Every so often, oyster farmer Bernie Connell comes across an unusually large specimen. He separates it from the rest of his crop, names it and lowers it back into the Clyde River at Batemans Bay, where he lets “tender love and care and good water” do the rest.
Now almost 10 years old, Jill – an oyster that caught his eye nine years ago – weighs 3.01kg. That makes Jill Australia’s – and potentially the world’s – heaviest oyster, after it beat Big Boppa, at 2.44kg, and Keithy, 2.4kg, to win the title at Australia’s biggest oyster competition at the Narooma oyster festival on the New South Wales south coast on Saturday.
“It was never in doubt,” laughs Connell, who has farmed oysters for 55 years and whose family has been in the business for 95 years. “But we never weighed her [beforehand]. The bloody scales were out of batteries.”
The competition drew eight entries from farms on the nearby Clyde and Shoalhaven river estuaries. To be eligible, oysters must be solo with no “piggyback” oysters joined to them, have minimal barnacles and “overgrowth” and be alive, with a vet checking for signs of life during the weigh-in.
It is the fifth time Connell has won the Australian title, and Jill is set to become the Australian Book of Records’ inaugural world’s heaviest oyster.
The newly introduced category comes after a five-year campaign by the festival board’s chair, Cath Peachey, who protested against the Guinness Book of World Records system that determines oyster size by length rather than weight. Connell’s oysters were not as long as the largest oyster record, set in 2013 by a Danish oyster that clocked in at 35.5cm and 1.62kg, despite weighing significantly more.
“Their measure is length, which we thought was a bit naff, and they don’t exclude oysters that piggyback, so we put in a protest but it didn’t move [the judges],” Peachey says.
Instead, after going through the formalities, the Australian Book of Records’ judges will likely bestow the record for world’s largest oyster by weight to Jill.
“I’m pretty stoked,” says Connell. “It’s an achievement all right – Cath persevered and got it, we owe it all to her.”
Big Boppa, in second place, was also from the Connell farm, and Keithy, in third spot, was grown by Connell’s son, a fourth-generation oyster farmer. Joint fourth place went to oysters Nick and Georgie, both weighing 2.18kg.
Connell bought Jill from a hatchery in Tasmania when the juvenile was the size of a match head. After relocating the baby oysters to his farm on the Clyde, he usually sells them when they are 10 months old, but occasionally finds a mollusc that is too promising to let go.
“You work on the oysters all year round and you come across one that is twice the size as the rest so you put it aside,” he says. “They’re what you call a fast grower.”
Connell knows of an oyster that reached 23 years in age and has no reason to think Jill – which has gained nearly 300g in the past year alone – won’t keep growing.
“I don’t know what he’s been feeding it,” Peachey says. “I don’t know if we’ve got a doping scandal coming up.”
But the secret to Jill’s size, says Connell, is the purity of the Clyde’s water and the health of its algae. Pacific oysters eat 18 kinds of algae, feeding “all the time”, while the smaller native Sydney rock oysters feed on just three algae.
Jill, like Big Boppa and Keithy, is very much a pet. “You wouldn’t eat her,” Connell says. “She’s been too good to us. One of the family.” But there is a culinary market for giant oysters, says Peachey. Pacific oysters weighing 1-2kg were sold for $125 each at the festival, while Connell has been told a world record-holder may fetch up to $100,000 in China or Japan.
(They may be large, but Pacific oysters pale in comparison to the flavour of Sydney rock oysters, both Connell and Peachey say.)
For now, Jill is back in home waters, and Connell is undecided as to whether he will enter for a sixth year, or step aside for the next generation. And, as the competition gains popularity, Peachey is considering introducing a cash incentive.
“Maybe that will bring some big oysters out of the woodwork – or out of the water, more to the point.”
