In the beginning people were a little wary of the fact that we were closing it, but if we didn’t do anything there would be nothing left.”

RICK SMITH

Two years after the town reduced the allowable daily catch from three bushels to two and a year after a crucial East Branch oystering ground closed completely, divers from the state found encouraging signs on the river bottom recently: Promising new growth.

The grounds in question, a roughly 10-acre patch running north from Hix Bridge to Doctor’s Point, are a well-known old time oyster hotspot.

But two to three seasons ago, oystermen started noticing that it was taking longer and longer to get their daily quota — “last lear you got your limit in two and a half, three hours,” shellfish advisory board member Ronald Savaria said in January 2024. “This year, it’s taking about five hours. So it seems to be getting depleted.”

Members of advisory board requested, and select board members agreed to, a reduction in the daily catch to take some pressure off the river’s oyster beds. They followed that up in 2025 with a closure of the area entirely.

“The goal was to study it” during the closure and figure out what the biomass was, deputy harbormaster Rick Smith said this week.

Smith, who is overseeing another project to seed new oyster beds in the lower east branch, recently contacted the state’s division of marine fisheries and asked for help determining the health of the closed question. The state responded earlier this month by sending down four divers and two marine biologists who went out to the site on a harbormaster boat and another loaned out by the Westport River Watershed Alliance.

The results? Promising.

“We haven’t gotten data back yet but we are finding spat (young oysters) which is telling us that they are reproducing,” Smith said. “We don’t know what rate they’re producing at right now, and if there’s enough to sustain the fishery — we’re going to have to sit on that for a while. But it was a very successful day — we did find a number of oysters with all different size spat.”

It’s still well short of anything that could lead Westport officials to re-open the oyster grounds. But Smith said that the goal is to open the fishery back up once it’s safe and sustainable to do so — “and we’ve confirmed it now that there is spat attaching up there, and hopefully with the addition of the reefs we’re working on” to the south, “that will help rebuild the fishery.”

Smith estimates that it could be another year or two of study to determine what should be done with the closed section, and while he knows the closure hasn’t been great for those who once fished in the closed waters, he’s confident that those displaced shellfishermen know Westport is trying to think long-term.

“In the beginning people were a little wary of the fact that we were closing it, but if we didn’t do anything there would be nothing left.”