Nurtured by Bernie Connell for almost a decade, the mollusc now weighs more than 3kg and is about to enter the record books
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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.
