PCSGA Tidings

By Steve Myrick
Pub­lished: Jan­u­ary 21, 2010

They come from a long line of fish­ing fam­i­lies. They still fish the tra­di­tional under­wa­ter troughs and canyons, with the tra­di­tional gear. But they are watch­ing the indus­try strug­gle. As quo­tas are low­ered, and fish­ing days are reduced, it gets harder and harder to make a liv­ing the way their fathers and grand­fa­thers did. The fish­ing her­itage in Men­emsha is in dan­ger of slip­ping away.

Alec Gale and Tim Brod­er­ick get ready to move the “socks” out to sea. Seed mus­sels are poured into the socks, where they grow to mar­ket size. Pho­tos cour­tesy of Scott Lindell

But like any good busi­ness­men, Alec Gale and Tim Brod­er­ick keep their eyes open for oppor­tu­nity, for ways to adapt from a strug­gling seg­ment of the fish­ing indus­try to one that is grow­ing. So even though it is a lot of work, and a lot of risk, when the chance came to learn to grow and har­vest mus­sels, they jumped at the opportunity.

“We’ve been look­ing for exper­i­men­tal fish­eries for a while,” said Mr. Gale. “We’ve been look­ing for other ways to make it on the water. The mus­sels came up about three years ago. It just clicked. They grow like weeds out there.”

“Here we go on aqua­cul­ture,” Mr. Brod­er­ick said. “Tak­ing a chance on some­thing like this, I think it’s worth it. The end result could really look toward the future.”

While it is still in the exper­i­men­tal stage, mus­sels are grow­ing right now off Chilmark’s north shore, with other areas set aside off West Tis­bury, and Aquin­nah. By mid­sum­mer, the two men expect to be har­vest­ing the blue mol­lusks to sup­ply local restau­rants and seafood wholesalers.

The crew deploys a large anchor, part of the sys­tem of sub­merged lines that are sus­pended above the bot­tom by buoys.

Help­ing hand

The town of Chilmark, and just about every­body in it, wants a sus­tain­able fish­ing indus­try to sur­vive. In order to fish, the two men needed some space on the Men­emsha har­bor water­front, to store gear and land their catch. The har­bor­front lots are leased by the town at a nom­i­nal fee, and only for com­mer­cial fish­ing uses. They rarely change hands. Mr. Brod­er­ick made a pro­posal to the select­men that started the wheels rolling. There was a joint meet­ing of select­men and the parks and recre­ation com­mit­tee. Then Louis Larsen stepped for­ward. He offered to give up his lease on a water­front lot, so the town could rent it to Mr. Gale and Mr. Broderick.

“We’re very psy­ched about how it went,” Mr. Gale said. “We’d like to thank Louis Larsen.”

“Mr. Larsen made a good ges­ture,” said Tim Car­roll, the town’s exec­u­tive sec­re­tary. The two men now have a base to work from, and the town has moved a step for­ward in its efforts to pre­serve the fish­ing industry.

“It’s nice to see us try­ing new things,” Mr. Car­roll said. “Any­thing that increases the com­mer­cial fish­ing fleet in Men­emsha is a good thing for us. It’s really good news for Men­emsha to have another active fish­ing boat, and a viable fishery.”

Mus­sel seed, at first sus­pended in bags from the hor­i­zon­tal lines shown in this sketch, will ulti­mately grow to matu­rity in clus­ters along the ver­ti­cal lines.

Sci­ence and work

The mus­sel farm­ing oper­a­tion began as a part­ner­ship of researchers, gov­ern­ment, and fish­er­men. Rick Kar­ney of the Martha’s Vine­yard Shell­fish Group orches­trated the per­mit­ting and plan­ning here on the Island. Scott Lin­dell, direc­tor of the sci­en­tific aqua­cul­ture pro­gram at the Marine Bio­log­i­cal Lab­o­ra­tory in Woods Hole, won grants to study how well mus­sels would grow in south­ern New Eng­land waters.

The exper­i­ment was also designed to test whether pea crabs, a mus­sel par­a­site, would affect pro­duc­tion. The sci­ence is not yet com­plete, but the group is able to make some conclusions.

“To our delight, the mus­sels grew very well,” Mr. Lin­dell said. “We think we can get them to mar­ket in 10 to 12 months.”

Accord­ing to Mr. Lin­dell, 80 per­cent of the mus­sels that Amer­i­cans con­sume come from Canada, Europe, even New Zealand. The bulk of those come from Prince Edward Island, where it takes two years to grow a mus­sel to mar­ket size.

“We can grow mus­sels twice as fast here in south­ern New Eng­land than they can in Prince Edward Island. We have large domes­tic mar­kets here. We should be able to be beat them not just on pro­duc­tion costs, but on dis­tri­b­u­tion,” Mr. Lin­dell explained.

The study of pea crabs was also good news. So far there has been no sig­nif­i­cant infestation.

Mr. Gale and Mr. Brod­er­ick are pour­ing sweat equity into the project. They set lines, man­age gear, and col­lect sam­ples for the sci­en­tists. They don’t get paid for their time, but they receive some reim­burse­ment for the use of their boats. Each day on the mus­sel project means a day away from fish­ing and a sig­nif­i­cant loss of income. In return for their effort, when the exper­i­ments are fin­ished, they will inherit the gear and the mus­sels that are grow­ing on the under­wa­ter lines.

How it works

The sys­tem used at the mus­sel farm was devel­oped at the Uni­ver­sity of New Hamp­shire. It is designed to avoid gear and turf con­flicts while pro­vid­ing opti­mum growth con­di­tions for the blue mus­sel. On the sur­face, all that is vis­i­ble of the sys­tem are three buoys, two of them teth­ered to an anchor and one attached to the cen­ter point of the “back­bone” for rais­ing it to the surface.

A long­line is sus­pended between lines attached to two buoys set 600 feet apart. The long­line is anchored at each end and sus­pended by sub­mersible floats at mid-depth, about 40 feet below the sur­face in the Vine­yard version.

The long­line acts as a back­bone for a series of looped grow-out “socks.” Seed mus­sels are poured inside the socks, the out­side of the sock dete­ri­o­rates, and the mus­sels cling to the plas­tic rope inside the sock. The fish­er­men and the sci­en­tists are work­ing now to deter­mine the opti­mum amount of seed mus­sels to stock inside each sock. Mr. Lin­dell esti­mates that 10,000 pounds of mus­sels can be grown on each line, and there is room in the des­ig­nated area to anchor more than 30 lines. There are two lines set up right now.

“They grow like crazy, and they feed them­selves,” Mr. Brod­er­ick said. “They are grow­ing unbe­liev­ably fast. They look very healthy.”

The aqua­cul­ture project turns the risky equa­tion of fish­ing upside down. Tra­di­tion­ally fish­er­men invest a lot of time and equip­ment to ven­ture out and hope they net a good catch. The pro­duc­tion can range from an empty hold to a full hold. In mus­sel farm­ing, if the fish­er­men can get the pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing right, then they can sim­ply take orders for a cer­tain amount, then go out and har­vest them.

“This could really be it for us,” Mr. Brod­er­ick said. “It’s not a ques­tion of ‘are the fish com­ing back this year, is there going to be an early squid run, are we going to lose our right to com­mer­cial fish­ing.’ The mus­sel thing, the poten­tial is huge.”