Direct from Norwalk: Lovejoy's White Rock and Grassy Hammock Oysters

Terry Backer read my earlier post about oysters, in which I referred to an old sign I had seen at his headquarters. I remember making note of what the sign said, but that notebook is long gone. But Terry remembered and sent me this, in an email:

That was a sign from the the Fredrick Lovejoy Oyster company. It advertised White Rock and Grassy Hammock oysters both place names in the harbor. I own one of those pieces of oyster ground now. The sign was from the 20s and 30s. It was and is common practice to name certain oysters after where they are grown. The location can contribute to the flavor of the oyster considerably thus by branding them with their place name can help people Id what they have had before.

Thanks, Terry!

Ghost-fishing for Blackfish

Norwalk Harbor seems to be littered with unattended fish traps -- maybe 100, maybe 1,000: no one really knows -- that serve, as one observer put it, as "self-perpetuating fish-killing machines."

On first read I thought it was a mistake. Fish traps? Lobster traps, perhaps, but whoever heard of fish traps in Long Island Sound?

The proliferation of traps was driven by two events, Backer said: the demise of lobsters in 1999 and the rise in the value of blackfish in New York City's live fish markets. Both changed blackfishing in the last two decades, Backer said.

"A lot of old-timers used to set up traps, catch a couple dozen blackfish and fillet them for the winter," Backer said. "But the confluence of events that drove up the value of blackfish made people more willing to exploit them."

So, as Terry Backer implies further on in this Stamford Advocate article (published on Christmas), it's good news that fish from the Sound are being caught and sold locally (or relatively locally). That's a sustainable use of the Sound. But it's irresponsible to leave traps out there and to not check them regularly. The Connecticut DEP, by the way, says there's not much it can do about the problem.

Nice work by Tim Stelloh, who also dug up this story, about the potential implications of an application by a Southport resident, Stuart Bell, on publicly-owned shellfish beds in the Sound.