CEDAR KEY, Fla. — Father-daughter duo, Captain Friday and Skylar Wirth, stand on their skiff as a beeping loader dumps about 3,000 pounds of limestone onto a wooden board spanning the boat’s center.
Friday picks up a five-gallon bucket, scoops up some saltwater and splashes it over the rock to wash away pebbles.
“That was the worst part, eating sand,” he says.
His meaning becomes clear as the skiff races off into the sunlit Gulf, turning anything lighter than a penny into a projectile. It’s the pair’s second time making the trek this morning. They’ve learned the tricks.
The motor’s hum quiets as Friday steers the boat toward white PVC poles. Father and daughter push white blocks of limestone to the edge of the skiff, then unceremoniously flop them into the water.
This low-tech strategy is the foundation of a high-hopes project led by locals to restore oyster habitat on a degraded reef that once helped sustain livelihoods. The $1.9 million endeavor, Oyster ROCKS, isn’t the biggest oyster restoration project in the Gulf, or even in Cedar Key.
But as dramatic oyster declines continue to shrink habitats and paychecks in the Big Bend, participants say the project is crucial to stop the area’s reefs from reaching a point of no return. That’s why they’re doing it themselves, with a fleet of well-worn skiffs and plenty of grit.
Memories of abundance
Today’s work was scheduled to start at 8 a.m., but captains, eager for work during their off season from oystering and wanting to beat the stifling July heat, showed up an hour early. Sixty-one boat captains and 12 shore-based staff signed up for the effort, though not everyone works every day.
Today is the second of three “pilot” days to tweak setups, schedules and systems for the rest of the summer-long project, which aims to add about an Olympic-sized-pool’s-worth of limestone to Corrigan’s Reef.
The reef needs it urgently.
Buzzing around the dock is Laura Adams, a blonde-haired, no-nonsense leader making sure everyone’s pay slips get counted. Adams farm-raises clams and has harvested wild oysters for about 30 years.
She and many others here used to harvest from the very spot they’re now working to restore, as recently as seven or eight years ago. “Corrigan's has always been a really good spot,” Adams said. “They grow fast down there, and they're salty. They're delicious to eat.”
Her son, also an oysterman, won’t be able to harvest from the spots his mom once frequented. If declines continue, Adams worries he won’t be able to bring in anything at all.
“I'm almost ready to retire,” Adams said. “But he's got another 30 years of work ahead of him, and if this goes away, this is what he knows. How do you switch gears at 45 years old?”
The speed with which oyster reefs are disappearing alarms Bill Pine, the aquatic ecologist behind Oyster ROCKS and more than a decade of oyster projects like it.
He’s heard stories of picnics and camping on keys and reefs that don’t exist anymore, Pine said. “The memories of these places…it just shows how fast this is changing.”
Intertidal reefs between Crystal River and Horseshoe Beach have declined 60 to 65% since the 1980s, according to Pine. Those are dense, island-like piles of shells and live oysters that are exposed at low tides and submerged at high tides. Once ancient shorelines, they’ve dotted the Big Bend for thousands of years.
The reefs are guardians of the Gulf, filtering coastal waters, offering food and habitat for birds, calming waves before they reach the shore, anchoring sediment and providing a payday in one of the region’s last wild oyster fisheries.
Scientists aren’t sure what is causing the oyster reefs to decline. The restoration project was funded with a grant from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement, but the slick itself never reached Cedar Key’s oysters.
What is clear is that the reefs are degrading because of a lack of hard material known as cultch, not a lack of larvae, Pine said.
“We know that, because there's still viable oyster reefs around, that there's already enough spat or oyster larvae in the water,” he said. “ If we put this durable cultch material back out there, we're able to restore at least small parts of these reefs that are degrading.”
Enter: limestone.
The legacy of an ancient shore
A dusty, white powder floats through the air each time the loader scoops up a portion of limestone from the towering dockside pile.
It smells of ancient shells.
The limestone comes from quarries near Branford and Newberry which, though undoubtedly dry today, were underwater about 30 million years ago. When corals and hard-shelled sea creatures died, they sank to the bottom of a shallow ocean, stacking and compressing over millions of years.
“Unlike baby fish or baby deer, baby oysters grow up on living and dead oyster shells,” Pine said. He pointed to a bumpy, off-white rock in the pile. “In a lot of ways, these fossil shells that we're seeing, this is just an ancient oyster reef,” he said.
The limestone chunks are large enough to stay stable through waves and currents, he said, and give oysters plenty of surfaces onto which they can attach.
If everything goes as planned, baby oysters on the new rocks should be about a quarter inch in size by the winter. Those particular oysters may not grow big enough to harvest, but some will form clumps and roll into deeper water where they can filter feed continuously. More food means bigger oysters.
Lone Cabbage Reef, five miles away, offers evidence and optimism.
Pine and collaborators at the University of Florida carried out the largest successful oyster restoration project in the state in 2018, bolstering over 3 miles of reef with enough rock to fill the Goodyear Blimp once and a half times over.
By 2023, oyster densities about tripled at Lone Cabbage Reef and Pine expects them to continue to grow. Longtime oysterman Gerald Allen, who today mans the PVC-lined dropoff site, harvested legal-sized oysters in the depths near Lone Cabbage just a few months ago.
Still, Pine estimates the restoration only replaced about 3% of the reef that has been lost. “This isn't a solution to oyster reefs going away,” Pine said. “This is just like a stopgap measure.”
Apalachicola Bay, the western end of the Big Bend, offers an example of what could happen if reefs degrade to the point where they aren’t producing enough larvae to sustain themselves.
Once the source of 90% of the state’s oysters, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Bay’s fishery collapsed in 2013 and closed to oystering in 2020. It partially reopened in January at a fraction of its original scale.
Throughout the Gulf, “oyster restoration as a business is bigger than oyster fisheries,” Pine said.
Concrete “reef balls” and latticed prisms dot restored shorelines in Cedar Key, efforts by the UF/IFAS Nature Coast Biological Station to strengthen them against record-setting storm surges. Wavy cement panels on the surface of Corrigan’s Reef provide habitat for oysters and a dining table for one of their predators: American Oystercatchers, which face their own challenges from rising sea levels and shrinking reefs.
‘Don’t doubt us’
Oyster ROCKS is an environmental restoration project by nature. Oyster gains benefit the surrounding ecosystem and, during construction, designated wildlife watchers make sure work doesn’t impact shorebirds or manatees in the process.
But the project focuses just as much on the people as it does the oysters.
The loaders, haulers, wildlife monitors, accountants and coordinators are nearly all locals. Many are oyster harvesters and a surprising number are family.
Charter captain, oyster harvester and seventh-generation Cedar Key local Olivia Webster spent the morning recording each boat’s loads on paper to make sure they’re paid properly. “That's easy for me to do because I know everybody here,” she said with a laugh.
Her uncle, Jerlad Beckham, is the president of the Cedar Key Oystermen’s Association, which is leading the project alongside Levy County and SWCA Environmental Consultants.
When Webster’s grandfather was a teenager, “he could pull a skiff out back here in Cedar Key, not even very far, and get 40 bushels, 20 bushels,” she said. “Now, we're lucky if we get five or six a day.”
Webster said she’s grateful for the regular work the restoration project offers during a time when she and her fellow harvesters would normally pick up jobs in construction, yardwork or restaurants.
Captains are paid by the amount of limestone they drop off, typically amounting to $600 to $1,200 per day. “Can’t beat that,” Webster said.
Laura Adams, the clam farmer and oyster harvester, shared Webster’s enthusiasm.
“It all came to fruition finally,” Adams said, watching a skiff haul away the morning’s last load of limestone. “It’s going to make me get tearful.”
Plans for a larger-scale project in the same area are already in the works, according to Levy County grants and finance manager Kari Bastow.
Last month, she submitted an application to the same oil spill grant that funded this effort. It asks for $10.5 million to restore about 30 acres of Corrigan’s Reef. It will go through state and federal review for the chance at a competitive pot of funds.
“It's a lot of area and a lot of monitoring and I'm sure extensive permitting, but it's a big one,” Bastow said. “So I'm excited about that one.”
Back on the dock, the water quiets as boats head back home, done with a day’s work before the sun reaches its peak.
“Don’t forget the little man,” Webster says. “Don’t doubt us either, because we can get it done.”
