Friday, June 07, 2013

Oyster Report - June 2013

Yesterday I performed some maintenance on my oysters that I over wintered at the SPAT facility at Cedar Beach.

I left Greenport at 9am and culled 4x hanging lanterns of oysters into 5x 4-tier lanterns with 20 oysters per tier. Result: 80+80+80+80+50(smaller oysters in final lantern). There were 24 empty shells. There were two floating cages with 50 oysters/cage - - I just scrubbed the marine growth off the outside of those cages. I took 50 oysters home for eating. I returned to Greenport at noon.

Total 2012 oysters living into 2013 season: 520. (Expected 2013 oysters spats: 1000)

2 hours of labor + 2x :30 minutes travel time = 3 hours.

If I value my labor at $20/hr, then $60/520 = ~$0.12/oyster invested in this maintenance cycle.

Removing my travel time, 4.33 oysters received one minute of my attention (=520/120).

Assuming no improvement in my work flow, 50,000 oysters would require 11,547 minutes (=50000/4.33) of maintenance that equals ~192 hours aka 2.5 weeks of service. This an on-the-cuff reality check of my thoughts to nurture a large number of the bivalves.

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