Mike Dunbar farms oysters in Yarmouth’s Lewis Bay. His Dunbar Aquafarm grows bags full of oysters in floating cages. And he says this was the roughest winter they’ve had in nearly a decade.
First, his cages took a beating when the bay froze. And it stayed frozen for a long time, cutting off access to his crop. And when the ice melted, his farm was even more vulnerable to the heavy winds of last month’s blizzard.
"I have floating cages that are attached with long lines," Dunbar explained. "And almost every one of those broke. The cages got crushed. The doors opened up. The bags fell out. They were all over the place. It was just absolute disaster."
In preparation for the blizzard, Dunbar decided to move his empty cages inland where they would presumably be safer. But that didn’t go well either.
"Anything that was empty, I figured I'd be smart and bring home," he said. "And I had a 40-foot tree fall at my house and land on top of them. So, I wasn't safe anywhere this year, I guess."
Dubar wasn’t alone. Oyster farmers all along the northeast coast battled the elements this winter. But some Cape Cod growers were spared the worst, thanks to a local tradition called pitting.
Andrew Cummings is the owner/operator of Wash-Ashore Oyster Ranch, in Wellfleet:
"Off site winter storage – the animals are coming out of the water, off the farm, going to a land-based facility," Cummings explained. "Historically, traditionally, this is [a] very Cape Cod-centric thing of removing the oysters from the water. Other regions on the East Coast where they grow oysters … nobody else does this."
Dave Ryan, of Cape Cod Oyster Company, in Brewster, also takes his oysters out of the water when they go dormant in the fall. He uses insulated storage containers.
Ryan said the exact timing is determined by water temperature, but he usually brings the oysters inland in mid-December and puts them back out in the water in mid-March.
Ryan said the term pitting goes back to a Native American practice of storing oysters in the ground.
"There's a long history, you know, going back to Native Americans, of taking oysters and putting it in a pit in the ground, a hole in the ground," he said.
Mike Dunbar said he was advised against pitting, based on specific characteristics of his grant in Lewis Bay. But it is a widespread practice among Cape Cod oyster growers.
When water temperatures drop into the low 40s, oysters become dormant. They don’t feed and they require less oxygen. That’s when growers move them inland to a climate-controlled space with consistently cool temperatures and high humidity, above 90%. Traditionally the space was a pit in the ground or a root cellar. Today, insulated buildings or storage containers are common.
Another technique used by local oyster growers is to sink cages into deeper water, below where surface ice can form.
Cummings says, even if the bays don’t freeze, he believes farmed oysters are better off if they're not left out on the intertidal flats.
"The wintertime out intertidal on Cape Cod, it's not a pleasant, you know, environment. You have wind events, storm events. There's a lot of things that aren't doing those oysters any good."
