Great Eastern Mussel Farms is generally credited with putting mussels on North American restaurant menus. Great Eastern’s success made mussels ubiquitous and many countries now farm them, so the Tenants Harbor company is trying to outdo itself by raising the world’s best mussels.
“We wanted to try to grow the highest quality mussel in the world. And we did. We have the highest meat yields — between 40 percent and 50 percent. They’re fabulous mussels,” said Chip Davison, president and co-founder of Great Eastern.
Marketed as Great Eastern “Choice” mussels, the half-million premium mussels produced this year will be sold to white tablecloth restaurants or their wholesalers. “It’s really still a research and development project” even though it was launched in 2000, said Davison. “We have to see if we can do it for the price we need to get, and deal with things like red tide and tough Maine winters.”
When Davison started Great Eastern in 1978, in a house in Sheepscot, the mussels were grown on ropes. Later, he worked with a couple of Maine fishermen who seeded mussels on the bottom, Dutch style, and harvested them for the company. “We were using both methods that were in use in the world for growing mussels at the time,” Davison said. Now the Choice mussels are grown on rafts, technology adopted from a Spanish system using rafts modified from a Scottish maker.
“We were trying to get Maine fishermen to grow the mussels on rafts, so we imported the technology. It’s a Scottish raft design,” Davison explained. A steel fabricator in Newport, Maine, makes the equipment to U.S., not U.K., specifications. He has become a partner in the venture, which has become a small offshoot company, Maine Aquaculture Equipment.
“It’s a really effective way of raising mussels,” said Carter Newell, the research biologist who started the raft program in 1997. “It doesn’t use up as much area and they grow faster. It’s calm, they get a gentle current instead of bobbing up and down on floats.”
The rafts are 40 by 40 feet, held together with galvanized steel I-beams with 28 floats. Inside the steel frame are three by four-foot tamarack timbers, two feet on center. Ropes 45 ft. long hang from the floats, with 400 lines per raft for 16,000 feet, or around three miles, of line. Each raft produces about 70,000 lbs. of mussels, worth more than a dollar a pound wholesale.
“The system protects the mussels from sea ducks,” explained Newell, because each raft is wrapped all around in a “predator net,” resembling a fish net. Every 12 inches, a peg is inserted on the line to give the mussels a place to attach so they don’t fall off.
“We love Maine. We try to buy as much as we can in Maine,” said Davison. Great Eastern buys rope, polypropylene pegs and droppers, all from Maine manufacturers such as Orion Rope and uses Maine tamarack in the raft construction. “We try to help the state’s economic development.”