Ask any Apalachicola Bay oysterman if things have returned to normal since the oil spill and the likely answer will be "yes." There's always a "but," though. And for those tonging Apalachicola Bay, the big issues are a lack of both oysters and consumers.
"It's pretty scrappy out there," said Taunya James, president of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association, about the winter bars.
James said the bars, which were opened by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were picked clean this summer as everyone scrambled to get what they could before oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster arrived.
That oil never came, and when the summer bars closed Aug. 31, oystermen were left with what they could find, which James said was often too small to take.
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