September 23, 2013 — With a few more weeks left for the shellfish growing season, the Barnegat Bay Shellfish Restoration Program has begun distributing seed clams and oysters to baymen who took a big economic hit in the six months after superstorm Sandy.
“These guys lost Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Lent,” said Gef Flimlin of the program, ticking off the traditional big winter markets for seafood.
On Friday morning Flimlin and Clint Lehman, a volunteer with the ReClam the Bay restoration group, were at one of the group’s nursery tanks here, counting out quarter-size baby oysters for grower Matt Gregg.
Gregg’s start-up underwater farm, Forty North Oysters near Mantoloking, was demolished in Sandy’s Oct. 29 storm surge, just days before Gregg would have made his first delivery for New York customers. He said the new oysters will grow fast and soon need to be subdivided between the mesh bags that protect them from crabs and other predators.
“These are our grow-out bags,” Gregg said as he and Dawn Hummel, a Rutgers University intern from Hightstown, packed the bags and stacked them on Gregg’s boat Aphrodite. “These will probably get split two times before the winter.”
The oysters “will double in size in a week” Lehman agreed.
Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press