Tim Levesque, who has been fishing since he was 18, is diversifying. Formerly, he made a living using his 58-foot steel dragger THUNDER BAY for groundfishing, but since the new rules allow him just 65 days fishing a year, he’s had to branch out to be able to keep the boat. He has taken on two new ventures: tending a mussel raft as a contract grower for Great Eastern Mussel Farms (GEM) and chartering THUNDER BAY at $700 a day to do the heavy work for other contract growers.
One of Levesque’s charter jobs is using his net reel to help growers install predator nets, one on each side of their new rafts. These are necessary to keep eider ducks from feasting on the mussels. “For me it’s second nature to be a ‘twine man,'” Levesque says, “but the nets are puzzling to some people.” Installing them, he says, can be tricky, explaining that “when you install them, you have to make sure they’re hanging just right and sew the corners so the ducks can’t sneak in. When I first set the nets on my raft, I had in mind to show the others how you do it, but then I went back and discovered mine still weren’t set right. It’s been a learning experience.”
At least once a year, growers need to pull and clean the nets, which by that time have become clogged with marine organisms. “They’re really heavy once seed and other seaweed growth gets on them,” Levesque says. “If a person doesn’t have heavy equipment to pull them, they have to be pulled once a week to keep them from collecting so much weight.” When Levesque pulls nets for a grower, they can be spread out on THUNDER BAY’s decks and he can make any necessary repairs. After they dry, the marine plants and animals can be shaken off, and then they are re-installed.
When the raft has been harvested after 14 to 18 months, Levesque stores seed the grower has bought in the fish hold of THUNDER BAY and brings it to the raft. If nets are pulled at the right time, when seed has attached but before the ducks have found it, he says it’s possible to collect as much as 1,000 pounds of seed from each net. Carter Newall, marine biologist for Great Eastern Mussel Farms, says the amount of seed collected depends on the raft’s location. Sometimes nets can provide as much as one-half the 15,000 pounds of seed needed for a raft. This amount of seed can produce 60,000 pounds of mature mussels.
Levesque and the grower use a sorter on board THUNDER BAY to sort seed from the nets and they use a socking machine he bought to wrap the seed with biodegradable cotton mesh around the 40-foot ropes that hang from the raft. On each raft the ropes add up to three miles in combined length.
Until recently, Levesque’s own raft, located off Lamoine Beach, was doing well even though it was under three feet of ice. He had seeded it about a year ago, and when he chipped through the ice in February, found that the mussels were thriving. However, March 26 brought a shock. After ice broke up near Trenton Bridge, a piece “about a mile wide” crashed into his and two other rafts. “The moorings got all dragged around and snarled up, and the raft is damaged,” Levesque said that night. “I was really shocked to see how screwed up things were.” He estimated it would take a week’s work to straighten it out and that he might have to re-seed the raft, which would cost an extra $5,000 and push harvesting forward a year.
Although discouraged, he said he planned to continue, adding more rafts when he gets a standard lease because he believes in the mussels’ quality and he believes they will grow well. “This is a good product,” he says. “Once we get the bugs out of the process, they’ll grow fast.
“It’s amazing how many people you can feed off such a small piece of ocean,” he said. “We’ve gotten 4,000 pounds of mussels in one day of harvesting from a six-by-six-foot square of raft. The product is so good, and our ocean is so fertile. It takes people in Nova Scotia two to three years to get product that we can grow in 14 months.”
Newall said later that GEM is working on adjustments to the rafts and various components of sites like wind and waves, especially if they are semi-exposed rather than sheltered. “We’re getting into more and more semi-exposed sites as we try to minimize the visual impact by siting at least 1,000 feet off shore,” he said. “Mussel raft culture is relatively new in the U.S.,” he added. “In Spain, there are 4,000 rafts producing 200,000 tons of mussels a year.”