If you want a cushy job and some easy money, you’d better not raise oysters.
Take it from Tim Dowling, who with son Jesse has launched Port Clyde Oyster Company, farming oysters on a nearby lease.
This winter, the Dowlings were building a porch on a summer resident’s bungalow to bring in a few extra dollars. Tim Dowling’s wife, Jean, commutes from their Martinsville home to her job as a midwife in Lewiston. Leasing an area on local waters that was once held by the Island Institute. Raising oysters — a multi-year proposition — also raises the hackles of coastal residents, who often don’t want to see, or hear, commercial aquaculture activity.
The Dowlings didn’t start out with oysters, but it seems a logical thing to be doing now, despite hardships. Tim Dowling was at one time in a partnership with Phyllis Wyeth — wife of artist Jamie Wyeth — who has a Port Clyde aquaculture operation. In the summertime, he managed the Institute’s lease, a project to help people get started in the business. He did that for three years. “I was paid in oysters, instead of money. From there, I got my own lease, and started a business. I do it a little differently than other people because my site is very muddy, and I can’t put my oysters on the bottom. So I’ve developed this way of using cages,” he said.
“I didn’t really invent it. There were other people using the cages.” Now in his second year of managing his own lease, he said good-humoredly that “I haven’t seen any money in it.”
“The only way you can really get into it is to have work on the side, or some big benefactor,” he said, as Jesse hammered nails on the porch. “It’s even worse than land farming, because it takes three years.”
The initial Wyeth and Institute leases raised the ire of waterfront land owners, as has happened up and down the coast. “It was a big fiasco,” Dowling said. Both Wyeth and Dowling (and the Institute) moved out of that particular area. Dowling said shore residents, many of whom are wealthy and seasonal, object to the aesthetics of aquaculture. But “how it looks” is not legal grounds to oppose it, so landowners complained about access and other issues.
Dowling said some waterfront owners confuse salmon farming and shellfish aquaculture, which are in his opinion quite different. Shellfish farming is benign, he said. He attended the recent hearing on legislation to put a moratorium on aquaculture leases, a bill opposed by just about every fish farmer.
“One of the provisions (of the proposed bill) was municipal control over these lease sites. And whereas we would like to see some municipal involvement, we don’t want to see them make the decisions, because harbormasters are politically influenced by riparian owners, by taxpayers in the town. They could effectively shut aquaculture off in their town. And it’s state water. Our contention is that it’s state submerged lands. So that’s a battle that’s going to be fought in the next couple of years.”
Dowling said he understands opposition to leases. “You paid $500,000 for a lot, and another $500,000 for a house, and all of a sudden there is an aquaculture lease in front of your house, you’re going to be upset. I totally sympathize with that. It has to be settled in some fair way, because that is public property out there. It’s the same thing as if you had a million dollar piece of property in some farm country, and all of a sudden the farmer’s son across the street decided, `I’m putting up barn, and I’m having cows here.’ And you’re going to have flies, and you’re going to have a smell, and tractors in front of your house. That’s where you bought it. These people bought property on working waterfront.”
“I think there is compromise to be had, though. We’re willing to compromise but we’re not willing to give the whole thing up. I want to do this as a living, and there is no other place for me to go. I can’t go out to sea and do this. I need these warm waters inside here.”
Running a pressure washer at a lease site is about like running a lawn mower, he said. You can hear lawn mowers all around the cove. Dowling’s lease has consisted — during the warmer months — of an acre or two of floating bags. You can’t boat through them, but you can boat around them. “It’s not that obtrusive,” he maintains. Even so, he will switch to suspended three-foot square wire cages that will not be visible from shore.
Dowling is still in the first year of a three-year experimental lease. He is applying for a regular commercial lease from the state. In the early 1990s, he fished sea urchins, and saw overfishing taking place. He earned a University of Maine master’s degree, based on farming urchins. As he finished the degree, a moratorium was enacted on raising urchins. He switched to oysters, which he sees as a sustainable enterprise.
A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, Dowling took a strong interest in the sea when he attended St. Francis College in Biddeford, and when his family vacationed on Cape Cod. He majored in biology, but there weren’t many jobs in that field. “So I decided to go build a boat, and I didn’t know how to built a boat. So I found that boat school (in Lubec) and that was the experience of a lifetime.” It led, eventually, to construction of a 45-foot Hereschoff-design ketch, aboard which his family lived, sailing to Florida and back. Jesse Dowling would like to sail her again sometime.
“Lubec was great,” he said, once the fog lifted after the first month. “Fifty students crowded in there. All we did was talk boats, build boats and draw boats for an entire year.” That was 27 years ago, but Dowling said it hasn’t changed much. “It’s just a lost continent down there.”
Today, Dowling has at least 150,000 oysters that are near market size. He started with 400,000 young “spat” last year, and some are mid-sized. He estimates he has lost 150,000, partly due to weather, partly to experiments with different gear and techniques. “Now we think we have pretty good handle on it, so hopefully these next 400,000 will fare better, with less mortality.”
Oysters are marketed in three sizes, from petite (up to two and one-half inches), regular (two and one half to three and one-half), and then the big ones (over three and one-half inches). By August he expects half his crop to go to market; by November the rest of it.
Father and son had originally called their venture Mosquito Harbor Farm, but changed the name to Port Clyde after hearing that “Mosquito” didn’t quite conjure the image they want.
Meanwhile, if you look out from shore at the Dowling lease, near Ten Pound Island, all you will see are white buoys.
