Under a brilliant blue sky, a wet-suit-clad Clay Lovel drops down into waist-deep water, groping in the cloudy jade brine.
He tosses away a predatory conch before his older brother Ben, on deck, grabs a hook, and together they haul aboard their Carolina Skiff what looks like an oversized fry basket. The men pry it open, and onto the boat’s stern clatter dozens and dozens of Crassostrea virginica the common eastern oyster.
It’s the same type of oyster that grows wild in coastal waters from Canada, down along the East Coast to the Gulf of Mexico, including nearby Apalachicola Bay. But the Lovels’ bivalves didn’t start off here as an offering from nature. They came from a shellfish hatchery near Tampa, leftovers from an oyster recovery project.
Last summer, the brothers and their father, Leo Lovel, bought 10,000 pinkie-fingertip-size oyster seeds. In August they put them in cages and plunked them down here on their two 1-1/2 acre clam leases in the waters of Franklin County.
We knew nothing about oysters, Clay Lovel said.
So the men studied oyster history. They experimented with enclosures and planting methods. The fishermen became farmers.
Nine months later, with some 150,000 pieces growing in 500 cages, their first crop is coming in big, succulent 3-inch oysters that within a couple of hours on this late May day, will be in the family fish house cooler, ready to be served on the half shell to seafood lovers at the Lovels’ Spring Creek Restaurant.
They are snow white on the inside and so salty they will burn your lips, said Leo Lovel, a Tallahassee native who has owned the beloved Wakulla County seafood restaurant perched on the water’s edge since 1977. It’s got a lot of people very excited. This could be the rebirth of the seafood industry in North Florida.
The Spring Creek Oyster Company is a Florida first. While about a half-dozen people in the state are cultivating farm-raised oysters and selling them in the shellfish trade, aquaculture officials say no one else has done what the Lovels are doing growing, harvesting, selling, serving and marketing to the public their own signature oyster.
2013 www.tallahassee.com