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Oystermen decry plan
Say sanctuaries would put them out of business
Friday, Jan. 29, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Tommy Zinn, president of the Calvert County Watermen's Association, points to one of 60 displays set up Tuesday at the Solomons rescue squad as part of the Department of Natural Resources open house on the state's proposed oyster restoration plan.
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Watermen at an open house in Solomons bemoaned Tuesday a new plan to restore Chesapeake Bay oysters.
Maryland's proposed Oyster Restoration and Aquaculture Development Plan, announced by Gov. Martin O'Malley in December, contains initiatives that aim to put some areas traditionally harvested by watermen off limits to save Chesapeake oysters from further decline.
"We try to make a living out there. We don't want to be out of business," said Jackie Bowen of Lusby. The waterman did not like the idea of creating sanctuaries.
"Once that's gone, it's gone forever," he said of public oyster bars.
Bowen and others said they were skeptical of the process and whether the state would be receptive to comments to alter or abandon the plan.
"We haven't seen a proposal yet that didn't happen. That's the problem," he said.
The number of oystermen has dwindled from 2,000 in the mid 1980s to just more than 500 today, including fewer than 150 from Southern Maryland.
Dozens of local watermen and other residents visited the Solomons Volunteer Fire Department and Rescue Squad building Tuesday during the last of four open houses on the proposal.
The plan increases the state's oyster sanctuaries from 9 percent to 24 percent of the remaining quality habitat. Sanctuaries are off limits to any harvesting to help oysters live longer and reproduce to develop a natural resistance to disease, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
With the increased sanctuary acreage will come increased enforcement, including a planned collaborative effort with federal partners, including the Navy, to use radar and cameras to help patrol the areas that are off limits to harvesting.
"Too many thieves around," St. Mary's waterman James Lathroum warned. "The department there, they do a right good job, but they can't be there all the time," he said of Maryland Natural Resource Police patrols.
A second aspect of the plan proposes to streamline the process for watermen and others to lease areas of the bay and some of its tributaries for aquaculture to grow their own oysters. This is based on legislation approved last year by the state legislature, and will include the opening of 95,524 acres of natural oyster bars and hundreds of thousands of acres on the lower Eastern Shore to leasing.
Aquaculture is now the predominant means of shellfish harvesting around the world, DNR officials say, and a multimillion dollar commercial industry in neighboring Virginia.
Lathroum and many others are skeptical that the leasing will work.
"Somebody knows where you planted it and will go in there in night and take them," he said. He said the only way he would try a lease would be at a spot in front of his own home, where he could patrol it for poachers himself.
"There's no way to enforce it," he said. "You turn somebody in he's liable to burn your house down."
Jack Fringer, secretary of the Calvert County Watermen's Association, said that watermen can and do contact DNR anonymously to report poaching, but even that runs a risk of exposure sometimes.
"There's an underlying discontent in that this is all for show," Fringer said.
He said the development of the proposal was not a collaborative effort and that some watermen would have been more receptive if they had been called in on drafting the plan.
However, there are watermen who are not happy with the idea of a sanctuary at all.
He said the Calvert association will draft some alternatives to the plan and submit them in hopes of bargaining. For instance, Fringer said, instead of stretching the Patuxent River sanctuary all the way down to Battle Creek, he suggested it only go as far down river as the Benedict bridge. In exchange, the group will submit other areas of comparable acreage and habitat to put into a sanctuary.
The plan does maintain 167,720 acres of natural oyster beds for the wild oyster fishery. This includes more than 27,000 acres, or 76 percent, of what is considered the remaining quality oyster habitat.
As for the prospects of watermen switching to aquaculture in leased areas, Fringer said don't count on it. The system is geared to bring in industry aquaculture, not small private enterprise, he said.
The capital investment needed would be prohibitive unless there were start-up grants available. Also, he said, enforcement would have to ramp up.
In the past two months since the proposal was announced Maryland Natural Resources Police have stepped up enforcement and charged about a dozen watermen around the bay with poaching or similar violations.
Fringer said the Calvert County Watermen's Association has lobbied the state to increase the resource police budget to pay for overtime or more officers to patrol waters.
Lathroum is not entirely against the idea of creating sanctuaries, and said that in fact he would have liked to see the entire St. Mary's River made into a sort of sanctuary to produce oyster seed years ago and only open for a short time each year for dredging to help clean the silt off of bars.
Most sanctuaries fail, he said, because oysters can't grow larger than 4 inches anymore without dying from disease.
Lathroum has been working the water for more than six decades. He does some oystering from his home in the 7th District on the Wicomico River, but oysters are hard to come by there, he said.
"An oyster bar is like a garden," Lathroum said. The oysters have to be "turned" by dredging to clean off the silt that chokes them out. "You gotta work it, keep the bottom clean."
DNR scientists disagree, saying that there is no real evidence that working an oyster bar with a dredge helps productivity. They will point to areas that are off limits to dredges and only open to hand tonging as some of the more productive habitat left in the bay tributaries.
Fringer said it is untrue that watermen want to harvest the oyster to extinction. "The watermen understand that in order to have a future we have to protect the resources," he said.
A St. Mary's College of Maryland student recently presented a senior project comparing the state's tobacco buyout to the watermen's current situation.
"If there was some sort of buyout, that could work," Fringer said.
The plan proposed by the governor was developed based on a six-year environmental impact study of oyster restoration options.
Comments on the proposal will be accepted and there will be another 30-day public comment in April, including a public hearing. The regulations could be effective as early as May 31.
To learn more
Information on the oyster restoration plan, including how to submit comments, is available at www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/oysters.
