Fresh-caught lobsters will be frozen and shipped to market from a renovated seaside plant where granite was once quarried and loaded aboard schooners.
Kyle Murdock, head of the Sea Hag lobster processing plant in St. George, was confident in a late August interview that his new business would be up and running within a few days. His goal is to create a profitable local business, employing people from surrounding communities and building a strong market for Penobscot Bay lobstermen.
“I have faith it will work out,” said Murdock, who has already spent two years planning and organizing his business venture. He has obtained loans, received permits and convinced the local planning board and town officials that it’s a viable project. “A lot of my friends gave me a hard time about it. That gave me more motivation than anything else.” Besides confidence, Murdock has a complete business plan in place, and points to the advantage of his Long Cove location. Saltwater for cooling can be pumped directly from the cove through the plant, then discharged into the sea.
The site has the two most important things for a lobster processing facility, according to Murdock, “access for boats and access to water for the plant.” Discharged water will contain only “stuff that came out of the ocean getting washed back into the ocean,” he said. Other waste will be sent to Coast of Maine, a Downeast firm that turns it into organic compost.
A protected harbor, Long Cove was “flat calm during a hellacious gale,” he said. With a deepwater dock, lobstermen can off-load their catch directly from boat to plant. A large building on the site, the former mussel plant, has undergone a lot of repairs. In the past several years while the building was vacant, vandals shot out windows and discharged fire extinguishers indoors.
Equipped with three different freezing methods—brine, plate and blast—Sea Hag expects to process 60,000 to 100,000 pounds of lobster per week, including lobster tails and bagged lobster meat. A major distributor is prepared to handle Sea Hag’s product and supply New England restaurants, cruise ships and other food service customers.
Murdock, 23, grew up on Monhegan Island in a lobster-fishing family and worked as a sternman for a season. He left his studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute when he saw an opportunity to acquire the former Great Eastern Mussel plant, defunct since 2008, and do something worthwhile for the fishery and people whose livelihood depends on it. “There is no way I would’ve left WPI and a career if it was just for myself. I grew up in a real community. Everyone’s in it together,” he said, referring to Monhegan, where 12 lobstermen fish.
Helping the young entrepreneur, financially and otherwise, are his parents, John and Winnie Murdock. An industrial roofer, John St.Hilaire, is a major investor. Kyle Murdock is looking for more investors. Expenditures so far, including purchase of the foreclosed waterfront property, total more than $2 million.
Murdock owns just one percent of the property but holds title to 51 percent of the business.
Sea Hag is hiring and training workers, and Murdock said he is paying $9.50 per hour, more than other lobster processing plants pay and $2 above Maine’s minimum wage.
“Local people, they need the jobs,” said Janelle Pratt, a new employee at Sea Hag. “This area really needs it.”
Another new employee, Jason Scully of South Berwick, said “it could be a good thing for the community.” He fished two seasons on Monhegan.
Sandra Hume, a longtime lobster processing plant consultant from Prince Edward Island, said she is glad to be able to help Murdock get started. “I’ll give him a little boost and then retire again,” she quipped. “You learn to love the people [in the fishery]. At first you’re stressed, but by the end of the day, you can say, ‘We did it,’ and it’s a good feeling.”
Lobster prices bottomed out this summer at $1.50 per pound, the lowest price in decades. The decline involves several factors, but one of them is the fact that many Maine lobsters are processed in Canada, and those plants already had a glut of lobsters on hand.
Kyle’s father, John, a lobsterman, said Sea Hag “is just part of what the state needs for processing plants. It’s hard to market a product you’re sending to another country. You need to control the product.”
But while Canada may not be the best market for Maine lobster, it’s apparently the best place to find help setting up a plant. Besides Hume from Prince Edward Island, Murdock has contracted with Young’s Industrial Refrigeration of Newfoundland and Labrador, apparently the only business on the eastern seaboard that specializes in lobster processing plants.