Tag Archives: May River
Human waste may end oyster harvesting on the May River. Can Bluffton clean it up?
Larry Toomer’s business depends on the May River. On a cold January morning, he stood on the boat ramp outside the Bluffton Oyster Co. with a paper cup of steaming gas station coffee in hand. A lifetime of wrestling shrimping nets has left him with a sturdy build. His rose-colored face is in stark contrast with his ghost-white hair. Behind him, dense clouds of powdery fog swallowed the river, giving his shrimp trawler the illusion of flight. The well-worn ship is easily two stories tall. “Daddy’s Girls” is painted in black-and-blue block lettering on the side. Named for his three daughters, the trawler has become the unofficial town seal. When a home is on a septic system, he said, everything that is flushed down the drain goes into a tank below the house. The solids are filtered out and held in the tank. The liquids go into a drain field below. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Toomer said, elaborating on the path of human excrement. “Every day, right out the toilet.” >click to read< 15:41
Bluffton has the last hand-shucking oyster house in SC; owner wants to ‘keep it alive’
A new video shows viewers a Lowcountry maritime tradition that hasn’t changed in more than a century. The video, with sweeping views from high above the May River, puts a spotlight on traditional oyster farming with the Bluffton Oyster Company, reported to be the last hand-shucking oyster house in South Carolina.”Basically what we’re doing now is the exact same methods that were done back in the early 1900s when there were 25 or 30 almost identical places doing the same thing,” the business’ owner Larry Toomer, also Bluffton’s mayor pro tempore, says. Watch the video >click to read<17:23
