The oyster beds at the head of Marrow Bay reopened to harvest this week after a run of closures that cost the small cluster of growers most of their summer season. The reopening followed a stretch of clean water-quality readings, the first sustained run of them since early June.
Relief on the foreshore is real but guarded. Growers point out that the closures always follow the same pattern: heavy rain, a spike in readings after run-off reaches the bay, and then a slow wait for the numbers to fall again.
Why the closures keep happening
The bay sits at the outfall of a catchment that drains farmland and an ageing network of pipes. When the ground is saturated, everything that lands on it eventually finds the water, and shellfish concentrate whatever is there.
- Closures this year clustered tightly around periods of sustained rainfall.
- The affected beds represent the livelihood of only a handful of families.
- No upstream fix has been proposed on any firm timetable.
For now the sheds are busy again and the first baskets have gone to market. But the growers are clear that reopening is not the same as solving anything, and they would rather talk about the catchment than the harvest.
Related: Harbour & Coast · reading the harbour's warnings
Further reading: Oyster farming
