Joe Larrabee says his friends have designated him as their guinea pig in the great mussel raft experiment. “They’re interested,” says Larrabee, “but they’re watching to see how this turns out for me.” He has been working three rafts under contract with Great Eastern Mussel Farms (GEM) in Tenants Harbor, a venture he began two years ago.
A native of the Belfast area, Larrabee, who is 54 and dug clams for 14 years, had decided he was too old for clamming and wanted to find a different way to make a living. He bought a skidder and worked in the woods for five years, but says there were too many people to deal with and the whole process was too frustrating. And besides, he missed the water.
When he attended a meeting about grant money available for fishermen to be a part of Great Eastern Mussel Farms’ mussel raft culture program, he came away ready to give it a try. “I’d seen guys raise mussels in the waters off Bayside,” he says. “They used lines hanging from buoys. The mussels grew well, but anytime a storm came up, the waves would knock them off. Carter Newall [farms manager and marine biologist at GEM] told me at Great Eastern, they knew how to keep them on.”
Mark Peterson, Mussel Raft Aquaculture Program Manager at GEM, says the company, which has been utilizing Dutch-style bottom mussel cultivation, started to experiment with Spanish-style mussel raft culture about five years ago because it couldn’t produce enough mussels to satisfy the increasing demand. Raft cultivation produces a plumper, heavier mussel, which GEM is marketing as “Choice Cultured Mussels,” selling them to high-end markets and restaurants. In 2000, the company received grants and loans from the Maine Department of Agriculture and Maine Science and Technology Foundation to launch its contract grower program. Money went to eight fishermen, Larrabee included, so they could purchase a “start-up” raft.
GEM finances rafts for its contract growers through a GEM subsidiary aquaculture leasing company. The company buys the 40- by 40-foot rafts, worth about $37,000, from Maine Aquaculture Equipment Co., formed by Dan Gerry, owner of Newport Industrial Fabrication near Bangor. Rope used on the rafts comes from Crowe Rope in Winslow and nine-inch plastic pegs, spaced along the rope every foot to keep the mussels attached, are made by a company in Rockland.
Newall helps beginning contract growers seed their rafts and provides technical support on all matters, such as installing predator nets around the rafts to keep eider ducks from eating the crop (one duck can eat 10 pounds of mussels a day; if it is eating seed, that can equal 80 to 100 pounds of mature mussels). Newall also helps them find solutions for problems that come up. Last New Years, when a fierce storm moved Larrabee’s reinforced concrete block moorings, Newall recommended and GEM helped him finance mooring tension buoys and six 1700-pound steel anchors, which have 20 times their holding power.
In 14 to 18 months, raft mussels are ready for harvest. When GEM needs the product (the mussels are pre-sold) it visits the site with the 30-ton barge, MUMBLES, which the company had built by Vic Levesque at Bar Harbor Marine to service mussel rafts. A crane is used to pull the mussel-laden ropes, and they are laid on the deck and stripped. Mussels are shoveled onto a conveyer belt that takes them to a hopper, where they enter sorting, debearding and bagging equipment. Bagged mussels are taken back to GEM for final packaging and distribution to foodservice markets. Broken or defective mussels end up in Coast of Maine compost and potting soil.
Contract growers agree to sell their mussels exclusively to GEM until their rafts, which should last 20 to 25 years, are paid for. A portion of the value of each bushel of mussels in applied towards the loan for the rafts. The grower receives the remaining money to help with other expenses such as insuring the rafts, pulling nets for cleaning, reseeding and other equipment, and to provide income. Larrabee estimates it will take about 6,000 bushels of mussels over about five to seven years to pay off his first three rafts. He thinks that this year he will break even, and then he will start making a profit. To support himself during the period when he hasn’t been making money from the mussels, he has been doing odd jobs.
During the past month, MUMBLES has been harvesting mussels from the raft Larrabee seeded first. Weighed down by the mature mussels clinging to the 400 40-foot ropes suspended from the cross beams, it sits lower in the water than the other two rafts. Larrabee says the harvest has been good, but not quite as good as he had hoped – about 800 bushels instead of 1,200. He anticipated this loss, he says, when eider ducks ate some of the seed before he could install predator nets.
After harvesting is completed and the migrating ducks are gone, Larrabee will contract with Tim Levesque to have Levesque’s dragger THUNDER BAY pull the net, shake off mussel seed, sort and sock it, re-seed the raft and replace the nets. If Larrabee needs additional seed, he buys it. Because hiring THUNDER BAY involves extra expense, Larrabee is having a barge built and plans to buy equipment for sorting and socking, and he also anticipates finding a site to grow his own seed. He says those measures could save him $5,000 a year.
Once the rafts are paid off and belong to Larrabee, he is no longer obligated to sell his mussels to Great Eastern, but he says as long as the company continues to give him a fair price, he will maintain the association. According to Peterson, Great Eastern hopes growers will continue to supply them with the raft-cultured mussels. Presently, about 10 growers are working approximately 15 contract rafts, and others are just beginning the process. Still others own their own rafts and work independently.
Contract growers include several mussel draggers, a groundfisherman, a couple of urchin divers who also work on salmon farms, one person who works in a paper mill and dives for scallops and a seafood dealer. “Each of them,” says Peterson, “wanted to find a way to supplement their income so they could continue to do whatever they were doing before. Some are paying off boats.” Since the Fishermen’s Forum in March, where a program on mussel raft culture was presented and Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center organized a drawing for a 20- by 20-foot raft, with components donated by Newport Industrial Fabricators, Maine Aquaculture Equipment Co. and GEM, several more people have expressed interest. Ray Carn, a lobsterman from Harpswell, won the raft. Newall says Carn plans to cover it with plywood to store traps on top of it in addition to raising mussels.
Peterson says the smaller size raft is useful for introducing fishermen to mussel raft culture and can be utilized with the new limited-purpose aquaculture license (much easier to obtain than a three-year experimental aquaculture lease) and can be renewed annually. “It’s a good way for someone who has a little bit of time to get into raft culture, and also, to test a site,” he noted.
Larrabee’s rafts are located on an experimental lease site at Kellys Cove in Bayside. He and other raft contract growers received help from Peterson in going through the lengthy lease application process. Since his lease runs out in April, 2004, Larrabee is applying for a standard (10-year) lease for his site, which he hopes to expand to have room for three more rafts.
He has encountered resistance to the site, not from the over 200 lobstermen who fish in the area, but from Bayside’s summer colony, a literally tightly knit community with houses only a few feet apart lining the waterfront and much of the village. Some of the summer residents who own sailboats have complained that Larrabee’s three rafts, located 1,500 feet off shore in 62 feet of water south of the village pier, cause them navigational difficulties.
Public access is no longer available in Bayside, and if Larrabee needs to do something at the site, he puts in a skiff in Belfast. “Most of the time there’s nothing to do,” he says. “I use binoculars to scope it out from the shore, especially after a storm.”
GEM, founded in 1978 by “Chip” Davison and Frank Simon under the tutelage of the late Ed Myers, the “grandfather of mussel farming in Maine,” is the largest mussel aquaculture operation in the U.S. It anticipates selling about 7 million pounds of mussels this year. The company continues to conduct extensive research on all aspects of mussel culture and marketing. With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Newall, aided by John Richardson at Alden Research Lab in Massachusetts, has developed “The Aquaculture Expert System,” which helps contract growers find a suitable site for their rafts. The program also works out the optimum way to arrange the rafts on the site to minimize fouling and maximize the flow of nutrients and oxygen to all of the mussels. (Mussels receive all their food from plankton in the water and thus help control plankton blooms. Newall says the two million mussels on a raft can filter about six million liters of water an hour.)
The growers have also taught GEM a thing or two, Newall says, telling about a huge carved eagle Larrabee put on a pole to loom over his rafts and scare away seagulls, which can keep the rafts in a dangerous state of slippery mess.
Davison, president of GEM, says the contract grower arrangement benefits GEM by providing a continuous supply of raft-grown mussels, and benefits fishermen by allowing them to follow their traditional path and stay on the water, doing what they are good at. “Great Eastern knows what’s going on around the world and can bring some of those technologies to Maine to help growers produce the highest quality product,” he says. “Their part is to adapt to their own little area. How you work in an area differs – animal predators, ice problems, wind. Each guy has to deal with that.
“Many fishermen don’t like to deal with marketing,” he adds. “We’re good at that. Some people are good on the water and others are good at going out and making the contacts.”
To view a slide show on mussel raft culture, visit