Two Parades!

We built a float and marched in the parade at Shady Side in the morning and Galesville in the afternoon. This got people's attention and advertised the Gala Kickoff on July 27.
  

GALA KICK-OFF - from 1-4 at the Galesville Community Hall.

Blessing of the Fleet Festival - Discovery Village, Shady Side, MD.

We had a table there. Former Governor Robert Ehrlich views oysters filtering the water.
  

Shell Bagging - Discovery Village, Shady Side, MD.

Shell Bagging - Discovery Village, Shady Side, MD.

Oyster gardening workshop at the Salem Avery House in Shady Side - 10 AM to 1 PM

Shell Bagging - Discovery Village, Shady Side, MD.

We were fortunate to have available some one-year old oysters from an oyuster gardener and they were placed on the reef right away to kick things off.

Meanwhile we held a very successful workshop to train new oyster gardeners to grow oysters at their docks. We trained 20 families at the workshop and another 3 families were trained at other CBF workshops, but are part of the POWeR family. It is expected that these families will return their oysters to us in the spring and that we should see thousands of adult oysters planted on the reef at that time.

However, it is also important to add baby oysters to the reef to provide the multi-generational aspect that makes for a healthy ecological system. In several trips with the CBF oyster boat, the Patricia Campbell, we put down over a million baby oysters as spat-on-shell. All of these babies were raised at the Discovery Village facility of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

We have received significant help and encouragment from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Galesville and Shady Side communities and the Salem Avery House.

See the Elmer Carroll Benning Oyster Sanctuary section for the log of plantings.

Click on these images to see bigger pictures.

Site number 2 is an oyster lease site (AA536) that was acquired in the name of POWeR committee member DJ Springuel. It consists of a 1/4 acre portion of a 7 acre lease site in the West River off the Shady Side community of Westerly. On June 6, 2005 POWeR funded the delivery and placement of 70 tons of oyster shell with another 70 tons placed on June 7. This will form the base of the new reef on which live oysters will be planted. Conditions of water quality at this site are similar to those at the first site (the Elmer Carroll Benning Sanctuary), but the bottom is steeply sloping from about 9 feet of water up to 4 feet. There are areas as shallow as two feet nearby, so it is not in the path of boat traffic. In any event the shell form a layer less than a foot thick.

1-4 at the Galesville Community Dock. Watch for pictures here.

Twenty gardeners returned 10,672 oysters. Some gardeners did better than last year and some not as well. Overall it was a good year for the oysters and the returns by our West River growers are similar to what we are seeing elsewhere - many good healthy oysters from a lot of gardeners, but also some with high mortality. In some cases the gardens had as many dead oysters as live. But some people had very few dead oysters. Those in shallow areas seem to have had the most trouble, although in a couple of cases those same people did very well last year.

All of the gardeners have been plotted on a map and you can see where the oysters are being grown. The blue flags are gardeners who have contributed over 1000 oysters total in the last two returns.

POWeR site #2 is named the Springuel Reef, as the lease is held by D. J. Springuel. 715,968 spat were planted by CBF on July 6.

An additional 5 tons of shell became available and was placed by CBF on the NE corner os site #1 to fill in some space left empty in the original construction of the reef.

Spat for the 2005-2006 season have been distributed to the gardeners at both CBF spat days and the POWeR spat event in Galesville.