NANTICOKE, MARYLAND — Maryland’s 2025 oyster list is finished. The 2040 list is not. The revised Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, adopted in December 2025, commits the states to restore or conserve at least 2,000 more acres of reef. Next named sanctuary-scale waters include the Nanticoke, Herring Bay, and Hoopers Strait. Eastern Bay is a separate multi-use planting project, not that sanctuary-scale list, even though the August 11 DNR release names it in the same paragraph.

Ferry Cove Shellfish’s hatchery is at 21770 Lowes Wharf Road, Sherwood, MD 21665 — Sherwood, not St. Michaels — per Maryland’s Best and the nonprofit’s GuideStar profile. In a January 2026 Baltimore Magazine profile, Talbot Watermen Association president Jeff Harrison spoke to why the hatchery exists, not where it sits: “Ferry Cove was born out of the realization that Horn Point couldn’t keep up.” Talbot’s June Choptank plant of 20 million spat-on-shell is the public-bar version of the same bet: seed that can be harvested later, credits for nitrogen pulled out of the water, a paycheck for a working boat. Sanctuary acres do not feed a family. Public bars can.

Eastern Bay is also where ShoreRivers keeps failing swim sites. Planting oysters there without cutting the load from land is how you get a reef that looks good on a map and a creek you still would not put a child in. A statewide acre target does not erase a failed creek.