He has 14 small baskets of live oysters and shells attached to buoys to keep them off the bottom. He pours Quikrete into egg cartons, then uses the concrete eggs to weigh down the baskets and offer a landing spot for passing oyster spat. We all did.”Īnd then there’s Kendall Schoelles, another veteran tonger and such a true believer in the bay that he has become an improvised aquaculturist.
They thought the oystering would last forever. Most of the young guys who were oystering had to go back to get their GEDs and find land jobs. There won’t be any more boats - they’ll all rot out. But I don’t know who’s going to work the beds if they do come back. “If Mother Nature wants to come back, it’ll come back. It was as if during a food shortage, Kroger had opened its doors, removed the cash registers, and said, “Come and get whatever you can carry.” Tongers raked the bay to the mud. Though oil from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon explosion never reached Apalachicola Bay, the fear of oil prompted the state to lift all restrictions on oyster harvests. Things had changed radically by the 2010s. Then came what Lockley calls the bonanza years - plenty of oysters and money. The oyster tongers stayed off the water for two seasons while the beds recovered. Tornadoes accompanied the hurricane winds and swells, destroying hundreds of acres of oyster beds. They’re mostly in law enforcement now.” 1985’s double whammy of hurricanes Elena and Kate was the worst year Lockley can remember. My kids went out with me when they were in school. You could take care of your family if you got out there and worked. “The bay was a good living,” Lockley says. The star of the piece is Noah Lockley, Jr., who first became a tonger on his uncle’s boat 50 years ago. The upshot is that the oyster fishery has collapsed and, in 2020, the state of Florida closed the bay to oyster fishing for up to five years. In addition, the watersheds along the bay have been the subject of a dispute between Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. These rivers have been engineered to serve the demands of modern society. There are 14 dams in the upstream watershed. Pumps on the Flint River irrigate cotton, corn, and peanuts. One of the bay’s barrier islands has been artificially cut to open a new channel. The Apalachicola is routinely dredged to allow boat traffic. In that way, the oyster is the ultimate downstream user, a keystone species stuck on the bottom, at the mercy of not only Mother Nature but our water power structure, too. “But if you get a bunch of dry years, numbers really go down.” The oyster, once affixed to its reef, has to wait for life to come to it. “Part of the success of wild oysters is getting successful years with lots of fresh water to knock back predators and disease.” There is a natural ebb and flow, Walton notes in years when the rivers run low, populations temporarily decline.
“It takes the right mix of nutrients and salt and fresh water, but also the geography of the bay itself matters,” says Bill Walton, the Shellfish Aquaculture Program Coordinator at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. That has become complicated in Apalachicola Bay.
And, as the good folks at report, it’s hitting a small place called Apalachicola Bay, where grandfathers and grandchildren have scraped the ocean floor for oysters for as long as anyone can remember.Īn oyster fishery depends vitally on a delicate balance between saltwater and fresh. It is a kind of environmental deindustrialization. They were the heart of small communities all around the country. Many of them had supported generations of workers. There are dozens of stories about occupations disappearing due to a number of environmental factors. It was this week that I learned what an oyster tonger is, and the tragedy of it is that, had I waited a few years longer, I never would have learned about them at all.
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