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Man of Mussel
Evan Young’s Wednesday Haul Might Be in Texas Cafe Thursday
By Aaron Porter
Mussel farmer
Evan Young holds up a string of immature mussels. They’ve
still got a few months of growing before they reach market
size.
Mussel farmer
Joe Racicot stands by the declumper as 800 pounds of mussels
start through the cleaning and sorting machine.
STAFF PHOTOS
BY AARON PORTER |
TREMONT—On a
fine late-autumn day it’s hard to think of a nicer workplace than
Evan Young’s. The air is clear, if cold. The sun, just breaking
over Mount Desert Island, spreads over the Pretty Marsh shore and
out across Blue Hill Bay.
It’s 7 a.m.
when Young backs his 21-foot outboard-skiff off its trailer. In
minutes the boat and three crew members are skimming out the bay
to Hardwood Island to bring in the day’s harvest of 800 pounds of
mussels that will be sent off to market in the afternoon.
These aren’t
draggers mining beds of wild mussels with powerful boats making
relentless passes over rich sections of bottom. Young’s
well-stocked larder of mussels is housed in a series of three
40-by-40-foot rafts. He said each raft holds between 400 and 450
ropes of maturing mussels. With each rope carrying somewhere in
the neighborhood of 300 pounds, it puts the raft’s capacity easily
over 100,000 pounds. But they’re not all ready for market.
The mussel
farm is a hybrid nursery, farm and warehouse. The final harvest is
a relatively easy step at the end of the mussel farmer’s effort.
Young and his crew need only draw a few of the 35-foot,
mussel-encrusted ropes from the bay into the boat, and clean and
sort the individual mollusks before they haul them off to market.
It sounds simple, but it can be trying work, especially as winter
closes in and market demand stays up.
“That’s the
thing about weather this time of the year,” Young said as he tied
his skiff to the raft last week in a brisk northerly wind. “They
say 10 to 20 mph but sometimes you have to add that together.”
While he
scampered around on the treacherous grid of timbers from which the
mussel ropes hang, Joe Racicot and Bruce Wilbur waited in the boat
to haul in each 300 or more pound rope of mussels when Young casts
it off.
It takes three
fit men to wrestle a rope of mature mussels over a wheel on the
gunwale and into the bottom of the skiff.
After a few
35-foot ropes were loaded, Wilbur, Racicot and Young started the
messy process of stripping the mussels from the ropes. With
practiced flicks of the wrist, the harvesters simply shook the
stovepipe-diameter mass of mussels that surrounds the rope into
the bottom of the skiff. They were left holding lengths of
surprisingly thin rope that will be reused as homes for many
generations of mussels to come.
Awash in
shellfish and dirty water, the crew shoveled the mussels into
plastic totes to make room for one more rope’s worth. Then, with
enough harvested to meet the demands of his customers, Young
headed over to his sorting barge.
The mussel
farm shares a site with a salmon farm operated by Acadia
Aquaculture Inc. Young’s few rafts are dwarfed by the salmon pens
and their accessory rafts. But tucked back in a sheltered corner
of the site Young has a barge of his own that houses a mechanical
processing line of a charmingly homegrown quality.
Everything is
powered by hydraulics from a stationary diesel engine: Seawater is
pumped to a number of work stations, conveyer belts move the
mussels along, a declumper breaks apart masses of mussels,
tumblers separate rocks and mud from the shellfish, and a bed of
turning rods pinches the tenacious bissal threads from the shining
black shells. The final steps involve a human sorter culling out
broken or damaged mussels and then a last squirt of water and a
run down a water slide that sorts the final product into separate
tote boxes by size.
Young got the
whole custom made apparatus from mussel farmer Paul Brayton who
put it together over a number of years to operate at his farm in
Blue Hill’s Salt Pond. Young said Brayton still supplies him with
seed mussels from the Salt Pond. This sort of camaraderie among
competitors is common among shellfish farmers, Young said.
“No one has it
figured out by any means. That’s what I like about it,” he said.
Even Canadian
growers who are some of his stiffest competition share emerging
do’s and don’ts of the nascent industry with him.
On the sorting
raft the three harvesters manned their work stations as the subtle
rumble, splash, swish, clunk and whir of the processing line came
to life.
As line work
goes, cleaning and sorting mussels is a remarkably social process.
Conversation passes back and forth across the raft as masses of
mussels are marched relentlessly toward cleanliness and the
market.
According to
Young, that market is growing. For now he’s selling mostly to
restaurants and restaurant suppliers who want the consistent
quality and supply of his farmed product. If they can get that, he
said, they don’t worry too much about the price.
That doesn’t
mean he stands to get rich any time soon. Young said he gets about
$1.25 per pound on average from wholesalers these days. He’s
harvesting about 1,500 pounds each week with the three rafts on
his current site. While that keeps three men busy two days a week,
Young has an ambition to raise that to three days a week by
harvesting up to 5,000 pounds. But such a change means growth, and
growth can be troublesome for a small-scale operator.
“I can see how
it would be easy to say you want to get big,” Young said. But
adding more equipment, employees and customers could be too much
for a business that seems to thrive because of its simplicity and
low overhead. That’s why three days a week appeals to Young. He
still dives commercially for sea urchins and scallops to help pay
the bills.
Growing
mussels seems to be a waiting and protecting game. There is no
feed given to the mollusks, which get all the nutrients they need
by filtering as much as a gallon of sea water per mussel every
hour. The only substantial threat from predators is marauding
eider ducks. Young said they can clean out a raft in short order
by diving down and stripping the ropes. He has predator nets he
can hang around the floats if the ducks are in the neighborhood.
Young has
applied for his own mussel farm lease off neighboring Long Island
where he plans to locate an identical series of three rafts. If
the Department of Marine Resources grants the three-year lease,
Young could expand his operation by next summer.
Based on
approximately one year grow out of seed mussels to market size,
and a yield of about 60,000 pounds per raft per year, the new
rafts would allow Young to meet his goal of 5,000 pounds every
week.
As the last of
the mussels was cleaned last Wednesday, Young got out his cell
phone and called his buyers to confirm their needs. Sometimes he’s
got to go back to the farm raft for another few totes of mussels
after he checks in, he said. But last week he’d come out just
about perfectly. After another hand sorting ashore, the mussels
would be couriered to buyers and restaurants locally, in Boston
and New York, and as far away as California and Texas where they
could be on the plate as little as a day after coming out of the
water. |
