Coffin Bay oysters: What makes these South Australian oysters special?

A combination of plentiful food and a bottleneck caused by a sandbar makes South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula ideal for farming Coffin Bay oysters.

Coffin Bay, near shark cage diving and koala-spotting hub Port Lincoln on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, is renowned for its high quality Coffin Bay oysters. Due to a few handy quirks of geography, Coffin Bay has near-perfect conditions for farming them.

Plankton is washed right across the Great Australian Bight, but a narrow gap created by a large, protruding sandbar creates something of a bottleneck. As the tides wash in and out, the food Coffin Bay oysters feast on gets logjammed in the sheltered area behind the sandbar.

Surprisingly little of the farming process is done at sea. The real grunt work goes in at Coffin Bay’s oyster sheds, a seven hour drive from Adelaide.

Visiting the Coffin Bay oyster farms

Outside Pure Coffin Bay Oysters are the baskets that the oysters are raised in. Owner Chris Hank explains why they’re on a liftable line-based system. “They’re intertidal,” he says. “They like being in and out of the water.”

It also helps in terms of longevity. The more practice the oysters get surviving out of the water, the longer they’re going to stay fresh when taken out for the last time and put on the refrigerated trucks for transportation across the country.

Coffin Bay oyster farming

But it’s not simply a case of plonking them in a basket, lifting them up a few times, and waiting. The farming process involves a surprising amount of meddling.

“They’re in and out of here about six times over the course of 18 months,” says Chris. “We put them in a clean basket, and there need to be fewer in each basket as they get bigger. There also need to be bigger gaps in the basket mesh.”

“They need sorting by size too. If small ones are put in with bigger ones, the bigger ones take all the food, just like with any creature. So they need to be in baskets with oysters that are roughly the same size.”

Coffin Bay oyster prices

When you can buy a dozen for under $10, Coffin Bay is an oyster-lover’s dream destination. Experience Coffin Bay offers oyster farm tours, taking in the waterways on a boat, for from $75. Hire a car from Port Lincoln Airport if going it alone. That’ll allow you to visit Whalers Way as well.

Elsewhere in Australia, oysters are about producing pearls rather than eating. The Willie Creek pearl farm near Broome in Western Australia is a good place to learn about the pearling industry.