2014 Oyster Cage Delivery Recap

The 2014-2015 Oyster Cage Deliveries took place on a beautiful Thursday in October. As the 21 volunteers showed up to the staging site, they were met with breakfast, coffee and a really cool ORRI delivery t-shirt – if we do say so ourselves.

Once everyone got settled, the ORRI founder, Scott Eglseder, with the help of Kelsey Harned, addressed the volunteers to explain how this year’s deliveries would work. Because the ORRI has effectively doubled in size this year, the planning for this year’s deliveries definitely required a bit more planning and organization!

Not long after the introductions, Tommy Price with the Oyster Recovery Partnership arrived in a rather large truck to deliver all of the cages and oyster spat-on-shell. From there, the oyster cages were placed into rows so they could be filled up with oyster spat and delivered to the 83 new growers that came on with the program this year. For our 84 existing growers, we filled 3 gallon buckets with oysters and placed them into groups so they could be loaded and hand-delivered to the docks of each of our growers.

After the volunteers organized the buckets and cages for the deliveries, teams of 2 were created to tackle their respective routes. Once their trucks were loaded with their assigned combination of cages and buckets, the deliveries were officially underway.

Volunteers then delivered the cages or buckets of spat-on-shell to our 167 growers in an extremely expeditious manner, thanks to the thorough and careful route planning done by Kelsey Spiker. Since we had almost doubled our number of growers from last year (84 to 167) we were anxious to see if we could complete our staging and deliveries in the required amount of time—the oysters cannot be out of the water for more than 3 hours at a time.

This year’s Oyster Cage Deliveries were a HUGE undertaking, but thanks to our amazing staff and dedicated volunteers, the sheer scale of this year’s deliveries didn’t seem to be an obstacle at all. In fact, this year was one of our smoothest deliveries yet! Our organization’s efforts would not be possible without the time and dedication of our volunteers and our growers. THANK YOU AGAIN for making the start of our 4th growing season a success! We look forward to the bounty of oysters that will be grown this year that will make a difference in the water quality and underlying ecosystem of the Bay we love and call home!

A HEARTY THANK YOU TO OUR VOLUNTEERS THIS YEAR:
Eglseder Wealth Management Group, Inc. staff: Scott Eglseder, Kelsey Spiker, Kim White, Janice Enfield. Janice Enfield, Maribeth Anderson, and Jennifer Taylor.
Einstein Marketing Concepts, Inc. (thank you for all the wonderful video footage and photography!): Johnny Vo and Chris McCarty