September 25, 2015 — POINT AUX PINS, Alabama — Starting as a volunteer oyster gardener way back at the turn of the century – that’s the year 2000 for those with short memory – Steve Crockett planted the first off-bottom oysters in the Gulf as a reef restoration project for the Mobile Bay National Estuary program. Fifteen years later Point Aux Pins Alabama farm is one of the largest Gulf off-bottom oyster operations supplying restaurants and grocery chains across the South.
Gathering figures on the success rate of the restoration project, a grad student informed Crockett that data confirmed he had the best oyster growth rate of any sites on the eastern or western shores of the Bay, Dauphin Island, or Coden. That was enough to convince him to try growing oysters, at least for his own use and for friends.
“We started production the following year,” said Crockett. “We adopted the Australian Adjustable Longline Method for growing our oysters. We fiddled around with that for a couple of years but ended up losing our shirts, as well as our camp house, when Katrina stuck the Alabama coast in 2005.”
Three years later, and with a new house, Crockett was determined to try once more to farm caged grown oysters.
“This was about the same time Bill Walton appeared at the Auburn University Shellfish Lab,” he told Gulf Seafood News. “He was instrumental in our decision to get back into off-bottom caged oysters.”
Getting seed from Walton’s Auburn shellfish lab, in 2009 the East Grand Bay oysterman put his first crop of oysters in the water, while at the same time testing four different kinds of grow out gear.
Read the full story at Gulf Seafood Institute