Lynnhaven oysters were once world-renowned for a sweet, briny flavor that pleased locals and leaders.
“I am glad to be here by the oceanside,” President William Howard Taft reportedly said in 1909, after eating well over 100 Lynnhaven oysters on a visit to Hampton Roads. “I am glad to taste the best oysters with the finest flavor I have ever tasted before.”
Decades of urban development and overharvesting took a toll on the waterway, and by the start of this century, almost all of Virginia Beach’s Lynnhaven River was off-limits for edible oysters.
When Lynnhaven River Now launched in 2002, only 1% of the Lynnhaven was open for the shellfish harvest. The nonprofit and other local officials spent more than 20 years working to clean it up.
They’ve now hit a milestone. The Virginia Department of Health recently opened about 250 acres of water for commercial harvesters to operate. That brings the percentage up to 52%.
Brent James, the oyster restoration coordinator at Lynnhaven River Now, said the move “represents a validation of all the things we've been doing.”
“We've seen such small, incremental changes, and then to have this one large change, it's like waking up on Christmas morning,” James said. “It's a wonderful moment in our history right now.”
The river had been stagnant at about 47% for several years, he said.
Most shellfish harvesting in the Lynnhaven is for oysters, though some pursue crabs or clams. About 98% of the harvested oysters are raised in cages rather than caught in the wild.
The state health department's shellfish sanitation division regularly monitors water quality to determine which spots are safe for consumers.
Karen Forget, executive director of Lynnhaven River Now, said the water quality standard for harvesting shellfish is higher than for swimmable fish, because people often eat shellfish raw.
“They can be dangerous for human health if they're not taken from waters that meet these really rigorous standards,” she said.
Being able to eat Lynnhaven oysters again was one of the nonprofit’s main goals when it launched, as a benchmark for water quality and a way to connect people to the river, Forget said.
Lynnhaven River Now helped build more than 150 acres of sanctuary reefs as habitat for wild oysters. The bivalves help filter nutrient pollution in the water — the more are added to the river, the cleaner it becomes.
Ribbed mussels, which are different from mussels eaten at restaurants, also seem to be naturally “exploding” in the area, James said. Unlike oysters, mussels consume bacteria such as disease-causing E. coli.
But stemming pollution at the source is key, Forget said.
“It’s really what happens on the land that is the biggest contributor to water quality,” she said. “It's the runoff from roads and parking lots and driveways and shopping centers. That's where all that sediment came from that's in the bottom of the river.”
The state automatically shuts down commercial harvesting for 10 days after significant rainfall.
When Capt. John Smith sailed into the area in the early 1600s, officials estimate that the Lynnhaven had up to 1,500 acres of oyster beds.
After 20 years of restoration, the river’s at less than 15% of the historic estimate, James said.
The water is nearly half as deep as it was back then, he said. Sediment running off land accumulated at the river bottom and smothered oysters, which settle in one place.
Cleaning the next half of the river to harvest quality will be more challenging, James said.
Deeper waters near the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay experience more “flushing,” where incoming tides push water in and out, and are near more wetlands and forests. Farther inland, the water is shallower and closer to developed land such as Town Center and Lynnhaven Mall.
Forget said people talk about the degradation of the river happening through “death by a thousand cuts.” But restoration works the same way.
“There’s no silver bullet. It's one property at a time. It's one person cleaning up after their dog, a homeowner putting in a rain garden or a business putting in a buffer between their parking lot and the storm drain. When you put all of those things together, they really do have a positive cumulative impact.”
