APALACHICOLA - While much of the Gulf Coast struggled with the BP oil spill, the oyster capital of Florida faced the law of unintended consequences.
Apalachicola Bay escaped damage from the spill, but the response to the disaster wound up disrupting the harvest anyway. When BP started paying oystermen a stipend and hiring away local boats, oyster suppliers lost business because they could not keep up with demand. Panhandle irony.
"It was just a weird thing," said Dan Tonsmeire, who leads the Apalachicola Riverkeeper organization. "It's hard to figure out how that all came to pass. Sort of typical of that whole deal with BP. Nothing was well-planned."
At Quality Oysters in Apalachicola, Lynn Martina had to lay off shuckers and cut back on truck deliveries to Tampa and Jacksonville. Hard times meant hard decisions. She could hardly blame oystermen for accepting $2,500 checks to be on standby for BP.
At first, Martina denies any hard feelings, but then she admits that suppliers will always remember who left them in a lurch.
"Oh, yeah," she said, drawing out her words. "Ohhh, yeah."
The Gulf oil spill closed commercial fisheries from the Mississippi River to Mobile Bay, leaving thousands of people out of work and fearful for the future.
By comparison, Apalachicola was lucky -- only it didn't feel that way to local residents.
Anita Grove, director of the Chamber of Commerce, compared the summer to slow torture, or having a loaded gun pointed at your head.
"You didn't get killed, but it made you question everything you do," she said. "We had no idea. Everybody was scrambling. We had two months of purgatory, wondering what was going to happen."
Florida produces about 10 percent of the nation's oysters. Ninety percent of those shellfish come from Apalachicola Bay.
Tourism has grown in Apalachicola and nearby St. George Island, but seafood remains central to the region's economy and identity. People listen to Oyster Radio News. They eat at a local restaurant called Boss Oyster.
There are only 11,000 residents in Franklin County, but more than 1,100 of them have oyster licenses. This makes 10 percent of the population full- or part-time oystermen.
In the shallow waters of Apalachicola Bay, almost all the oysters are harvested by hand. Oystermen work long-handled tongs in the same way their fathers and grandfathers did. Hundreds earn a modest living one sack at a time. It is a grueling job.
Billy Dalton, vice president of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association, was not surprised when oystermen took a BP check and chose not to work for a while.
"If you've got a pocketful of money," he said, laughing, "you don't want to go out in that heat."
BP's hiring boats and paying oystermen caused a short-term glitch in the supply chain of Florida shellfish. A government decision might have long-term effects.
In the weeks after the Gulf oil spill, when things looked bleak, the state opened winter beds of oysters in Apalachicola Bay. Instead of letting the beds rest and oysters grow, people harvested everything they could.
"Everybody panicked," Dalton said. "They jumped the gun and spooked a lot of guys. Guys were bringing in anything, and the warehouses were buying anything."
Now people are starting to worry about the winter harvest. Some Apalachicola oystermen and suppliers would like to close the winter grounds -- or the whole bay -- for a few months.
"It's been worked pretty hard," said Martina. "It's going to kill us this winter if there's no product."
The problem with closing the beds, Dalton said, is that local families depend on a regular income from oystering. He joked about illegal alternatives to tonging on Apalachicola Bay.
"I don't know they're gonna do," Dalton said, laughing. "Probably a lot more pot grown in the woods."
Tonsmeire, the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, takes a long view of the oil spill.
He would rather not pile on criticism of BP or state decisions made this summer.
"Hindsight is always 20/20," he said. "At the time, somebody had to make the call."
Tonsmeire worries more about the long-term future of the Gulf of Mexico. After the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, the worst impact of the oil spill was not seen right away. It took years for people to realize that local herring fisheries had collapsed.
In Apalachicola, the immediate concern is capping the oil spill and coping with hurricane season. Then the winter season will begin and oystermen will see just how well the bay has recovered.
"In a couple of months," Tonsmeire said, "I'll rest a whole lot easier."
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