PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss.—On a mid-November morning, a stately white fishing boat named the Royster peeled away from the harbor and motored toward a reef less than two miles offshore. The 42-foot vessel was equipped with a triangular oyster dredge made of rope and metal—a common tool for scraping the shellfish off the surface of the reefs on which they grow.
Over the next four hours, Capt. Richard Bosarge and his three-man crew used the dredge to retrieve oysters from the seabed and haul them back onto the boat for sorting. Muffled radio tunes mingled with the sound of clanging metal as crew members broke up oyster clusters using hatchets.
Bosarge could hardly contain his excitement. For the first time in five years, he and his crew were harvesting wild oysters in Mississippi waters.
“We never thought we’d get to do this again on our reefs,” said Bosarge, a Mississippi native who began harvesting oysters on the Royster in 2007. “It was just something that we didn’t think would ever come back.”
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While Mississippi’s oyster catch has fluctuated for decades, the local industry was formidable at the turn of the 21st century. Between 1996 and 2003, Mississippi reported capturing over 2 million pounds of oysters during the annual harvesting season, which stretched from October through April. Those harvests were valued at as much as $7 million in a single year, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But over the past two decades, a series of natural and human-made disasters have decimated Mississippi’s oyster population, hobbling restaurant and tourist economies along the coast. The state had not held a harvest on its public reefs since 2018.
A member of the Royster’s crew measures an oyster cluster harvested from the Henderson Point reefs near Pass Christian, Mississippi. Photo by Illan Ireland ” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?fit=200%2C300&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?fit=682%2C1024&ssl=1″ src=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?resize=682%2C1024&ssl=1″ alt=”White men culling oysters on a boat” class=”wp-image-49980″ srcset=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?resize=682%2C1024&ssl=1 682w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?resize=200%2C300&ssl=1 200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?resize=768%2C1152&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sizing-Oysters_cred-Illan-Ireland.jpg?resize=1024%2C1536&ssl=1
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