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Tommy Zinn dipped hand tongs into the water of a Patuxent River tributary on an early October morning and waited for the heads to scrape shell.
Holding the end of the tongs like two long rakes pinned together, Zinn gave a few pumps of his arms — as if using a fence post digger — and scooped a cluster of oysters from the riverbed.
On this day, there were far too many box oysters in the sampling dredged up by Zinn, the president of the Calvert County Watermen's Association and a part-time crabber and oysterman for decades.
"It looks like we've had at least a 50 percent dead loss from being stressed out over the summer," Zinn said of the 11 million young oysters, called spat, that the association planted in August 2007 as part of a partnership with the nonprofit Oyster Recovery Partnership and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge.
Traditional aquaculture conjures up images of salmon farms. Indeed, Maryland's fledgling oyster aquaculture industry includes companies that grow oysters in racks or cages near the water's surface or on the shoreline. The effort can be costly, both in time and money.
Large-scale, state-backed efforts at oyster aquaculture have focused on growing oysters the natural way, in less-controlled conditions out in the wild. This method uses spat on shell and replenishes existing oyster bars for harvesting the way watermen have done it for centuries.
The marriage of watermen and state bureaucrats isn't a happy one, with state Department of Natural Resources officials and watermen each acknowledging resistance and mistrust on the part of the watermen.
But, officials say, the marriage is necessary. Maryland's oyster harvest was about 4 million bushels a year at the turn of the 20th century, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Today, it is about 100,000 bushels a year.
If growing oysters was profitable, watermen would be doing it, the watermen say. They worry that the state wants to turn the Bay's oyster fishing over to big business and leave them in dry dock.
For their part, fisheries officials say the watermen need to transition to a new way of doing business or risk being left behind.
From hunting to farming
Zinn doesn't see many watermen taking the bait.
Watermen are set in their ways, scouring the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries using hand tongs and dredging equipment and selling their catch in the cash-only trade of the wholesale market.
"The state is sort of forcing it on them," Zinn said. "The blue-collar watermen aren't fully grasping it. They don't like to do paperwork. They don't like the IRS. They don't trust DNR."
At 62, Zinn is better off than most watermen, who often have neither Social Security nor health insurance. He retired 18 years ago with a pension from a career as a Prince George's County firefighter, where shifts of 24 hours on and 72 hours off left days free to supplement his income with fishing.
"I'm not a waterman; I just represent 'em," he said.
Mike Naylor knows that many watermen often see DNR officials like him as pencil-pushing desk jockeys who are out of touch with life on the water.
"There's always, within the watermen's community, great resistance to change, unless the change is demonstrated to be [for] the better," said Naylor, who oversees the agency's shellfish program.
The transition to aquaculture has happened more quickly in other parts of the world, including in Virginia.
"We are one of the last estuaries where shell fishing is dominated by wild harvest," Naylor said.
The resistance to change is as much about culture as it is about industry.
With only protected sanctuaries to limit where they can fish, oystermen go where they want, seeking out the best spot. With aquaculture, watermen are tied to a spot, tending to oyster beds in a certain area.
"It's like asking a hunter to become a farmer," Naylor said.
Zinn calls it something else.
"It's basically an experiment, is all I can say," Zinn said of the Oyster Recovery Partnership and Horn Point aquaculture program, to which the association has contributed $10,000 of its own money.
"Look, they all died," he said of the box oysters. "We had no control over them. And it's not going to work. Don't invest your money in it, because we don't see it working.
"But if we can use our funds from our association, the guys don't have to dig out of their pocket," he continued. "And if it does work, it could provide a little bit of income."
Getting with the program
The state's Department of Natural Resources prefers to accentuate the program's positives.
Earlier this month, DNR touted a "record" number of nearly 750 million spat produced and planted this year on about 350 acres of oyster bars at 26 sites across the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
Another effort, which was launched last year, involves a $470,000 federal grant to grow oyster larvae at a hatchery at Morgan State University's Estuarine Research Center on the Patuxent River in St. Leonard.
The Maryland and Calvert County watermen's associations are participating in the Horn Point and Morgan State programs by preparing publicly and privately leased oyster beds and planting spat on shell there.
Federal aid also is being aimed at aquaculture.
In January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared Maryland's commercial blue crab fishery a disaster. It awarded the state $2.2 million — the first installment of an expected $10 million over three years — to revitalize the fishing industry. Part of those federal dollars will go toward scholarships for college courses in aquaculture.
Maryland also set aside $3 million to employ watermen in oyster bar restoration, in removing abandoned crab pots and in monitoring the health of oyster and crab populations. With the early closure of the female crab season, the state hired watermen to clear sediment off oyster bars and dredge shells for use in oyster sanctuaries.
"If it hadn't been for that, a lot of [watermen] wouldn't have made it through the winter," Zinn said.
A law passed by the General Assembly this year requires holders of state-issued leases for submerged land to either plant oysters or lose their lease and requires DNR to begin establishing aquaculture enterprise zones.
The first two zones, totaling 150 acres, should be ready next month for lease at $3.50 per acre per year and a $300 application fee. Twenty-five percent of each zone is reserved for licensed watermen for one year.
The other 75 percent is open to anyone, including entrepreneurs from out of state, as a way of promoting "commercially viable aquaculture," Naylor said.
"It's going to change the face of aquaculture in the state," he said.
That face, Zinn fears, is not going to be the face of the watermen.
"Deep down, personal feelings, I just feel it's too much manpower, and it's not going to be cost-effective," he said.
"It's capital-intensive, too," said Jack Fringer, the watermen's association's secretary and a retired Army veteran turned part-time crabber. "Most watermen won't have the capital to invest."
The concern, Zinn said, is that watermen would be "sharecroppers" for private companies.
Naylor estimates $30,000 to $40,000 in startup costs for anyone venturing into aquaculture — about what Zinn says a waterman makes each year in gross income.
"It's not so much the money," Naylor said. "It's that your return isn't until two or three years down the road."
And there are no guarantees. "If there's a huge hurricane, they can lose it all," he said.
Policing for the future
Not all watermen share Zinn's dim outlook on the prospects for aquaculture.
Donnie Thompson, 57, of Hollywood has spent his life on the water crabbing and fishing for oysters, rockfish and eel — "whatever's in the water."
"A lot of people are — the word is ‘bullheaded' — in their ways of doing things," Thompson said. "But there's always a better way."
Other people "have come around" on the potential for aquaculture to boost oyster harvests, he said.
The state's aquaculture efforts "could be very, very successful," Thompson said.
For that to happen, DNR must set strict limits that prohibit certain sized dredgers and hold oyster fishing to specific hours each day, he said. Most importantly, state Natural Resources Police must enforce the limits and protect oyster bars from poachers, who with big enough equipment and a few hours under the cover of darkness can do major harm to a harvest.
"Some of these places have been wiped off the map by a handful of individuals," Thompson said.
Almost half of the state's licensed watermen were cited for a DNR violation last year, Naylor said. Penalties for fishing during restricted hours or taking more than the limit are so minimal that they are not a deterrent.
Legislation passed this year increases the penalties for certain violations. One new law increases fines from a maximum of $500 to up to $1,000 for first offenses, and double that for subsequent offenses. Another allows DNR to suspend or revoke commercial fishing licenses.
While DNR is focused on increasing its patrolling efforts, budget cuts have led to a "greatly reduced" police force, Naylor said.
"We have fewer [officers] on the water now than we did a short time ago," he said. "There're fewer watermen. But the Bay's the same size."
Fishing for answers
DNR estimates the Bay's oyster population to be about 1 percent of its original size.
As recently as the 1980s, the Bay still yielded ample harvests. But an early-1990s outbreak of the parasitic diseases MSX and Dermo ravaged the population, putting many shucking houses and watermen out of business.
As a natural filter, oysters once removed 133 million pounds of nitrogen from the Bay annually. Today's population removes only about 250,000 pounds.
A DNR report released in January showed some good news, however: Oyster mortality rates fell for the fourth straight year in 2007, though preliminary 2008 data showed that reproduction was poor throughout the Bay region.
Last spring, after a four-year $15 million study, Maryland, Virginia and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided against a proposal to introduce Asian oysters into the Bay.
Zinn was among those who believed the larger, heartier Asian species could have helped restore oysters to the Bay without harming the ecosystem.
So without Asian oysters, what is the answer?
"Clean up some of these sewage treatment plants," Zinn said.
Maryland has 420,000 septic systems. The state has retrofitted about 1,300 with nitrogen-removal technology.
"It seems like not enough progress is being made to control the sewage," Zinn said.
And aquaculture?
"Is it the answer? No, I don't think so," he said. "I don't see anybody getting rich doing this. I don't see anybody making a living doing this."
