Maine aquaculture farmers often bend over backwards to satisfy the desires of riparian landowners. They’ve muted colors, muffled engines, reduced the size of buoys, cut down the size of lease sites. Now, Babe Stanley and his son Shain are using their Yankee ingenuity to invent a way to get their mussel aquaculture rafts out of sight. They hope to sink the 40- by 40-foot rafts 10 feet underwater to take them out of the way of sailboat racers from Sorrento, and at the same time, protect them from the battering they could receive from wind and waves at their highly exposed site south of Bean Island in Frenchman’s Bay.
Babe Stanley, now 66, was given five lobster traps by his grandfather when he was 10 years old and has been fishing ever since. Several years ago, he learned about the 180-hour course given by Maine Aquaculture Technology Institute, which teaches people about every aspect of shellfish aquaculture, from farming techniques to choosing and applying for a lease site. He and Shain, who drags for scallops off the coast of Cape Cod and works as a minder for a diver in Maine, completed the course two years ago. Then they applied for a 10-acre lease to raise mussels and scallops.
“Looking at the future, you don’t know what will happen with lobstering,” Babe Stanley says. “And there aren’t that many scallops on the coast any more. We just figured we would get a couple more baskets to put our eggs in.”
The Stanleys, whose fishing heritage goes back several generations, are the sort of resourceful people who have no need for big suppliers like Home Depot, VIP or Wal-Mart. If they want a part, a piece of pipe or a fitting, generally they can find it in one of their yards in something they have salvaged over the years.
Before starting the raft project, they focused their talents on reclaiming a 39-foot hull that had washed ashore in Steuben and had been stripped. Among other salvaged parts, the restored boat, which Shain used last season for dragging, has side windows from a junked school bus (the kind that have thumb latches), tempered sliding glass doors from the dump for the windshield, the light switch panel from the school bus and lots of hardware from another boat they had salvaged several years ago. This past winter, Shain, 45, whose only experience building boats was helping his grandfather build a peapod 33 years ago, replaced all the ribs and stringers in the boat’s hull. He and his father will use the boat, christened THE OLD FART’S GNU (yes, there is a story) to service their aquaculture operation.
The Stanleys have been working during the past year to design and test rafts built to one-eighth of the projected actual size. Dana Morse, Extension Associate at Maine Sea Grant, connected them with the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center and John Riley, Professor of Bio-Resource Engineering at University of Maine at Orono, so they could test the rafts in the university’s wave action tank. People in Sorrento are helping support the project.
Stanley explains that this latter support developed after the pre-hearing for the lease he and Shain have applied for, which is three-quarters of a mile from Sorrento. Initially, he says, people in Sorrento opposed the lease, but after they learned he and Shain planned to invent a way to submerge the raft and thus make it possible for them to continue to use the traditional course for their sailboat races (sailing over the rafts), they decided to help with the project.
The Stanleys have applied for a grant from Maine Technology Institute for funds to build a full-sized prototype raft, which they will test at the lease site if the lease is granted.
The one thing the townspeople still may object to, Babe Stanley says, is the size of the buoys they will need to use on each corner of the raft to monitor how deep the corner has sunk once the mussels, which will hang on ropes suspended from planking on the raft, begin to grow. Also, the buoys, which are marked in one-foot increments, will indicate any of the raft’s compartments has sprung a leak and is allowing air to escape, thus tilting the raft underwater.
“We’ve told the townspeople that we don’t want to be handling these ten-foot by two-foot buoys,” Babe Stanley says, (five feet will be out of the water) “but it’s the best we’ve been able to figure out for now.” Eventually, he hopes to perfect a small two-inch PVC pipe buoy that will hardly be noticeable. Meanwhile, he says, he will paint the buoys any color the townspeople want, and notes that sailboats will be able to bump into them without damaging boat or buoy.
Since the Stanleys have applied for a patent on their invention, they couldn’t share too many details about its design. Babe Stanley did explain that it will be built out of polyethylene pipe (they rejected a fiberglass model) and uses a system of pumping in or removing air through tubing to raise or lower the raft, which has compartments similar to those on a boat. They will keep the controls for the raft on their boat, reattaching them when necessary. He and Shain have modified some features of the experimental one-eighth scale raft in ways that they think will bring the cost of a full-sized raft down to about $20,000 as opposed to an initial projected $40,000. They think they have found a contractor who can build the floating part of the raft, and they would finish it off themselves.
The Stanleys’ project and lease could benefit Maine fishermen in more than one way. Babe Stanley says once the raft is patented and bugs are worked out, he and Shain will give the plans to any mussel farmer on the coast of Maine. “The rest of the world will pay,” he says. “These guys on the coast are my friends. The only reason I wanted to patent it is I was told that if I didn’t and someone else copied it, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would end up paying for the plans.”
The aquaculture lease application, which includes plans for 200 submerged cages to raise scallops, could also benefit the fishing industry by releasing scallop spat in Frenchman’s Bay. “There will be trillions and trillions of scallop eggs going into the bay,” says Babe Stanley. Also, he points out that the scallops and mussels will help clean Frenchman’s Bay.
Once he and Shain have a raft in place on the lease site, Babe Stanley, who plans to continue fishing for lobsters, will monitor it every day on his trips out and back. “But the day we put the first raft out,” he says, “I’ll be there all day, watching for little bubbles, keeping an eye on the buoy levels.” They will continue to add rafts as quickly as they can afford them, to the maximum approved for the site.
Mainly, they love working on the water and want to continue. No matter how difficult conditions can be through the different seasons, it seems inconceivable to them to imagine working any other job.