Area Waters Closed After Heavy Rainfall
By Patricia Smith, The Daily News, Jacksonville, N.C.
Oct. 12–North Carolina’s oyster season begins Saturday, but that does not necessarily mean people will be allowed to pick a peck this weekend.
Shellfish waters from Beaufort to the South Carolina line remained closed Tuesday after the weekend’s weather system that dumped as much as 10 inches of rain in some parts of the coast.
Patti Fowler, assistant section chief with the Shellfish Sanitation and Recreational Water Quality Section of the N.C. Division of Environmental Health, said authorities will begin testing waters for bacteria levels today.
“We’re going to look at the areas we know clear up the quickest and those that maybe didn’t have as much rainfall as others,” Fowler said.
One of the places that usually clears quickly is the New River, Fowler said.
But those in the commercial fishing industry said they are not expecting anything that soon.
“I know the water is just as black as the ace of spades around here,” said Clarence Grant Jr. of Grant’s Oyster House in Sneads Ferry.
It normally takes at least a week for shellfish waters in the New River or Stump Sound to reopen after a heavy rainfall, Grant said.
State authorities close shellfish waters after rainfall amounts reach certain levels to protect the public from possible health threats associated with pollution from stormwater runoff.
Sneads Ferry fishermen had mixed opinions about what oyster season will be like once the waters reopen.
“I think it’s going to be a poor one in a way,” said Elwood Pierce, who said he’s seen a lot of dead oysters out there.
Billy Ray Sanderford said he lost 300 bushels of oysters on a lease site in the New River during Hurricane Ophelia, but he believes that the wild oyster stock was just moved to deeper waters.
“About 80 percent of our shell stock in the New River survived,” Sanderford said.
Craig Hardy of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries said that preliminary sampling of oysters across the state has shown low incidences of disease this fall. And while the state has not yet gotten a good indication of the marketability of the oysters south of Bogue Sound, when disease is low it usually means a good crop, he said.
“Right now what we expect is to maintain the level of production that we had last year,” Hardy said.
State records of dockside seafood sales show commercial oyster harvests jumped from 49,272 bushels in 2003 to 69,479 bushels in 2004, the highest in several years.
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