvests in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake have been as low as 25,000 bushels – in the 2003-2004 season according to state statistics – and as high as nearly three million bushels in the 1971-1972 season when he was first getting started. Though final harvest numbers for the 2021-2022 season aren’t yet available, the bushel count should reach into the 500,000 range, well up from the 332,000 count in the 2020-2021 season. Many feel this will be the best season that many watermen – especially younger ones – have ever seen.

In the midst of the current optimism, Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Dr. Allison Colden sounded a cautionary note.  Colden is Maryland Senior Fisheries Scientist for the foundation. She develops state and federal fisheries policy initiatives and manages Maryland’s Oyster Restoration Program. She also serves on the Maryland Oyster Advisory Commission.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation is dedicated to improving, maintaining and sustaining the Bay for the sake of the many economic, cultural and economic benefits a clean Chesapeake means.

With a formal education in oysters and fisheries via University of Virginia and the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, Colden brings a deep appreciation and understanding of the science influencing oyster production and management.

“We’re happy and grateful for the strong spat sets of the past two years,” she said in a recent interview. ‘That’s pretty lucky and pretty rare. And we’re also happy that the watermen are having a good season and things look good for the next couple of years. But we don’t want to continue to have the boom and bust cycle – especially in Maryland – that we’ve been experiencing in the past.”

Colden said a strong season like this can bring many more harvesters back into the industry – people who stayed on the sidelines for a while during thinner years. It’s called activation of the latent effort. That makes her and other scientists and managers worry about overharvesting.

“In Tangier Sound, for example,” she said, “there’s a high concentration of fishing. That could result in elimination of the oyster population there if the harvesting rate continues.”

The first formal stock assessment of the number of oysters in Chesapeake Bay in 2018 raised concerns, said Colden.  That assessment estimated a total number of oysters in the system at about 300 million. “That was down from a previous estimate in 1999-2000 of about 600 million oysters.”

Thinking that overfishing was contributing to the decline, Maryland managers, said Colden, responded by reducing bushel limits slightly and closing harvesting on Wednesdays during the season. “The goal was to reduce the harvest by 26 percent during the 2019-2020 season,” she said. “Instead, come a year later, the harvest had increased by 86 percent.” That was from 145,000 bushels harvested in Maryland waters in the 2018-2019 season to 272,000 bushels harvested in the 2019-2020 season. By industry request, however, the state didn’t further restrict harvesting to achieve its previous goal.  Instead, Colden said the state gave back the Wednesday harvesting day – going from four days in 2019-2020 to five days for the 2020-2021 season. “The state saw a good spat set and said ‘why not?’ Our concern is that we may only see two or three years of good harvests.”

In a recent dockside conversation, one veteran waterman said he understood reducing the bushel limit, but was glad the Wednesday prohibition was lifted.  “Down the bay especially there’s a lot of wind and they already lose days to weather.  Wednesday could be the one day in a spell when they could work.”

With more bushels being harvested and the extra day returned, the number of watermen with oystering permits increased from 800 to 1,200, a fifty percent increase.  That’s the activation of latent effort Colden discussed.

That’s where concern about overfishing comes into play and her additional concern that increased activity could damage the small oysters coming along from the strong spat sets.

This point of view, of course, brings another from the opposite direction. Many oystermen feel that working the bottom keeps the oyster bars cleaner, and doesn’t allow silt to settle over and smother baby oysters.  Cultivation.

“We have the ability to make oystering more sustainable tomorrow,” Colden said. “Our stock assessments tell us how many oysters there are in the different areas of the bay that are monitored. The state could set limits on how many oysters could come out of those various areas and help ensure that they would keep on producing from year to year.  The state could also limit the number of permits it issues each year, but right now there’s no limit to how many are issued.  If we [Chesapeake Bay Foundation] knew the Department of Natural Resources would keep in sustainable limits for harvesting, we would stay out of it.  But for now we don’t see any changes in that direction.  It’s pretty well falling on deaf ears. We’re looking for a path forward.  It’s more contentious than it needs to be.  We need to develop a consensus on how we can work together to get more done together”

In the broader perspective, Chesapeake Bay Foundation is concerned that overfishing would result in fewer oysters in the Bay, which would mean fewer oysters to help filter the water and make it a cleaner and healthier system overall, and jeopardize the future for all of us including the next generation of watermen like Taylor Moran.

The next formal stock assessment, with extensive surveying mandated for every five years, will come in 2023. That will provide a more precise picture of how well the overall oyster population is doing in Maryland’s portion of the Bay.

The state’s management policies for the coming 2022-2023 season will be set – probably in July – after the June 14 meeting of the Oyster Advisory Committee which includes industry, environmental, and legislative representatives.

Two ancient economic guiding principles are likely to come into play: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it;” and “Get ‘em while you can.” Coming off a strong season with lots of baby oysters growing toward market size for the next couple of years, any significant changes in the status quo are unlikely.

Dennis Forney grew up on the Chester River in Chestertown. After graduating Oberlin College, he returned to the Shore where he wrote for the Queen Anne’s Record Observer, the Bay Times, the Star Democrat, and the Watermen’s Gazette. He moved to Lewes, Delaware in 1975 with his wife Becky where they lived for 45 years, raising their family and enjoying the saltwater life. Forney and Trish Vernon founded the Cape Gazette, a community newspaper serving eastern Sussex County, in 1993, where he served as publisher until 2020. He continues to write for the Cape Gazette as publisher emeritus and expanded his Delmarva footprint in 2020 with a move to Bozman in Talbot County.