OYSTER BAY, Fla. — Cainnon Gregg felt a wave of anxiety at the prospect of seeing how much damage his oyster farm had sustained from Hurricane Michael’s fierce winds and 14-foot storm surge.

Climbing on his boat last week to venture out to his oyster farm in a spring-fed bay, he felt like he was going to throw up. But he tossed some beers in a cooler and pushed the boat forward, weaving through debris like staircases and satellite dishes that Hurricane Michael had haphazardly tossed into the warm coastal waters here. As a breeze tempered a hot sun on the cloudless day, Gregg felt ready to celebrate surviving the storm — or to mourn what it had done to his last two years of work and the 200,000 oysters he had growing in the bay.

His anxiety-laced nausea lifted when he saw his lines of oyster bags tangled like spaghetti on the section of the bay he leased from the Florida government. It wasn't all gone.

Cainnon Gregg, who operates Pelican Oyster Company, pulls a line holding his oyster bags. Mariana Keller / NBC News

But then he checked the bags.

“I don’t know what happened to them, but I’m experiencing a lot of death in these oysters and bags of oysters that I was going to sell this week,” said Gregg, 30, who operates Pelican Oyster Company. He poured out a pile of shells. The hollow sound of their clatter indicated the absence of meat and a complete loss.

The operations in this part of Florida are relatively new. The oyster farming industry first started here in 2013, when the state changed the regulations around its aquaculture leases. In recent years, single farms have begun to grow as many as a million of the mollusks, and the bay here now makes up nearly a tenth of the state’s farmed oysters.

Oyster farmers start by buying seed, or baby oysters, that has been grown in controlled labs. They then distribute the seed in netted bags that float in the ocean, where the oysters mature over the course of nine to 12 months. Farmers like Gregg then heft the bags up and remove the ready-to-eat oysters. Except this year, the nets brought up more shells than marketable mollusks.

After the brutal winds and rain of Hurricane Michael struck nearly two weeks ago, some of the 38 operators who farm here estimated losses ranging from 60 to 90 percent of their crop.

Cainnon Gregg holds dead oysters. Mariana Keller / NBC News

Now these farmers said they are wondering if they can continue after the storm ravaged the region and killed 39 people. The storm razed entire towns on the coast, and residents continue to live without power, running water, sewer and cell service.

As many here begin to rebuild, the oyster farmers said that they are constantly reminded that the prospect of another hurricane looms in their future.

“We had to all get together after the storm and decide: Are we going to dump some more money back out here and keep moving forward or just call it quits, go back to welding?” said Scott Lawrence, who cashed in his retirement fund earned from welding to join some partners in this new industry.

Lawrence, 28, who is one of the partners in L&W Oyster, watched as a shirtless colleague sprayed out one of their 200 muddied and debris-strewn cages, each holding more than 3,000 oysters that he hypothesized had choked to death on the seafloor from dirt and refuse.

“I think we might fare the same, buying scratch-off tickets, to be honest with you,” he added.

The advent of oyster farming in the Gulf

The oyster farming industry developed after Florida’s oyster fisheries struggled in recent years. There were many reasons for the decline of the traditional industry, including over-harvesting naturally occurring oysters, pollutants from the BP oil spill, and Georgia and Florida debating over water rights that flow into Apalachicola Bay. The region once produced 90 percent of Florida’s oysters and 10 percent of the nation’s supply, according to the governor’s office, and the practice of harvesting mirrored fishing more than farming.