Cold Galveston Bay oysters on the half shell and January go hand in hand, like saltines and cocktail sauce. Cool temperatures have plumped up bivalves to their prime size by now and area restaurants are celebrating the bounty, although it may be short-lived.
Frances Jurisich, owner of legendary seafood restaurant and oyster joint Gilhooley's in San Leon, has plenty of oysters to satisfy her customers, she said.
In large part, that's because her father owns an oystering company and brings in oysters from south Texas bays when the pickings are slim in Galveston Bay, she said.
"We want to give people Texas oysters," she said. "Right now Galveston Bay oysters are plump from that good brackish water, but they're scarce. There's always a bay open somewhere where we can get good oysters."
The limit for a boat is 30 sacks a day, and for most oystermen in Galveston Bay it takes all day to harvest even half that, Jurisich said.
"My dad said in San Antonio Bay right now, it takes three hours to make 30 sacks down there," she said.
Harvests have been sparse in Galveston Bay this season, according to multiple sources. And much of Galveston Bay might be closed to oystering as soon as a month from now, according to some, the Galveston County Daily News reported last week.
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The annual San Leon Oyster Fest has been postponed until next year, said organizer Lisa Halili of Prestige Oysters in San Leon, the area's biggest purveyor of Galveston Bay oysters.
"This has been a devastating year for oyster production," Halili said in a statement announcing cancellation of this year's festival. "The flooding we experienced in spring has stressed oyster beds and the quantity of oysters that are available to harvest.
"This limits our ability to ensure the availability of oysters for the oyster fest and heightens the urgency to fulfill our mission to restore oyster reefs in Galveston Bay."
Halili predicted the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department might soon shut down most of the bay to oystering to allow immature oysters to grow, and Parks & Wildlife spokesman Lance Robinson confirmed that in part.
"Inspecting the beds is something we routinely do at this time of year, and it's possible a section will be closed if we don't find mature oysters there," Robinson said. He added, however, that one section of Galveston Bay, closed at the beginning of the season in November, might now be recovered enough to open, depending upon what inspectors find.
It's a dance everyone involved in the oyster harvest has been engaged in regularly since 2008 when Hurricane Ike dredged up tons of silt that essentially smothered and killed most of the oysters in the bay, leaving oyster beds and the industry to be rebuilt, a job all involved share, though not without disagreement.
Brad Boney, former fisherman and coastal advocacy consultant, argues the state has "been monkeying around" for 11 years with little discernible success.
Boney argues the bay needs an association made up of oystermen, environmental, industry and government representatives and marine scientists, all to put their heads together for solutions, rather than sticking with just one formula -- shut down the beds until they have recovered.
Oystermen and industry people have a vested interest in protecting the harvest and restoring reefs, Boney said. Still, many government solutions place the burden on them, applying new rules that are counter-productive, he said.
For example, the legislature has talked about limiting leases in state harvesting areas to five years, Boney said. As it stands, leases are good for 15 years from the time of original issue.
"If that happens, people who invest in a lease may or may not be able to harvest reefs they've invested time and money in," he said, noting it takes three of those years for oysters to reach harvest size.
The cost of leasing state-owned shellfish harvesting areas is too high in Texas, he said. And there are too many oyster licenses issued by the state. To fix the problems of oystering, people with a vested interest in seeing the beds grow and produce must have an equal voice in the conversation, he said.
In recent days, at the State of the Bay symposium held at Texas A&M University at Galveston, scientists weighed in on oyster health in Galveston Bay and potential ways to improve reef restoration.
One of them, Kyeong Park, a professor in the university's department of marine sciences, is particularly concerned with studying the movement of water in the bay to determine how and where it carries oyster larvae that must attach themselves to a reef in order to survive.
"Those larvae wander around about 10 to 14 days, dictated by the current," Park said. "If they don't find a good substrata to settle on, they die."
That leads Park and others to wonder whether existing reefs and those being built to restore oysters to the bay has been studied carefully enough.
"One of the most important issues when building new reefs is where to locate it and how to design it," Park said. "As far as I understand it, we don't have good information about Galveston Bay."
Scientists study larval and water movement by placing settlement plates in various locations, then collecting them after a few weeks and determining how many oyster larvae have settled on them. From these collections, computer models can be made that predict good locations.
Park worked on a project in Alabama's Mobile Bay, about the same size as Galveston Bay, where these ideas were put into practice with notable success, he said.
Oysters feed hungry seafood lovers, bolster the local economy and provide essential natural functions such as filtering impurities from the water, making them a treasured and much needed regional resource.
But restoring Galveston Bay to full productivity feels something like walking on a treadmill and not getting anywhere, Jurisich said.
"It's very difficult, because every summer we have a problem with too much fresh water, a storm, whatever, she said. "It seems like it's getting worse and worse every year."
And while she is confident about the supply at Gilhooley's, Jurisich said she understands that's not the case for everyone.
"I know a lot of restaurants just take them off the menu when there's so few and the prices get so high," she said.
