FWC outlines limited reopening of Apalachicola Bay

With a nearly five-year moratorium on harvesting wild-caught oysters in Apalachicola Bay expected to expire at year’s end, state regulators earlier this month unveiled outlines of a regulatory plan they plan to propose to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in August.

The enthusiasm from the large audience at the Chapman Auditorium June 3 was not exactly breathtaking.

While Franklin County commissioners, led by Chairman Ricky Jones, have all repeatedly voiced support for the bay’s reopening, the FWC’s public workshop left them, as well as the smattering of oyster dealers and oyster harvesters in the audience, voicing fears that the tightened rules may be too little too late when it comes to reviving a floundering oyster industry and a workforce battered by a half-decade devoid of harvest.

“The overall thing I took away from the workshop is they’re talking about opening the bay,” Commissioner Ottice Amison reported to his colleagues at last week’s county commission meeting. “We can still fight for it, because it’s still time for maybe some of these things to be changed.

“They understand how it works on paper, but I don’t think they understand the reality. I honestly don’t think there’s any kind of malice with anybody involved with this in any department,” said Amison, who years ago served with the Army’s 82nd Airborne during a training mission in Israel and the Persian Gulf. 

“I feel like we’re in a religious struggle. We’re all Muslim, Jews and Christians, and we want to get to the same place, but we got different ways of getting there,” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh man, maybe I should go back to the Middle East.’”

Led by Devin Resko, the FWC researcher who works most closely with the local industry, including the volunteer Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay, which is presided over by Amison, the workshop outlined key points among the options that staffers plan to present to the full FWC board as early as the upcoming August meeting in Quincy.

With a minimum of 400 bags of legal-sized oyster required to designate an oyster suitable for harvest. Resko said only four reefs – two at Cat Point termed “NFWF” and “Spur,” Easthole and Peanut Ridge – would meet this threshold at the start of the 2026 season.

All told, these reefs comprise 94 acres, and with density levels ranging from 400 to 571 bags per acre, would yield about 50,000 bags during a given commercial season, which FWC staff want to limit to between Oct. 1 and March 1.

Harvest could be done any day of the week, and there would be no daily bag or vessel limit. Tags would be issued to qualified harvesters at the start of the season, and would be specific to individual reefs. There would be no recreational harvest allowed.

Because overharvesting remains a paramount concern, FWC is currently proposing to limit the harvest level to just 5 percent of legal-sized oysters on these four reefs, so that roughly 2,500 bags would be allowed to be harvested out of the 50,000-bag available crop.

“We were thinking to begin with that it was going to be more of a 10% number,” said Amison. “Mississippi is at 20% and I want to say Louisiana or Texas is at 25% of the take on the public bars. Last night they unveiled 5% which is even less amount of oysters. And again, we’re talking less than 50 acres of bars,”

One issue that concerned Amison is that the qualifications to secure a commercial AB (Apalachicola Bay) endorsement, could include a requirement that harvesters have a restricted species (RS) endorsement. The RS endorsement, which is granted when a fisher meets a designated threshold of his or her income from previous years, would include oysters, and would be enforced statewide, although a one-time exemption would be granted to those who held an AP license prior to the 2020 closure.

“Basically, with the RS aspect, I think that in 10 to 15 years, if they do put oysters on a restricted species, and you have to have an RS endorsement to catch it, that fishery will be done in 10 to 15 years, when the folks in that room can’t physically do it any more or passed on, or whatnot, that’s it, because anybody behind that will not be able to qualify for an RS endorsement,” Amison said. “Because everything that swims in that water, you have to have right now an RS endorsement to catch it. Shrimps, restricted, flounder, mullet, anything that’s going to go on a plate, restricted. So if they put oysters on a restricted list in 10 to 15 years, you won’t have a fisher in the state of Florida.”

The staffers said they are weighing an option which would limit endorsements to just 10 participants, drawn from among Florida harvesters who have harvested a minimum of 2,000 pounds of oysters in the bay between 2016 and 2000. The alternative would be to allow all qualified applicants to receive endorsements, an option that was much more popular among attendees based on a clicker poll taken in the second half of the workshop.

The staffers stressed that the logic behind limiting endorsements, and thus the ability to harvest oysters, is that it would ensure that there’s earnings potential for a handful of oystermen, as opposed to meager money to be made by a large field of fishers. To demonstrate the point, they used a hypothetical value of $100 per bag paid by dealers, a number that nearly all in the audience said was well above the likely price, which was in the neighborhood of $60 to $70 when the fishery shut down five years ago.

The proposal also called for harvesting monitoring conducted by a cellphone app to be used by both harvesters and dealers to pinpoint locations, as well as a limited number of mandatory landing locations around the bay. The staffers sought input on the question of FWC’s enforcement powers regarding undersized oysters, which could be as strict as no more than 5 unattached, and 15 attached, per bag, well below the previous requirement of no more than 5 and 15 percent per bag, respectively.

Size limits and substrate in bags would be enforceable off the water, and there would be a mandatory clutching program to promote new growth and sustainability.

Gulf County Commissioner Randy Pridgeon and County Jeremy Novak both spoke out in favor of reopening Indian Lagoon to recreational harvesting. The county has been embroiled in a court case over this issue ever since the 2020 closure, arguing that no research was done on the volume of oysters in that sliver of Gulf County waters and that FWC has failed to live up to its commitment of taking a close look at those waters both before and since the closure.

FWC staffers promised to pay the Lagoon a visit before drafting their final set of recommendations.

Amison said he is looking to the legislature to adhere to the governor’s recommendation that $30 million be appropriated for oyster restoration, but worries that this amount could be lowered or cut out entirely, rendering the millions so far spent on the bay an exercise in futility.

“I just want the bay back, and the only way that’s going to happen, and they’ll know this, is if we get material in the bay,” he said. “If we don’t have material in the water for an oyster spat to attach to, and I don’t care if it’s an oak tree, I don’t care if it’s a limestone, if it’s oyster shells, if it’s a concrete, the materials got to be out there.”