By Aaron Porter

ELLSWORTH — Fish farmer Erick Swanson said he is keen to get moving on his switch from growing salmon to growing mussels.

In fact, he’s hoping to get some of his submerged longline mussel gear in the water off Tinker Island late this month, but before he does, he’ll answer questions abut his plans at a Tremont Selectmen’s meeting March 7 a 6 p.m.

Erick Swanson has proposed a longline mussel growing facility off Tinker Island. graphic by catherine mckinney

Swanson described it as an informational meeting for him to explain what sort of aquaculture installation he’ll be placing on a lease that was granted to him last fall for the farming of salmon.

“Because there are changes, we need to let the fishermen know what we’re doing,” he said.

What he is planning is a marked departure from the 54-acre lease housing an array of salmon pens that was the subject of a three-day public hearing in 2003. At that time, there was opposition to Swanson’s plan to locate a salmon farm off Tinker Island. There also was opposition to his application for renewal and expansion of his existing salmon farm off Hardwood Island. After a protracted hearing and deliberation process that stretched into last summer, the Department of Marine Resources granted Swanson a 30-acre lease off Tinker Island and renewed, but did not expand, his 25-acre lease at Hardwood.

The department’s decision to grant the leases has been appealed in Kennebec County Superior Court by the Conservation Law Foundation. According to plaintiff attorney Roger Fleming, there are settlement negotiations under way in that case, but no agreement has been reached.

In December, Swanson surprised opponents of his salmon farming proposal by announcing that he would shift to mussels.

He applied for, and was granted, a species amendment to add mussel farming to his Tinker Island lease. According to Swanson and Mary Costigan, the state aquaculture administrator, he asked in a letter that salmon be removed from the permit. However, he still must make a formal request to the department before that second amendment can be granted, according to Costigan.

There are more changes to come.

Swanson said last week the blunt cruciform layout of the original lease was designed to fit the salmon pens and their moorings, but it doesn’t work well for the submerged mussel longlines he’s planning to use. For those, a rectangle would be better. To that end, Swanson said he will apply for a lease to square up the current site to encompass 53 acres this spring. But for now, he will get started growing on his existing Tinker Island lease.

Swanson’s plans indicate that mussel-growing ropes hanging 45-feet down will be suspended from buoyed 600-foot longlines moored 20 feet below the surface of the bay. What will be visible on the surface are the buoys that mark the mooring blocks, both ends and the middle of the longline. On the 53-acre site, he plans to locate 60 lines.

Swanson said the site would have to be tended weekly in order to add floats to keep the longline suspended at the right level as the mussels grow. At peak production, Swanson predicted, the Tinker Island farm could be producing as much as one million pounds of mussels in a 12-month growout cycle. He said during the beginning of that process, when miniscule wild mussel spat are collected near the water surface in June and July, 25 percent of the lease will have lines at the surface. But once those lines have been sunk again, boats with less than a 20-foot draft will be able to pass right over the lease as long as they avoid marker buoys.

Swanson said he would be harvesting twice every week, and bringing his mussels ashore at Bartlett Landing in Pretty Marsh. He said he will have a service barge and a separate harvest barge that he will use on Tinker and eventually at Hardwood, where he plans a similar mussel growing operation.

For now, Hardwood still holds about 200,000 salmon.

He said Heritage Salmon, for whom he was growing the fish, will harvest by July and have their pens removed as soon as possible after that.

Swanson’s Hardwood Island permit already allows him to grow mussels there.  He said his plan is to remove salmon from the permit language once the salmon have been moved off-site.

In addition, Swanson said he has withdrawn his applications to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for the pollution discharge permits required for him to farm salmon on the leases.

When he originally announced that he would be switching to mussels, Swanson said he would try to keep some salmon at Hardwood to sell locally. Last week, he said that probably wouldn’t be the case.

“It’s a diversion of resources,” he said, explaining why salmon farming on the side might not be such a good idea for a man turning to mussels. Swanson said he’d be happy to field questions about his plans for the leases at Hardwood and Tinker islands, during Monday’s meeting.