OYSTER FARMERS
By the Dart INTERVIEW
GEORGE CONGDON & PAT TUCKER OYsTeR FARMeRs
(left to right) Pat Tucker and George Congdon
O
YSTER farmers on the River Dart can only tend their crop
for 25 days of the year when the spring tides are in force. Fishermen George Congdon and
Pat Tucker cultivate the crop when the tides are low enough to reveal the shellfish, which happens during the spring tides, as this is the only time they can see the oysters. Their aquatic farm stretches some 800-metres from Noss to Long Wood just below Maypool on the east side of the river, and around 300-metres from Kiln Gate to Lord’s Wood on the west side. They also have rights to use an area at Flat Owers near Dittisham, set up by Devon Sea Fisheries over a decade ago.
The pair can yield an annual
harvest of up to 50-tonnes of Pacific oysters from the river banks, the ma- jority of which are shipped to France. When not tending the oysters,
George and Pat independently fish in Start Bay.
Oyster farming can be a lucrative
business but oysters are delicate creatures so it’s also an unpredictable one. Last year George and Pat bought 1.8million juvenile oysters. It usually takes around two-years for the pair to grow the seeds to market size of between 80 and 110-grammes. ‘On paper it’s a massively viable
business, we have just yet to realise it,’ George said. ‘We keep expanding and ploughing money in’. Former KEVICC’s student George,
crab, ray and red mullet. Pat joined forces with George three years ago. Setting up an oyster farm seemed
like a natural side-step for George, of Ashprington, who explained: ‘I knew someone with an oyster farm on the River Yealm and he asked me to sup- ply him when he didn’t have oysters. ‘There was an oyster farm in the
Dart in the ‘70s but TBT antifouling paint, which is toxic to oysters, killed it off. Their shells got thick and deformed; you can still see the dead ones there now. ‘As far as I know Devon Sea
Fisheries were forced to come up with some alternative way shell fishermen could make money. They set up Waddeton Oyster Fishery and leased the land off the Duchy of
44, has been farming oysters for 11 years. He became a fisherman when he left the Totnes school, skippering Torbay-based trawlers in Scotland before going solo and fishing for shellfish and the likes of bass, sole and cuttlefish in Start Bay. Pat, 49, a former Churston
Grammar School pupil, spent five years in the merchant navy before skippering the Dartmouth-based William Henry crabber off the Hebrides and Orkney Islands. He now fishes alone off Start Point in his 30-ft craft True Grit for spider
‘They turn up from the
hatchery in a bag, like a bag of sand,’
Cornwall for a vastly reduced rate. ‘Every fisherman was supposed to
have a patch like a communist state up there but none of them took it up. A couple of people tried and gave up. ‘There is one other chap up there doing it like a hobby, he’s got a tiny bit and we’ve got the rest of it. If it wasn’t for us it would have fallen by the wayside. ‘We have now expanded down the
river into a new oyster fishery and with the space we’ve got we could harvest 50-tonnes a year, which is what I reckon we will do this year and next year’.
For the past couple of years
George and Pat have been playing catch up as they received undersized seed oysters from their suppliers at Morecombe Bay Oysters. It has taken them nearly three years to grow the oysters to the 2-milimetre size they usually receive from the hatchery. ‘They turn up from the hatchery in
a bag, like a bag of sand,’ George said. ‘Their lives are spent in bags, dif-
ferent size mesh string ones, and we sieve them as they grow as they all grow at different rates. We just keep sieving and grading them. ‘We can only work every other
two weeks because of the spring tides but we do a lot of work in that time. We grade and count at the same time, it’s an on-going process.’ George and Pat’s biggest market is at Christmas time. They sell their oysters to Brixham Sea Farm which in turn sells them on the buyers in
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