The Oyster Blog

The official Anderson's Neck blog with progress updates on our mission to Save the Bay One Oyster at a Time. We will notify you when we post new articles if you Join Our Mailing List.

As many of you know, when I get ideas in my head, they have a tendency to become all consuming endeavors. I pursue these little thought bubbles with fanatical focus until they are fully explored and figured out in all their complex beauty and uniqueness. The story of our oyster farm is no different.

When I decided to officially kick off the restoration of the Anderson’s Neck and its legendary oyster beds, I had a series of difficult decisions to make. It did not take long to realize that the natural oyster population of the Chesapeake Bay had declined so precipitously, that there were nearly none left to harvest. The natural oyster fishery is virtually nonexistent. It is no different for the oyster beds of Anderson’s Neck and the Upper York River. So if you don’t harvest naturally occurring oysters, how else do you raise them? Sustainable Aquaculture is the answer.

For me the work of oyster aquaculture was an unknown world waiting to be explored. It is filled with nooks and crannies of little known techniques and methods. In this little corner of the fisheries world, an eclectic group of entrepreneurial tinkerers strive to restore the oyster to its former glory. That sounded like something I wanted to know more about and do my part to further the cause.

So I began reading every book, research report, and website I could find on the topic. I also convinced my wife, Laura, to take a trip to the 2010 Urbanna Oyster Festival as part of my newfound passion. Ok, well it really didn’t take much convincing given her penchant for oysters on the half shell. I think her enthusiastic response broke the sound barrier. I could have sworn I heard a loud explosion and several of the windows rattled in the house as she shot back a resounding ”YES!” Perhaps, a little context is in order…

Laura absolutely loves oysters on the half shell. My beautiful little wife becomes a voracious predator when these tasty bivalves appear. There are a few specific behaviors I have observed in the animal kingdom that resemble Laura’s actions when a fresh plate of oysters are set before her. She goes through a scary transformation where genes and DNA take over. She becomes the predator stalking her prey. Eyes sharpen. All conversation ceases. Like a lioness on the Serengeti, she locks on her target. There is a brief pause, then unexpectedly, she makes her move. With cheetah-like speed, she pounces on her prey. Then unbelievably she undergoes a rapid metamorphosis, growing fins in fact, and voracious shark-like feeding ensues. Only when every single oyster has been slurped down, will she breathe again. Her muscles relax. She leans back, and takes a sip of beer. The wife I married and love has thankfully returned. She will eventually turn to look at me. She finds a look of horror on my face. She seems to say with her eyes: “What did I do?” A little embarrassed, she mumbles in her soft spoken inside voice, “Sorry” followed by a little euphoric giggle. WARNING: Be careful if you are present for one of these episodes. I have established as a matter of sound practice to do a formal count of all my fingers and toes to ensure they are still in good working order after one of these feedings. It’s best to be safe.

So now that you understand Laura’s passion of oysters, let’s get back to the Urbanna Oyster Festival. The event obviously has oysters, which is all Laura needed to hear. But it also has several educational booths down close to the water where you can speak with waterman, biologists, and conservationists. So Laura and I decided to make the trip.

When we arrived at Urbanna, we side stepped all the artisan booths and distractions. Laura needed oysters and fast. She was whipped into a near frenzy in anticipation. She darted to the nearest booth elbowing folks out of the way and ordered up two dozen oysters on the half shell and told the guy to “keep ‘em coming” and that she would let him know when to stop. He looked a little frightened as he looked at me. I just shrugged my shoulders as if saying “what do you want me to do, bud?” I motioned to him in that wild eyed husband-to-husband look and he instantly understood that he’d better get moving or we were going to have an incident, and it wouldn’t be pretty. He got the message. From that point, oysters were thrown in front of us as fast as they could shuck them. So after an hour or so of ravenous feeding, I was ready to risk suggesting we move down to the water and get some oyster education. Laura begrudgingly agreed. We settled up and moved on so we could chat it up with the experts.

Our first stop was at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation booth. After talking about salinity levels, oyster filtration capabilities, and oyster farming, I quickly learned I needed to meet with one man, Tommy Leggett. His name was littered everywhere. From what I had read and after hearing the descriptions, he sounded like what I would describe as a modern day Oyster Oracle. Not only did he have a part time gig for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation as a marine biologist, but he also has his own oyster farm on the lower York River. The gentleman at the booth was nice enough to give me Tommy’s personal cell phone number and email address. All I had to do was work up the courage to call him when I got back home.

And so after a few weeks after the festival, I worked up the nerve and gave Tommy a call. Surprisingly, he answered right away as if he was expecting my call. I told him briefly what I was trying to do. The next thing I know, I was in my truck driving down to meet Tommy. He wanted to take me out on the boat and give me a tour of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s model farm. There he showed me the various methods that could be used to raise oysters with several interns in tow.

I shared my plan in more detail with Tommy telling them I wanted to pursue the technique for growing oysters known as “remote setting.” Tommy quickly expressed his reservations. He told me he was concerned about sedimentation suffocating my oysters and hog-nosed rays gobbling up all my oyster seed. That sounded ominous. He advised that using off-bottom aquaculture cages might be a better way to go. I listened intently and soaked up as much as I could. But the information was coming so fast it was like drinking from a water hose. I also had mixed feelings of both disappointment and excitement. I had already done a tremendous amount of research on remote setting. In fact, I had all the plans laid out with a fully functional financial model and all the contacts for buying the equipment I needed. Plus, remote setting fit with my current lifestyle. I had a day job and a life back in Richmond, Virginia. I could go to the farm to do the setting during the spring and then pay someone with a boat to dredge the flats when they were ready to harvest. But after seeing the aquatic life teeming on those cages that Tommy and his interns showed me, I just couldn’t fathom dragging a power dredge across the bottom. It would harm, if not kill, every living animal in its way. That simply wouldn’t do. I had to do better than that.

After coming back to the dock, and saying my thank yous and goodbyes, I made a bee-line to Anderson’s Neck. My head was spinning. Once I arrived, I threw on my waders and walked out onto the mud flats at mid tide despite the heavy rain that was coming down. I waded out to about four feet of water and walked one side of the old beds to see if I could feel any old oyster shell on the bottom. What I found was mostly sand and mud. I did find one big area where the neighbors told me a sunken island used to protrude out into the river. When I got there, I felt the crunchy discarded shells under my feet, millions of them in fact. The neighbors tell me there used to be a pier that would access the island with a big oyster shucking house at the end. That was back when the New York family, the Wright’s, bought The Neck and the oyster grounds off the shore, “Anderson’s Front”, contained prime oyster beds that were routinely scraped until nothing was left. However, this small sunken island and the area around it, was the only place I found shells. The rest of the bottom was either mud or sand. Perhaps, Tommy was right. Putting baby oysters that have attached (“set”) on old oyster shells directly on the river bottom (“remote setting”), may not be the best method. The oyster beds had been scraped clean after years of harvesting and the discarded shells were not redistributed to the river bottom. So the baby oyster larvae had nothing to attach themselves to as larvae. The few that did were submerged in the muck from sedimentation and suffocated. Now I understood why the oyster strip mining of the past led to the massive decline of the oyster’s reproductive patterns on the old oyster beds. This was going to be much harder than I expected.

Perhaps off-bottom cages were they way to go. But if I went in that direction, an enormous series of logistical and financial problems needed to be solved. I had no boat. I had no oyster cages. I had a half mile long dock that everything would need to be transported across and it was only five feet wide. I had no electricity at the farm or on the dock. I had no boat slip. I had no farm crew. I had nowhere to store supplies. I couldn’t use an upweller at the dock to raise baby oysters before they went into cages. The floating upweller would ground out at low tide on the shallow mud flats and simply clog up, killing all the oysters. And how would I raise those heavy cages that weighed up to 850 pounds, with no boat and no crane? Plus, I had a job and a life in Richmond. This was stupid. What the heck was I doing anyway? I was no waterman. I needed to go home, grab a bourbon, drown my tears, and move on. Or I could simply get on with it and solve every one of these technical challenges by sheer determination and ingenuity. Well, needless to say, I chose the latter.

We will explain how we solved these formidable challenges throughout this blog. But that is more than can be explained in one post. This blog is dedicated to keeping you abreast of the exciting developments at Anderson’s Neck Oyster Company. We have a whole host of plans in the works. We will share with you the exhausting, yet rewarding effort that goes into bringing premium oysters back to the Upper York River and to our customer’s tables.

You can probably tell that despite the aching muscles, we are having an absolute blast. We are excited to share with you our passion for sustainable oyster farming and the taste of our fresh, premium oysters. We hope you enjoy the story and can follow us in this epic journey!

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