Wearing neon-orange overalls, white rubber boots and a baby-blue visor that matches his eyes, Chalmers, with his mate, works the oyster lines—underwater cables linked to hundreds of cages overflowing with growing oysters. with the help of a pulley, the men haul a heavy cage out of the river onto the deck of the gleaming white boat, where they take turns spraying off the oysters with a high-pressure hose. Keeping the oysters clean helps them grow better, Chalmers says.
Today Chalmers is one of a handful of oystermen working on the Lynnhaven River, trying to resurrect the famous Lynnhaven oyster from its watery grave. in late 2007, commercial shellfishing became a viable industry on the river for the first time in decades when the Virginia Department of Health opened up nearly a third of its 5,100 acres for safe shellfish harvest. That’s when Chalmers sold his landscaping business and, with the encouragement of his father and Cliff Love, a family friend, decided to devote all his energy to his fledgling business, the Lynnhaven Oyster Company, which he had founded in 2004. “They believed in the cause,” Chalmers says. Now he leases more than 500 acres of river bottom for his aquaculture enterprise.
While Chalmers has yet to show a profit, he gets a gleam in his determined blue eyes when he thinks about the future. This winter, he expects to harvest 50-60 bushels a week. “The distributors want to make sure we have enough,” he says. That’s why he often shares equipment and trades favors with other Lynnhaven oystermen like John Meekins and Pete Dixon. “We help each other out,” Chalmers says. “The more people that succeed, the more Lynnhaven oysters we can get to the market.”
Public demand for the oysters is growing. Lynnhavens on the half shell are appearing on the menus of Hampton roads restaurants and are also available at seafood markets (see sidebar). Prices are high, but no one seems to mind paying a little extra to indulge in this historic bivalve.
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