Photos By Megan Hartley, Capital News Service

With the help of his golden retriever, Cap’n, Larry Simns is herding a cluster of 22 white oyster boats over the smooth waters of the Chester River dropping black flags to make sure the craft, laden with wire baskets, do not wander over oyster bars where they are forbidden to dredge.

On the boats, watermen drop metal cages to the bottom of the river about 14 feet below, and drag them for a few minutes to scoop up a load of oysters. When finally the cages are raised to the surface, the rock-like oysters are dumped on the deck of the boat.

These oysters are not destined for dinner tables or restaurants in Baltimore and Washington. Rather, they are being dredged to make room on Maryland’s best oyster beds for new baby oysters less likely to be infected by the diseases that have ravaged the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster harvest for the past 50 years.

Mostly because of the disease, efforts to increase the bay’s oyster population since the historically low catch in 1994 have been largely unsuccessful. Still, a coalition of legislators, environmentalists, watermen and scientists is refusing to give up, persisting in the effort to make sure that these profitable and eco-friendly mollusks make a comeback.

“We’re not gonna get rid of the disease,” said Simns, a veteran skipper who has spent his life as a bay waterman and now heads the Maryland Watermen’s Association. “We just gotta work around it.”

Oysters are the natural filters of the bay, which makes them important to not only watermen, but to anyone else who cares about the health of Maryland’s iconic natural symbol. Citizens are starting their own oyster gardens, lawmakers are providing funds to hatch disease-free baby oysters and watermen are planting them in the water.

“It’s big news,” said Kathy Brohawn, chief of the shellfish certification division at the Maryland Department of the Environment. “Everybody knows oysters are part of the solution to the bay clean up.”

The oyster diseases Dermo and MSX are the main cause of the decline of the Chesapeake Bay oyster. A study to come out this year by the Army Corps of Engineers will examine if a disease resistant non-native Asian oyster will have adverse effects on the ecosystem of the bay.

There are other factors for the oyster’s current difficulties – sediment, reduced water quality, shrinking habitat but none so important as disease. Thus, said Tom O’Connell, assistant director of fisheries at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, “there isn’t going to be one solution, we have to use a combination of strategies.”

Marylanders, either organized into groups or on their own, are trying their best to help the native oyster make a comeback.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for example, provides workshops where people can learn to grow oysters in baskets off their piers. After a year, the small oysters are planted in a sanctuary.

Steve Gauss, a retired astronomer, took the idea a little further and organized a group of more than 20 residents in Shady Side, Anne Arundel County, to build their own oyster bar in the West River.

“I’m retired and I was looking for something to do that would help the environment,” said Gauss. “I l