Brewster Approves New Shellfish Grants; Some Have Waited 15 Years For Opportunity

BREWSTER – Brewster’s mollusks may not yet rival the Wellfleet oyster, but if all things work out the local shellfish industry will be growing.

The select board on Aug. 10 voted unanimously to support applications for eight new aquaculture leases along Cape Cod Bay.

“This is part of state regulation Chapter 130 section 57 and 60,” senior Shellfish and Natural Resources Officer Ryan Burch said. “And what we’ve done is we’ve accepted applications from both the state and the town. Our department has reviewed them, made some suggestions, and gotten back what we need.”

The town’s aquaculture regulations were reviewed to make sure the applicants met all requirements at both the state and town levels. State officials from the Division of Marine Fisheries still need to come to Brewster to do a shellfish survey in the areas of the proposed beds to make sure there’s not already a large native population of shellfish there. To do so they need the name of the applicant who will hold the aquaculture license for that particular site.

Brewster has 3,700 acres of sandy ocean bottom along its bayside shoreline. Burch noted that shellfish farming has ecological benefits (filtering the water, removing nitrogen) and he’d like to expand the number of leases. 

“We had not gone out there and roughly surveyed the areas,” Burch said. “There are two areas, one is directly out in front of Spruce Hill and the other area is to the east of Breakwater Beach. Unfortunately we had surveyed the site prior to the ice coming, and I was surprised more stakes survived the ice than I thought. So we went out a second time and reset some stakes. This isn’t the official area because once the state comes down they may find shellfish or eelgrass and the perfect squares on the maps may shift around.”

Those squares represent half-acre lease sites that will go to the eight future shellfish farmers. So in total there are four acres of town-owned sand being reserved for them, two acres off Breakwater and two off Spruce Hill.

“We have four people at each site,” Burch said. “How we assigned the sites is we took it in order of how they were in the wait list. So the first person got first pick and then down from there.”

The Breakwater Beach grants will go to Nick deRuyter, Troy LaBonte, Michael Schaffer and Amy Rudolph. The four sites off Spruce Hill are slated for Chris Dudzik, Ray Escher, Leo Marseglia and Rachel Hutchinson. The leases are good for three years. 

“If this is approved, the next step is for the state to come down and they’ll do random rakes and passes through these sites looking for natural sets of shellfish,” Burch said. “If they find none, that gets approved. If they find a certain amount within these areas then we have to reconfigure things. They’re looking for patches of eelgrass as well.”

That is important because the conservation commission wants to make sure there will be no adverse effects from the shellfish farming.

“This is very exciting to see this,” said select board Chair Amanda Bebrin.

“I fully support moving forward with this,” board member Mary Chaffee agreed. “I’m curious about how long the folks who are being approved for this have been on a waiting list and how many remain?”

Burch said some have waited more than 15 years, and there are about a dozen people still on the list. One applicant was removed because they are no longer a Brewster resident and another declined.

“Starting from the top of the list we gave them a period of time to go out and see what made sense for them, and even the person that was the last was excited for the spot they got,” Burch said. 

Each location also has four more possible sites for future expansion.

In selecting a location, the distance from a town landing and conditions at different tides are factors. Spruce Hill is actually a little closer than Breakwater at 500 feet offshore. Breakwater is 800 feet from shore. In Massachusetts, shorefront property owners can control the substrate up to 1,650 feet from the high water mark due to early Colonial laws still in effect. That isn’t the case in the rest of the U.S. 

The Breakwater sites are opposite private shoreline but the property owner supports the leases while the Spruce Hill grants are in front of town-owned conservation land. They’d be accessed via Linnell Landing.

“We are tremendously excited to see you get underway,” Bebrin concluded.