By Cheryl Lyn Dybas
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 14, 1998; Page H01

Tendrils of fog curl above the waters of Chesapeake Bay. Biting winds gusted out of the northwest yesterday, and an early snow is forecast for tomorrow. But for this one afternoon in mid-November, cold winds fetching across slate-gray waves have gone elsewhere. The Chesapeake is holding its breath, granting one last look at autumn on a day that seems suspended in time.

"Days like this, I could just die right here," says Russell Dize, sighing, his voice rising above the whine of a winch and a clinking, clanging sound like that of banging pots and pans.

Dize (pronounced dies) is captain of one of the last of this country's working sailing vessels, the skipjack Kathryn. He and five crewmen are dredging ("drudging," they call it) for oysters (or "arsters," as some pronounce it) in the northern Chesapeake, just above Annapolis at the mouth of the Magothy River in a place known as Snake Rip.

"We call it `Snake Rip' now, but it used to be `Snake Reef,' " Dize explains as the dredges -- iron claws at the mouths of huge mesh bags -- drop into the Bay, one from port, one from starboard. "Whatever you want to call it, Snake Rip's a good place for oysters and has been since my father drudged for 'em here almost 70 years ago. Chesapeake gold I heard oysters called when I was growing up."

To the Bay itself, oysters are indeed gold. The American oyster, Crassostrea virginica, lives in the Chesapeake at depths between eight and 25 feet. Oyster bars dot most of the Bay and tributaries as far upstream as brackish water penetrates.

The shellfish can survive on hard sand and firm bottoms but not on silt or shifting sands. They filter their food -- algae and other microscopic organic matter -- from the water and so must not be buried by shifting sediments.

This filtering mechanism makes the oyster valuable to the Chesapeake ecosystem. Scientists estimate that, when oysters were abundant in the 19th century, the mollusks processed the waters of the entire bay through their systems about every seven days. Now, after more than a century of decline in oyster numbers, it takes more than a year.

Oysters "were, in effect, miniature treatment plants capable of continuously removing excess nutrients that took the form of algae," Alice Jane Lippson and Robert L. Lippson wrote in Life in the Chesapeake Bay. "Small wonder that the Bay waters were clearer a century ago than they are now."

Oysters are bivalves, mollusks with two shells, and are related to clams, scallops and mussels. The form of an oyster's shell reflects the bottom on which it grew; those on hard bottoms and in calm waters tend to be rounded, whereas those from softer bottoms are long and narrow.

The oyster's two shells, or "valves," consist of a cup-shaped bottom and a flat top, with the bottom valve heavier and usually attached by a natural glue to the bottom.

Oysters mature within their first year and have the remarkable ability to change sex. In their first winter, most are males. By their second winter, most have become females. As the water warms in late spring, the temperature change signals the oysters to spawn. Males release sperm and females eggs into the water, turning the area around an oyster bed milky white. When one oyster begins, it triggers the entire bed into spawning.

Once the eggs are fertilized, they develop into swimming larvae, which eventually settle to the bottom. The larvae, attracted to chemicals emitted by adult oysters, often "land" on an existing oyster bed, thereby building the bed. Newly attached oysters are called spat. In years when oysters are prolific reproducers, a single oyster shell may have dozens of spat anchored to its surface.

Spat share oyster bars with many other creatures.

"It has been estimated that the surface area over an oyster bed, across the dips and folds and crevices, may be 50 times greater than that over an equally extensive flat mud bottom," the Lippsons wrote. Many species that live on dock pilings and in seagrass meadows also live on oyster bars. These include sea anemones, sea squirts, crabs and fish such as gobies, blennies and skilletfish.

Perhaps the most unusual resident of Chesapeake oyster bars is the oyster crab, a crustacean the size of a lima bean that takes up permanent residence in an oyster's gills. Once attached to an oyster, the crabs lose their ability to move. Ultimate couch potatoes, they simply catch particles of food drifting in the current caused by the oyster pumping water through its feeding apparatus.

Watermen (and they are nearly all men) know the locations of most large oyster bars. Many have been charted on maps and almost all have names. Dize says Snake Rip "is just one of the bars we catch oysters on over on this side of the Bay. On the other side, we've got lots of bars to work, too, although there are a lot fewer than there used to be."

No one knows exactly how much of the Bay bottom is covered with oyster bars, but it's thought that the area of the Chesapeake supporting oyster beds has significantly declined over the last 100 years, according to Dorothy Leonard, former director of fisheries at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

Dize signals his crew and up come the dredges, clunking along the Kathryn's gunwales. Steve Pilkerton and Richie Person grab the starboard dredge and Russell Swift, Timmy Howard and Chuck Strobel snare the port dredge. They are loaded with oysters, mud and miscellaneous detritus. In synchronized motion, the crew bangs the full dredges over the rail, then tips them down, spilling the contents across the deck like jewels from an undersea treasure chest. It's a good haul or "cull."

This scoop, which watermen call a lick, has brought up nearly 100 oysters, all keepers, meaning they are more than three inches long. "Not every lick comes up like this one," Dize says. "We been out here all morning, got some good licks then but then not much after lunch but about 15 oysters a lick until this one."

The first skipjack, named after a fish, the jack, that skips across the Chesapeake's waters, sailed the Bay in the late 1800s. By 1900, there were "hundreds of 'em out here," Dize says. "But no more. Now there's just 11, far as I know, left anywhere, all of 'em here in Maryland.

"It's one of the saddest sights, seein' a skipjack taken up some small creek and left there to die in the marshes, bein' broken up by wind and water. But you see it all the time."

Because we're dredging on a Tuesday, the skipjacks are powered by tiny motorized "push boats" attached to the sterns. Under Maryland law, watermen can dredge for oysters under power on Mondays and Tuesdays. From Wednesday through Friday, they must work under sail, an effort by the DNR to limit oyster catches, according to Leonard. Some skipjacks, such as the Kathryn, don't work much on "sail days" because they can't harvest enough oysters then to pay captain and crew.

In the late 1970s, when Dize started oystering, "we had a race on to see who would catch the 150 bushel [per day] limit first," he says. "Usually, we'd be full and in by 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Now, you're lucky to get to your 150-bushel limit at all. Looks like we might make maybe 130 bushels today."

In Chesapeake oystering's heyday, which peaked in 1884, about 15 million bushels were harvested annually. During last winter's oystering season, just 148,000 bushels, about 1 percent as many, were caught.

Dize looks out over the Bay, pointing to an approaching outboard motorboat, a last pleasure craft enjoying today's quiet waters. Two retirees motor close and peer at the skipjack, "an unusual sight for summer people," he explains. Oystering season on the Chesapeake runs November through March. Dize says the folk wisdom that one only eats oysters on months whose names include an "r" resulted from the lack of refrigeration in times past.

"You'd only want to have oysters lying around out in the air on chilly days," he says. "Even though we have refrigerators now, it's a lot better to catch oysters when they're kept cold by the weather. But it sure isn't easier on us, days when the boat's covered with ice, and you can barely walk without slipping right overboard."

The Kathryn's crew continues to raise lick after lick of oysters, bending as each dredge spills its contents, picking one oyster at a time from a tangled mass of shells and mud. Each keeper is thrown into one of four growing piles, shellfish riches to be sold dockside at day's end for about $23 a bushel.

Another small craft zooms by, circling the Kathryn once and examining its activities closely. Seemingly satisfied, it whizzes on.

"Well, that was the marine police [the DNR] checkin' up on us," Dize says. "It's all pretty friendly with the patrol boats most of the time now, but you should have been out here 30, 50, even 100 years ago. Then, everybody was shootin' at everybody else, the marine police was called the Oyster Navy and murders happened at least once a week, if not once a day."

The oyster wars occurred in the decades after the Civil War. Almost 7,000 men fought on the Bay over oysters until the resource was nearly exhausted in the early 20th century, according to John Wennersten, author of The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay.

First, shallow-water tongers, with wood-and-metal tongs that brought up relatively few oysters, fought with deeper-water dredgers, whose scooplike tools nearly wiped out the Chesapeake oyster.

Later, Wennersten writes, "hostilities became more political, with Maryland and Virginia violently disputing their state boundaries for the sake of oyster-fishing rights in the Bay and in the Potomac River."

A boom-and-bust business with the same get-rich-quick spirit of the gold and silver mines of the West, oystering on the Chesapeake knew no bounds in the mid- to late 1800s.

Oyster-packing houses sprang up around the Bay, with the greatest concentration in and around Baltimore. This coincided with the building of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

As trains moved into the hinterlands, packers sent tons of oysters westward as fast as watermen could land them. Before the rail line, oysters had gone by wagons throughout the Midwest, giving rise to a countrywide appetite for the mollusk. The new railroad was a boon to the oyster industry, by 1860 carrying 3 million pounds of oysters a year to points west and to northern cities.

Who was catching all these oysters? Watermen, by the hundreds. In the oyster season of 1869-70, for example, 563 vessels were licensed in Maryland to dredge for oysters. They carried about 800 bushels a load. This lust for Chesapeake oysters led to what Wennersten calls "hell on the half-shell."

With attacks, counterattacks and piracy rampant on the Bay, the Oyster Navy tried to control the looting and shooting. But the conflict raged, with many people on both sides being killed, ambushed in marshy creeks night and day. A worsening lack of oysters finally halted the mayhem.

Only when oyster stocks had been pillaged and too few were left to be worth fighting over, did the oyster wars cease in the mid-20th century.

"There's still guys alive who remember the most recent round," Dize says. "In fact, one of 'em comes down to the dock sometimes when we come in. He's now an oyster buyer for a company, but he used to work for the Oyster Navy in the 1950s and '60s, although I think it was called the marine police by then.

"I know some of these guys got shot at more than once out here. But that never, that I know of, happens nowadays. Now, dredgers and tongers work side-by-side on the Chesapeake, just tryin' to survive. Aren't enough oysters for a squabble."

Leonard and the DNR, working with the University of Maryland's Horn Point Environmental Laboratory in Cambridge and other groups, hope to change that, although without inviting another war.

Through the efforts of the Oyster Roundtable, whose members represent state regulatory agencies, watermen, environmentalists and scientists, sites in various Bay locations are being restocked with spat.

"The Bay's oyster population is about 1 percent of what it was a century ago," Leonard says, "but we're aiming to bring 2 billion seed oysters into the Chesapeake each year beginning in the year 2002."

This year alone, about 7 million seed oysters were transferred from hatcheries at the Horn Point lab and at state labs at Piney Point and Deal Island in Maryland to the Patuxent River, 4 million were brought into the Severn River and more than 4 million were put in the Choptank River at three different sites. Another 12 million were settled on a fourth Choptank River site, Dickinson Bar, an oyster bar long known to and favored by watermen on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

"We introduce baby oysters to the Bay in one of two ways," Leonard says. The first involves placing microscopic oyster larvae on old oyster shells, called cultch, after the old shells have been cleaned. Once attached to cultch, the larvae are put in mesh bags in tanks where they develop for a week or two until they become "eyed larvae." These, Leonard says, look like "little black specks."

The mesh bags are taken from hatchery tanks to the Bay and placed on wooden or vinyl pallets or on existing oyster beds. A short time later, the bags are slit open, and the spat gently float down to their new home.

The second means of seeding oysters involves much the same process but occurs without cultch. "In this method, we `trick' the oysters into settling onto fine particles of shell suspended in the water column," Leonard says. "Then we put them into mesh bags and hang them on a line above a hard bottom area in the Bay.

"We use buoys to mark the lines. Again, when the oysters have reached a certain point in their growth, we open the bags and allow them to settle. Then we cross our fingers that they'll survive, especially in the face of diseases like MSX and Dermo."

MSX and Dermo have wiped out large portions of the Chesapeake's oyster population. MSX, a parasite, appears in more saline areas, "downbay in the Chesapeake," Leonard says.

Oysters in more northerly parts of the Bay, where water is less salty, have largely been spared the ravages of MSX. But in years when rainfall is low and salinity increases, MSX creeps northward.

Dermo, on the other hand, is always in the water. "It's a bit like strep in humans," Leonard says. "You always carry around the bacteria with you, but you don't get it unless your system is somehow stressed. It's that way for oysters, with Dermo. Unless an oyster is affected by one or more of a myriad of factors, it won't contract Dermo. But if it's in a less than healthy condition, it's ripe for Dermo."

In addition to restocking efforts, she says, "we need to work on habitat. Habitat quality is probably the single most important thing when it comes to the future of the oyster in Chesapeake Bay."

Dize says efforts like those of the DNR already are making a big difference. "Granted, oysters have a lot of problems to overcome," he says. "Something happened a couple of months ago, though, that I can't stop thinking about," and for the merest of moment, the weathered face of the Kathryn's captain takes on a dreamy look.

"It was the darnedest thing. The boat, she was out of the water up on the rails before the season started. I was looking her over, and there, to my total surprise, was 500 or more tiny oysters all over her rudder.

I took a picture of it to show Dot Leonard and the rest of the DNR oyster folks so they can see the results of what they're doing. The skipjacks and the oysters, they're on their way out, but they aren't dead, at least not yet."

The Kathryn skips across waters above Snake Rip. Light is fading fast, and a gray sky has darkened to pewter. "You can almost smell that snow coming," Dize says. No sign is given, but somehow the crew knows that it's time to call it a day.

Dredges are brought up one final time, and Dize turns the Kathryn up the Magothy, away from the Chesapeake's open waters. The skipjack motors through the fog toward Deep Creek, carrying more than 125 bushels of oysters and a century-old tradition into an uncertain future.

Today, she'll unload at a dock on Deep Creek, but at a time not far distant, Deep Creek or another reedy backwater might be more than an overnight berth.

If the Chesapeake's oyster population continues its decline, some winter soon, the Kathryn may make her last voyage "up creek," coming to her final resting place in waters strewn long ago with shellfish bigger than silver dollars and worth their weight in gold.

Cheryl Lyn Dybas is a freelance science writer specializing in marine biology.