19/04/2022
My neighbor Stephen Weglarz Jr., after 11 years of operating Cedar Point Oysters, has sold the business. I had the good fortune of spending part of the day with Steve on his boat last July. This tribute in words and photos to him -- and his work as a steward of the Great Bay Estuary -- was written after my excursion and is being published here for the first time.
And on this farm he had some oysters ...
By Paul Briand
DURHAM -- By any other measure, Steve Weglarz is a farmer. His crop is oysters. His farm is four acres in Little Bay, just off Cedar Point in Durham, near the mouth of the Oyster River.
It’s pretty obvious why he picked the spot for his farm. “There’s a reason why they call it Oyster River,” says Weglarz.
Like a farmer that tills the soil for corn or soybeans or such, an oyster farmer has to tend his farm too. The crop is raised from what are called oyster seeds to an ideal length of about three inches -- the preferred size for a restaurant or retail sale. From seed to harvest is about a three-year stretch, requiring a lot of attention.
“We handle the oysters many times before they’re harvested,” says Weglarz.
It’s a repeating process of clean and sort, clean and sort; It’s all part of the routine of the business of oystering. On this particular day that’s just what Weglarz is doing as he guides his modified pontoon boat from the Cedar Point dock close to where he lives and steers through the thickly humid air to the farm.
His farm is marked by four yellow buoys, as are the other farms licensed by the state to operate in Little Bay, part of the Great Bay Estuary. Little Bay is a thin body of water between Durham and Newington that opens into Great Bay. Both bays are huge basins of brackish water - a mix of saltwater and freshwater, the salt water coming from the ocean via the Piscataqua River, the fresh water from the rivers that feed into it: Bellamy, Oyster, Lamprey, Squamscott, and Winnicut rivers. The estuary’s outlet is at Hilton Point, where it meets the Piscataqua River in a to and fro motion of incoming and outgoing tides.
There are about 30 farmers here, most operating one farm, some operating a few at a time. Of the 30, about half are one-person operations. Weglarz is one of them as sole operator of Cedar Point Oysters.
He snags a buoy with a grappling hook, secures the lines to a winch, and hauls a 200-pound tray to the surface. Each wire mesh tray holds upwards of 1,000 oysters. He hoses down the tray, removing as much mud as he can, before winching the tray onto the deck.
Weglarz says these particular oysters hatched in 2019 and were played in this tray in July 2020. The last time he went through this tray was in April.
He has 20 of these trays on the bottom of Little Bay, along with 18 of what he calls “the condos.” Each condo - a wire structure -- holds eight bags, and each bag has 1,000 young oysters. These guys will eventually move from the bag to the tray.
Weglarz doesn’t have a map of his farm to know what is where. Buoys help mark the locations. He doesn’t have a notebook of what tray or what bag is at what cycle of growth. He just knows.
Initially, Weglarz picks through the oysters seeking out a predator -- the Atlantic oyster drill, a species of a small sea snail that literally drills into the shell of an oyster to consume its insides. Their evidence is the perfectly round holes in the shells of the dead oysters. As Weglarz picks them out he doesn’t return them to the water - they go into a bucket to die.
Weglarz uses a large scoop to get the oysters into a bucket and into a tumbler. This is a sorting machine, locally made, using a car windshield wiper motor powered by a car battery, which, in turn, is charged using a solar panel on the canopy over Weglarz’s pontoon. The tumbler has different sized holes. As the tumbler rotates it gives the oysters a rinse of bay water as different sized oysters fall through the different sized holes to buckets below. This helps sort the oysters into like-sized groups.
“Smaller ones grow better with smaller ones,” he says.
Weglarz has a work barge on the farm to store gear. Trays that have been in the water are difficult to clean with the accumulation of mud and vegetation. Once a tray comes out of the water and emptied, he puts the tray onto the barge where the sun and air dry everything up.
Weglarz gets a clean tray from the barge to the deck, and he spreads the like-sized oyster among the tray’s four separate sections, and moves the boat to another section of the farm where he winches the tray into the water.
With the COVID-19 pandemic ebbing, restaurants are back to serving a public eager to get out again. That’s good news for farmers. “I think we’ll definitely be in better shape than last season,” he says. He’s back to using a wholesaler who sells his oysters in individual bags of 100 to local restaurants. Like he did during the pandemic, he’ll continue to sell oysters each Friday at nearby Emery Farm on Route 4.
He was part of an effort by The Nature Conservancy and Pew Charitable Trust last fall to purchase 5 million surplus oysters here and in other parts of the country and use those oysters for oyster bed restoration projects.
Oysters that grow beyond that desired three inches are called “uglies” and become surplus. The Nature Conservancy and Pew Charitable Trust once again are purchasing these surplus uglies for oyster reef restoration purposes. Weglarz expects a visit to pick up his uglies soon.
The program is called SOAR – Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration. The surpluses from farms here are placed at a natural oyster reef further up into Great Bay at a restoration site at Nannie Island.
There, oysters do their thing for the health of Great Bay by filtering the cleaning the water. One adult oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day. “I can’t imagine there’s a machine that can do what they do naturally, for free,” says Weglarz.
This day’s work is done. Weglarz secures the winch, tidies up the deck, reorganizes the buckets, and heads back to the dock.
By profession, he’s a real estate inspector. Oystering is part-time, three days a week or so. But when the farm needs tending it needs tending. Wind, cold, rain, sleet. Doesn’t matter.
He’s not sure how much longer he’ll keep at it. “It’s a young man’s game,” he says.
Until then, it’s back on the water, back to the farm. There’s raking that needs doing to clean mortality debris from the muck. There’s sorting to do. A harvest to bring in and sell.
These are all Eastern oysters, also called the Atlantic oyster, American oyster, or East Coast oyster, native to the Eastern Seaboard. They are briney with just the right amount of salinity. Does the fact that his farm is at the mouth of the Oyster River make a difference?
Weglarz thinks so. Any number of factors affect how an oyster tastes -- water temp, water salinity, availability of the plankton they eat. “Yeah,” he says. “I think the flavor of the oysters can vary by location.”
