Oysterman’s body recovered from bay

APALACHICOLA - The body of an oysterman was recovered this afternoon in Apalachicola Bay about a mile east from where his small boat went down Monday morning in a thunderstorm.

Capt. Chester Creamer, with the Franklin County Sheriff’s office, said a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission helicopter spotted the body about 2:30 p.m.

Law enforcement officials aboard the sheriff’s watercraft, and one from the Wewahitchka Search and Rescue Team., retrieved the body from the body.

The man was identified as Brandon Wayne "Bruno" Creamer, 21, of Eastpoint. Distraught family members were on the shoreline, awaiting the news they expected would be grim.

Oystermen, together with law enforcement vessels, scoured the area on the northwest side of Bird Island, west of the St. George Island bridge, where an oystering vessel sank with two aboard in bad weather at about 8 a.m. Monday.

Eastpoint resident Billie Murray, 18, was picked up within minutes by another boat in the vicinity, and she was taken to Weems Memorial Hospital, treated and released. A sheriff’s deputy on the bridge at the time of the mishap said Brandon Creamer clung to oyster tongs for a time, before the swift current pulled him beneath the waves.

Shrimp boats worked Monday night dragging the sea floor, and nine divers from an interagency FWC team worked this morning in the area near where Creamer had gone in.