Off and Running

December 16 2011, Project Update

 A Pilot Project to Stimulate Seaweed Production on Mussel Farms in Maine

Funding: Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, with lots of match from industry partners, and Maine Sea Grant

We're IMTA active, folks!  A couple of weeks ago, Tollef Olson, Paul Dobbins and Matt Moretti planted seedling lines out on Matt's farm in Casco Bay. That, I believe, made it the first kelp/mussel IMTA farm in the US, and we're pretty stoked about it. 

This week, Sarah and I met up with Tollef, and seeded in rafts on Peter Fischer's site in Walpole, and Joe Larrabee's site in Northport - they are both part of Pemaquid Mussel Farms.  We also met with Evan Young, of Blue Hill Bay Mussels, but it was blowing a gale from the south, and not a good day to be out on that site, given its' exposure. So, we ended up hanging the spools of seed lines off a float temporarily, until Evan can get back out and seed his raft in with them - should be no problem.

L-R: Tollef Olson,  Peter Fischer, Sarah Redmond

Anyway, on Wednesday, we started over at Peter's.  He wanted to hang the lines under one of his rafts, and he'd devised a plan to place one person at the far end of the raft (turned out to be me), and use a 'messenger line' to draw the longline through the seeding tube. Tollef and Peter worked on that end, since Tollef had the technique down for letting the line off the spool. Sarah took all kinds of photos, and helped out with the seeding end of things, and with equipment going back and forth.  Great to hear her talk about seaweeds too; biology and physiology, ecology; the whole nine yards. 

Juvenile kelps on seeding strings, around PVC pipe

The process is simple and effective.  Ocean Approved had done the hatchery work about 40 days ago, to produce the spores and then to set the spores on strings, which are wrapped around a PVC pipe.  Each pipe contains enough string to seed about 200 feet of line.  The horizontal longline is drawn through the PVC pipe, and the string is tied to the longline. As the longline is pulled through the pipe, the string unwinds, and spirals itself around the longline.  It'll take a few weeks for the young plants to 'step off' the string, and grow on to the longline, but once they do, their holdfasts will…well….hold them fast to the longline. 

It was cold to start, but we got into a rhythm,

Seed lines unspooling around longline

hanging lines at depths of either 3 or 7 feet. This is to test growth and quality in relation to sunlight; too much is not good and neither is too little.  About 9am, Pete Smith (Pemaquid Oyster Co) came rowing out to see what we were up to, and brought over some oysters - man, were they good!  Just out of the water, cold and salty…..yum.  After our little morning break, we kept going, and ended up with a total of 17 lines under one raft. 

Pete Smith (right) of Pemaquid Oyster Co - thanks Pete!

Peter's raft, seeded in!

Our water quality data collection includes sampling for nitrate and ammonia, so we gathered samples at the rafts and a short distance away, for baseline information, and then took some info on secchi depth and salinity. We set out an iBcod temp data logger, set to sample every 30 minutes - we can swap that out later, or leave it for the whole 4-6 month growout period.  The hope is to begin to draw some correlations between the growth we observe, and the measurements for these various parameters.  It certainly won't solve any specific puzzle, but might provide the right material for more focused research in the future.

The sun was coming out, and it was getting warm; things shaping up nicely. 

The afternoon was spent up at the Northport site; Joe picked us up in the skiff and out we went - Carter and crew were out there working on the middle raft, and we went to the northern raft and set in our lines there.  Since we'd used essentially the same setup as down in Walpole, it went pretty quickly, and we got the lines settled in with no delay.  More water samples, and a quick chat with the crew, and we headed back to the wharf.  The wharf itself is in the little community of Bayside, a little bit south of Belfast, and it's sort of a secluded little secret - like a summertime beach community, only without the beach.  I had Cape May in mind, for some reason, but anyway, lots of tidy and pretty houses set one close to another, facing a town common just up the shore from the wharf, and a great view across western Pen Bay, to Islesboro.

Joe Larrabee's site in Northport: harvest barge Mumbles and Tim Levesque (also of PMC) with his boat F/V Thunder Bay, working on predator nets, etc.

And that brought us to Thursday morning, and the aforementioned bad weather.  We stood in the parking lot talking about the project, the prospects for seaweeds along the coast, and how we were all looking forward to watching this particular batch of kelp grow.  Even there in the rain and the wind, it was pretty exciting; this is a new venture, with its own set of obstacles and opportunities, but nice to have some of the kelp lines already in and doing their work.  Evan will get a chance to set his lines out, and our next deployments will be on raft sites in Stonington and Lamoine (Pemaquid Mussel), and hopefully on the longline farm that Erick Swanson has for his company, Maine Cultured Mussels, out by Long Island in Blue Hill Bay.