BOZMAN — With Maryland‘s wild oyster season behind him, fifth-generation waterman Tyrone Meredith will be glad not to see another oyster for a while. Then again, after he spends the summer as the affable Captain Ty on his fishing charters, he’ll be looking to slip back to some of that Chesapeake Bay serenity. And so, on Oct. 1, he’ll be back on the prowl for Maryland‘s famous mollusks.

Oysters occupy a special place in Maryland. Dubbed a keystone species, they sit at the intersection of environmental concerns, political wrangling and a legacy economy that basically built Baltimore in its heyday of sail, railroad and canneries.

Meredith has had a perfect vantage point to observe the changing industry. He survived the oysters’ worst seasons, when disease ravaged them in the late 1980s and early 2000s, and has enjoyed the recent stretch of good years — when there’s catch aplenty and the dock prices aren’t bad, either.

“A piece of cake, every day” said Meredith, 64, as he chugged out just after daybreak in his 40-foot classic Chesapeake deadrise workboat, the Rose Mary Anne. “Come out here, fresh air, get to look at the water, catch a few oysters, go home, got nobody on top of you [to] tell you what to do. That’s the main thing.”

The ultimate downplay. His look at the water is to witness a rather shocking inky swirl of blue, silver and gold burst of daybreak over Broad Creek just south of St. Michael’s. Even seen through the smudged cabin’s plexiglass, the watery view makes the case for what old timers call “God’s Country,” a watery haven sliced off from the world where even the rattle from a Ford Lehman diesel engine sounded in key with the sublime.

His idea of a piece of cake, oystering … well, oystering has more in common with mining than it does with, say, fishing, where patience is considered a virtue, part of the process. Downtime in oystering is lost money. Oystering is hard, rock-breaking labor.

On a late-March day, Meredith worked a chisel-shaped culling hammer, knocking the clumps of oysters apart, making them presentable for shuckers before tossing them into buckets. He culled quickly to clear the way for the next catch to swing up onto the boat.

His mate, John Clopein, stood on the edge of the boat to maneuver two long tongs to gather oysters on the bottom and then, when they were pressed together, pulled them up with the aid of a locally made mechanized wrench. Picture giant salad tongs being used to gather up stone from about 14 feet down and that’s pretty much what they do from sunrise until early afternoon, as they pursue their limit of 24 bushels. Oyster season ended March 31.

“You get to this point, you are ready to go fishing,” he said. “Time fishing season’s over, you’re ready to go oystering.”

A good year

The 2023-24 season produced more than 430,000 bushels of wild-caught oysters with an estimated dockside value of $15 million, state figures show. Limited market demand and fewer oysters available for harvest were blamed for a drop from the previous two seasons, when the harvests topped 700,000 and 500,000 bushels. Still, it was the fifth season in the past 30 years when the harvest exceeded 400,000 bushels.

Just as important, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ 2024 fall oyster survey of juvenile oysters, or spat, showed the oyster population to be faring well. Strong spatsets typically signal a bountiful oyster harvest.

“Combine the impressive 2023 spatset with the good 2024 spatsets and oysters are well positioned for the future, assuming, of course, there’s no disease mortality that would knock off a lot of the oysters,” said Christopher Judy, the director of DNR’s shellfish program.

If this sounds like checking one’s optimism, that’s because it is. When it comes to the oyster, it’s not just about bushels plucked and scraped off the public bottom fishery. It’s also about oysters harvested from the underwater farms along the shore that are not part of the public fishery — an aquaculture industry that state officials and environmentalists hope continues to expand.

It’s also the oysters that will never be harvested. Twenty-four percent of the bay’s historic oyster habitat, or 9,000 acres, is protected in underwater sanctuaries and tributaries, in hopes that robust larvae from the preserved oyster reefs will benefit the entire ecosystem. This is paid for with state and federal dollars. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has warned that budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration could have a devastating effect on bay restoration, including efforts to restore and protect native species such as oysters.

For such a simple organism, the Maryland oyster leads a complicated life. It can go from being babied in the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory to being hoisted onto huge barges for replanting to create reefs.

The oyster is revered for its contribution to the environment and to the economy.

According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an adult oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day, including pollutants such as sediment and nitrogen. At one time, oysters could filter a body of water equal to the entire bay in a week.

Tal Petty, owner of Hollywood Oyster Co., an aquaculture farm that sits along the Patuxent River in St. Mary’s County, has seen his stretch of water go from an underwater desert of sandy bottom to “more crabs, more fish, there’s just more, more critters.”

The DNR’s Judy noted that oysters are a rare species that creates its own habitat, unlike fish, which seek out habitats — often in oyster beds. “They are nature’s engineers,” he said.

Allison Colden, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a fisheries scientist, described them as a bedrock species, both for physically being at the bottom and for their role “underpinning the bay’s entire ecosystem.”

“I would say the importance of the oyster in the Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake Bay region is really woven throughout the fabric of our social norms, our culture, our economy, our ecosystem,” she said.

Oysters’ future

The state of bay oysters depends on your perspective.

Talk to watermen, and they are not enthusiastic about the idea of creating more public sanctuaries.

Robert Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, said the state’s big five restoration sanctuaries are not doing well, and that’s why partners have to keep planting them. “They were the best bottom that we had,” he said.

Although tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the sanctuaries, he said, they are still dependent on human care and are just as vulnerable to disease, runoff and silt.

Colden disagreed, saying the five sanctuaries, which have received $92.82 million in funding since 2014, are showing signs of being self-sustaining. There is hope that other bay regions would benefit from healthy spat.

“Oysters, you know, have the benefit of living in close proximity to one another. That’s when they do best,” Colden said. “The question was, well, instead of spreading our effort across the entirety of the bay, why don’t we try to be more focused and see if that approach works better? And it turns out it does.”

Talk to an aquaculture farmer like Petty, and he’ll describe how he went from throwing oyster parties at his waterfront home to running a productive aquaculture operation with 16 employees, producing millions of oysters shipped as Jesus Sweets or Hollywood Oysters nationwide.

“The watermen thought we were taking their water [the public fisheries]; the homeowner thought that we were going to block their precious view,” Petty said. “I would tell them, it’s all about the oyster and habitat.”

Talk to a DNR official, and they’ll describe the state’s efforts to bolster its oyster recovery program. Oyster shells are planted every year in the bay to create oyster reefs — so much so that last year the state brought in trucks of oyster shells from the state of Washington to beef up Maryland’s reef restoration project.

Once the world’s capital of oyster production, Maryland can no longer provide enough shells, normally recycled from shucking houses or dredged out of the bay, to create the reef for larvae to settle upon. Maryland plants about 200,000 bushels a year and has a goal of planting 17.5 million bushels of shells over the next decade.

Since 2017, the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, a collaborative of businesses, oyster growers, foundations and government agencies in Maryland and Virginia, has aimed to add 10 billion oysters to the Chesapeake Bay by 2025. Right now that figure is 6.5 billion, but much of the number for this year has yet to be counted.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that 6.5 billion is a massive number, and we’re still looking at what amounts to the largest oyster restoration effort on the planet,” said Colden, whose foundation is part of the alliance.

Don Webster, a regional aquaculture specialist with University of Maryland Extension, is encouraged by the solid yields of recent years. But he said that, as long as parasitic oyster infections such as MSX and Dermo are in the bay, there is a chance for another devastating oyster season.

It’s the hope that the strategic maneuverings in the bay, particular allowing for longer-living oysters that through genetics could prove to be disease resistant, will yield benefits. The more oyster habitat established, the better.

Judy hopes there will never be the opportunity to test Maryland oysters’ resiliency to disease.

“I don’t want that experiment to have to happen,” he said.

Aquaculture

A good boost to Maryland‘s harvest can be found in the budding world of aquaculture. It was once seen as a politically contentious undertaking, as watermen proudly protected the state’s open fishery approach. But the industry was jump-started by legislation in 2010 that reinvigorated oyster bottom leasing along the shoreline, away from the public fisheries. In 2023, about 7,400 acres of aquaculture produced more than 94,000 bushels, for an economic impact of $13.3 million, according to University of Maryland Extension.

Webster hopes to see the aquaculture program reach 50,000 to 100,000 acres, with restaurant chains such as Wendy’s and Popeye’s someday arguing “over who has the best oyster sandwiches.”

It helps to have an unshakable demand for the mollusks.

Bill Sieling, executive vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, is not so sure that’s the case. He recalled how oysters, not crabs, were once the dominant seafood in Maryland. He said the tradition of grabbing a dozen or so, especially during the fall, may not transcend generations.

“The oyster market has gotten soft,” Sieling said. “It’s harder to sell oysters.”

But Damye Hahn, the fourth-generation owner of Faidley’s at Baltimore’s Lexington Market, said oysters still look pretty good served with beer. She said oysters trend well with younger people, who are interested in the mollusk’s role in the bay’s recovery efforts, especially because the restaurant contributes spent shells to the state’s oyster recovery program.

“Young people particularly love the idea of the recycling,” she said. “I would definitely say it’s a resurgence.”

Until next year

Money doesn’t lie, and Meredith knows how much he’s getting for his bushels — $35 dockside, a bit lower than before Christmas, when demand traditionally eases.

About 2 p.m., he pulled up along Grace Creek at P.T. Hambleton Seafood, a distributor in quiet Bozman and a rare holdover from when such buy-back wholesaler operations could be found in fishing hamlets across the bay. Tied-up boats can be seen through the grass and piles of shells on the shore.

Meredith and Clopein harvested eight bushels — not ideal, but Meredith didn’t seem worried as he walked by two workers readying that day’s oyster boat for next week’s crab season. Meredith has no interest in crabbing due to the daily cost and work of baiting a trot line or readying crab pots.

“See, if you don’t catch any crabs, you don’t make any money,” he said with a laugh.

Still, this “piece of cake” livelihood had him heading to his truck to get his boat ready, happy to leave the oysters behind. He knows that come October, barring natural calamity, the Chesapeake should be primed to offer another solid season. This is the no-stress lifestyle he has grown accustomed to, all around a simple oyster that leads a complicated public life.