Shrimpier This Year

Maine caught shrimp will be, well, shrimpier this year. Fewer five year old shrimp, are available so most of the catch will be made up of or the smaller four year old class shrimp. The Northern shrimp season started December 1 and will close on April 15. The season is the same for both trap and trawl catch methods and allows 136 days of fishing, less than the 180 day planned for last year. I say planned because last year's season was cut short at 156 days because of the small population of shrimp. The same could happen this year as catch rates and stocks will be monitored and the the fishing season closure date revisited in February. Shrimp are hitting the stores and pedlars now.

Shrimp are caught in traps (fixed gear) not unlike lobster traps that sit on the bottom waiting for shrimp to swim in, and nets dragged through the water behind boats (mobile gear). I prefer to buy trap caught shrimp when I can because they don't run the risk of being crushed at the bottom of the trawl, releasing enzymes that hasten their decay. I'm also pretty sure that it takes less fuel to haul traps than to trawl.

There are three questions I like to ask when I buy shrimp: Where, when and how was this product caught? If the vendor can't answer these questions I move along and make my purchase somewhere else. I like responses like "These here trap shrimp was landed Tuesday morning in Port Clyde by one of the Reed boys." Often asking any question at all will bring up a lot of information about the product. And I soak it up like a sponge. While I prefer trapped to trawl shrimp, I'll buy either caught in Maine waters in the past few days.

Biscuits

I can't think about biscuits without smiling and remembering my friend Lyford. He grew up in the keeper's house of an island lighthouse in the 30's. Eventually the family moved ashore, or at least to a larger island were there where neighbors and things like stores and schools and electricity. Lyford was in the sixth grade then and when lunch time came he broke out the biscuits and jam that his mother had packed for him. He looked around and noticed that his classmates weren't unwrapping biscuits. Everyone else carried sandwiches made on sliced bread. Lyford said it was the first time he'd ever seen such a thing and he developed a lively trade switching his mother's biscuits for store bread sandwiches. It was a novelty to the scholars on both sides of the trade. As he told me the story I could imagine young Lyford eyeing the Wonder bread sandwiches and wondering what his best trade might be. I can't eat a biscuit without thinking of his story.

I bake my biscuits using Bakewell Cream which is packaged and distributed by the Winterport Company just around the corner and up the Penobscot River from me. I use it, and Crisco because it makes lofty, light biscuits without much effort on my part. Dinners like chili, beef stew, and corned beef all present an excuse to bake some biscuits. After dinner the left over biscuits go in the biscuit jar to wait for the next morning. Nothing beats one split in half, buttered and grilled on the stove for breakfast. Washed down with a swallow of coffee, it's just the thing to brighten the prospects for my day.

What's in a Name?

Family Tradition is more than a reference to a couple of Hanks

What's in a name? The American Dream, hope for the future, respect for the past, someone who knows their place in time, space, community and family. I love the name Family Tradition for all it evokes about getting a living on the water. Boats with names like Steppin' Up, Provider, and Old Horse show a respect for what hard work life on the water can bring. Most names have more to offer than denotative meaning. Many prudent fishermen name their boats after their wives and children. Others come up with names that tell a story or reflect their thoughts about life on the water. Either way, names are worthy of a close look and reflection.

Many lobster catchers start out with a few traps and a small skiff and outboard. When other kids are playing video games or watching the latest DVD they're on the water or as close to it as they can get. They are drawn to it. The motion of the boat, thrill of finding lobsters in a trap, and entrance into an adult work world cast a mighty spell. Pretty soon they're looking out past the harbor entrance and imagine all the lobsters crawling around on the bottom waiting to be hauled aboard. If only the boat were a little bigger. That's how the yearning for the next boat begins. Something to carry a few more traps, a better hauler, more electronics and able to fish outside the harbor.

They move up from sixteen to nineteen feet and 15HP to 70HP outboards to 6 cylinder diesel between junior high and adulthood. The boat brings a job, sense of place, a degree of pride and maybe a hefty debt. As soon as I saw Steppin' Up at the dock, I knew where the owner got the name and what it represented. Step up to a bigger boat, more gear, and potentially more income. It's a sign of the hope and optimism both of which are necessary for lobster catchers. Still other boat names exhibit a sense of irony or at least understatement or great exuberance. Consider for example Hot Damn! or Lazy Days, or the above mentioned Family Tradition and those Williams boys.

Red Tide Alert!

I wish I knew what the marine equivalent of bucolic might be. It would make a great title for this photo. The serene scene above harbors trouble below.

NOAA radio began broadcasting warnings about Paralytic Shellfish Poison (PSP) or red tide contamination in Hancock County this week. The algae blooms that cause PSP have reached the mud flats in some Downeast areas that are home to clams and mussels. Right now, the warning is up roughly from Isle Au Haute to Millbridge for mussels and snails. Other warnings over a broader area are likely to follow. The local TV news is reporting the dangers of digging your own clams and mussels and dutifully explaining the safety of the same products provided by commercial harvesters and sold in stores and restaurants. This is made possible by an extensive testing program run out of labs in Boothbay Harbor and Lamoine. I have been present in the lab when PSP testing was going on and have a lot of confidence in the program.

Red Tide blooms occur in warm weather, which is about the most inconvenient time for diggers, restaurants and votaries of the mussel and clam. Too bad to have the flow of bivalves interrupted just when the diggin's good and the market's strong. In the wake of what might be a disaster for all kinds of seafood news outlets are constantly reminding me that fin fish, crabs and lobsters are not part of the shellfish biotoxin problem.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources estimated that last year red tide closures cost the state $10 million. Let's hope we get off a little easier this season. I'll be interested to see what forces of supply and demand win out over the next few weeks and what happens to clam prices this summer. I'll be sure to pay attention when I cruise by the seafood counter at the grocery store.

Jumbo Shrimp: Globalization comes to Waldo County

Oxymorons: Bird dog, a new classic, ham steak, and my favorite, jumbo shrimp. It makes me smile every time I see the phrase in print or hear it uttered. I love big little crustaceans. What's not to like about them dipped in cocktail sauce, or sauted and served over pasta, in a sandwich, stew or fried. A local product served up at a reasonable price. I wish it were that simple, but shrimp are pretty complicated these days, starting with size. The photo above is 61-70 Maine shrimp.

Shrimp size references the number of the acquatic anthropods needed to make a pound, so super jumbos (U/15 or less to the a pound) are bigger than jumbos (16/20 per pound) down to small (41/50). I'm talking wild, Gulf of Mexico shrimp as compared with an imported, farm raised product. Down in the Gulf shrimpers in Alabama get about $4.50/pound for jumbos and $1.60 for 41/50. My local store gets $7.99 for Gulf jumbos peeled and cooked. These are much larger than shrimp caught in Maine, and cheaper in the local grocery store as well. Sound wrong to you?

In the same store I can buy farm raised, cooked shrimp from Thailand or Vietnam for $7.79 a pound or frozen Maine shrimp from Maine for $8.87 a pound. How can it be less expensive to raise shrimp thousands of miles away (where it has to be fed, medicated and nurtured with care) and ship it to Waldo County. I just don't get it. Shrimp is landed on wharfs within 50 miles of the store. Boats with names like High Roller, Susan Jessica and Bad Penny (it keeps coming back) are paid $.50-$1.00 per pound for the wild caught shrimp and the peeled and cooked meat can be bought for $5.00/pound from trucks all along the mid coast area. There's so much that doesn't make sense here that I don't know where to start. The most expensive shrimp in the store is the local product. The same item can be bought a hundred yards away, outside the store for about half the price. Maine shrimp at $8.87 a pound makes the distant, farm raised product a better value for the casual shopper.

No wonder Maine shrimpers are struggling. With lots of shrimp to catch they're competing in a market where globalization means everything. Native products slug it out with domestic, and imported farm raised products in grocery store freezers and fish cases for even a modest share of the market. The outlook should be good here as Gulf of Maine shrimp are plentiful. Unlike a lot of sea food, they're not over fished at this point. This should be a bright spot in the the regional economy. But it isn't, because of persistant troubles competing in the global market.

Fresh Shrimp Ahead!

Last week my friend Dick told me he bought 20 pounds of shrimp for ten bucks off the boat about an hour south of here in Boothbay Harbor where he lives. I was surprised. Fifty cents a pound is really cheap for protein. For a seafood delight like shrimp, its a fire sale. We're smack in the middle of the Maine shrimp season right now and I headed out to the grocery store to check out how Maine shrimp's holding up against product from Thailand, Brazil, China and the US Gulf Coast. The last time I tried this, the grocery store didn't have any Maine shrimp while the tailgate peddler I passed on the way to the store had a truck full. When I asked at the store why they didn't have local shrimp I was told the supply was unreliable. Why not sell it when you have it I wondered. That got me thinking about the whole buying in season perplex.

I did a little better today. Whole Maine shrimp was $2.99 inside the store and $1.00 from the truck. Shrimp meat was $6.99 in the store and $5.oo from the truck unless you were willing to buy a 10 pound bag of frozen meat for $40. They didn't have any Gulf shrimp at all inside [more on that later], but there was a good variety of imported product over a range of prices.

Maine or Northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) is smaller than the other types and many people think it tastes better. It's caught by towing nets behind boats or in traps, like lobster traps only different. The design is not really the same, but if you are far enough away a pile of shrimp traps looks like pile of lobster traps. Maybe that's not such a good description, after all if you were far enough away I might look like Johnny Depp. While I'm on the subject of being far away, that reliable shrimp from Thailand sure traveled a long way to get to a Waldo County supermarket, didn't it.

Pooh Island Whale

The joy that both Native Americans and Colonial Settlers experienced when they came upon whales on Cape Cod beaches has been replaced with sadness and dread for the future of the marine mammals. In Leviathan; The History of Whaling in America, Eric Dolin describes how the Pilgrims soon realized the commercial advantage to be made in the taking of whales and got busy. A couple of hundred years later, I take the problem to heart. Stories of lost whales in harbors and strandings always make me uncomfortable, anxious now. In my carefree youth I ate whale. I didn't know any better. I went to a restaurant where broiled whale was featured on the menu and on a neon sign with a spouting whale out by the road. I tried it, just once. I hope you can forgive me. I suppose it was offered as a novelty item like the incongruous espresso bar in a local McDonalds or the all you can eat [AYCE on the sign out by the road] alligator at a place up the road. More for the curious than the hungry, I suppose.

I haven't seen whale on a menu for a while, but I did see an interesting snippet on ONN [Onion News Network] about Japan developing a new hybrid whaling ship, bigger than a Prius, but still gets good fuel economy. And will there be work for those new whalers you're wondering? I recently read that whales are coming back. An article provided by Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management suggests that “There is now strong scientific evidence that several species of baleen whale and possibly the sperm whale, have recovered to levels that would support commercial harvest.” I don't think I'm ready for US whaling, but if the numbers are up, I fear the harvesters won't be far behind.

The whale pictured above washed up on on Pooh Island, Hancock County, Maine in 2008. Don't bother Googlin' it, Pooh's too small for an official name, but locals need something to call it other than "the big ledge on the south side a hundred feet offshore that's only uncovered about half tide." The smell was so bad I couldn't get near enough to really look it over, but even from an olfactorily satisfying distance it was impressive and I was sad to see the it rotting in the sun. I didn't have to watch it very long. Somebody threw rope around the tail at high tide and dragged it couple of miles offshore much to everyone's relief. Was that legal? I don't know.

International Lunch

I ripped the top off a can of sardines and made a sandwich for lunch today. I guess the humble sardine, once popular in the working man's lunch box, has been eclipsed by drive through fast food. For years herring provided an inexpensive, healthy sandwich for lunch, but I think it has largely fallen out of favor lately. The fine print on the can says" Brunswick Sardines in Mustard Sauce. Distributed by Connors Brunswick LLC, So Portland, ME; Product of Canada." I buy Maine sardines when I can, but sometimes I can't find them in the grocery store and fall back on other brands. I'll admit I can't tell a Canadian sardine from a Beach Cliff once the top's off the can.

More Bad Clams

I just ran into an interesting story in the BDN. http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/131930.html . When there's a lot of surface runoff, like there has been around here in the last week or so, water from storm drains and catch basins overwhelms the sewage treatment plants. Storm water mixed with sewage goes overboard into the rivers, streams, harbors and bays adjacent to the treatment plant. Just like it always did in the good old days, right. Anyway, tide flats are polluted temporarily as their filter feeding residents work through the bounty of organic matter. Harvesting shellfish is supposed to stop. Eating clams from polluted flats makes people really sick.

Sounds like people at the state are getting annoyed with the folks in Machias for their management of sewage. The worst part is it puts diggers out of work for a while and "erodes consumer confidence" in clams. Who wants to pay 20 bucks for a clam dinner that's going to make 'em sick...and once sickened by bad clams it's a long time before somebody orders up another plateful.
Got any tartar sauce?

Bad Clams

The hits just keep coming. The Stinson Canning closure is still on the front page of the paper and I heard on the radio, as I was driving to work today, that Maine should expect severe red tide blooms this summer. Biologists predict the bloom by counting algae cysts [which act like seeds for the next crop of algae] on the ocean bottom in the fall and the number is up by 60%, prompting a warning that flats might be closed again next summer. The DMR monitors shellfish for red tide toxin that causes PSP (Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning) and closes areas to harvesting clams and mussels when the toxins appear. This means no work for diggers and expensive clams. I once asked a DMR biologist, who was injecting lab mice with ground up clams to see if they containted the PSP toxins, if there was home test I could do for red tide. He asked me if I had a cat. Yes, I had a cat. "Feed him a couple of clams. If he's OK in half an hour or so, go ahead and eat some clams. It works, but only once," he said. I never tried it.

I used to work in a boatyard with a couple of guys who dug clams to augment the $5.00/hr we were making scraping and painting boat bottoms. They'd dig before or after work, or maybe cut work altogether if the digging was good. They looked forward to 'double tide' days with two low tides in daylight hours because they could make a lot of money. I admired how hard they worked to scratch out a living between the yard and the clam flats. Back then the 25 million pound Maine clam harvest earned about 8.5 million dollars and clams in the shell brought about 33 cents a pound, Diggers were paid by the bushel. Last year about 9 million pounds were worth 12 million dollars and brought $1.31 a pound. The size of the harvest has seen a gradual, but troubling decline over the 40 years.

A lot depends on which way the wind blows on the Maine coast. This summer offshore winds at the right time could push the algae off shore and spare some, or all of the coast a PSP scare, but onshore winds could increase the problem. How bad will it, be? Depends on which way the wind blows.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZJeRs_-FkA&feature=related

View from the Pool

The hammer's fallen on the Maine sardine industry. http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/137081.html
I've been reading a lot about it lately and I'm still thinking about my trip to Prospect Harbor last week. I'm worried about what the herring limits might mean for other fisheries or lobstering too.

One day a while back I was knocking around the Boston waterfront and found a bronze marker noting the location of the first successful cannery in the US. I can't remember the name on the marker, or exactly where it is or what the date was, but I'm pretty sure the whole herring factory era lasted less two hundred years. That's several lifetimes, but just a blink in the larger scale of time. In that time it supported a lot of households in Maine.

In the 1980s it was a boom and bust business with huge landings and low prices one year and higher prices but fewer fish the next. One fisherman friend told me with a sardonic grin once that has soon as he got a good shut off of fish somewhere people came out of the woodwork, old friends and relatives he hadn't heard from in years showed up to help him harvest the fish and to share in the profits. It was hardly worth the effort and cost of doing business after he got through sharing the wealth he said. But he couldn't stop looking for herring and hoping every year that the August Darks would find him sitting on a cove full of fish. There might be enough to pay down some debt, help out his relatives and friends and maybe even get another twine dory in anticipation of a better year ahead. It's that sort of optimism that will see the community of Prospect Harbor through this latest bit of bad news.

Hard Times at the Factory

Today I'm thinking about sardines. That's because I recently read about the closing of the last sardine cannery in the US in Prospect Harbor, Gouldsboro, Me this week. The Bangor Daily News story told of 130 people losing their jobs and how the most recent round of herring protection measures means that the cannery can no longer get enough fish to can. Back when I was reporting fishing news rthere were 35 herring canneries in Maine and thousands of people earned their living in the factories, on the boats or in the supporting services and stores all along the coast of Maine. At the time, Stinson had operations in Prospect Harbor, Belfast, and Rockland. Now they're all gone as are the dories loaded with twine in coves and harbors, the purse seiners, and the sardine carriers, the most graceful of commercial boats on the coast to my eye. I guess it really is the end of the sardine as we knew it, and I'm sad about that. I knew some of those people who made a living cutting up fish and putting them in cans or catching them after long cold nights of tending nets. They were good people who worked hard and were quick to help others.


So on Thursday, my friend Dick and I packed up our cameras and headed down to Prospect Harbor to see for ourselves how Gouldsboro might make out without the herring fishery. The closure of the nearby US Navy base there, downturn in the tourist economy and hard times [dare I say collapse] of commercial fishing, limited shell fish and urchin fishery paints a grim picture of this ironically picture perfect section of the coast. We checked out Main Street. Dick and I visited an optimistically trendy coffee shop with empty tables, and comfortable couches, shelves of teas and a case full of baked goods. We were the only customers. Across the street there's a genuine five and dime store and three empty store fronts. That's it. No gas pumps, no pizza shop, just the “For Rent” signs.
We drove much of the day taking in the sights and really thinking about what it would feel like to call the peninsula home. I told Dick about the follow up story in the BDN which said the state was sending a task force down to meet with the cannery workers about retraining for new jobs. We spent a lot of time looking around behind empty buildings and along shore for where those jobs might be. Unless we missed some secret underground bunkers packed full of jobs, I'm thinking those cannery workers are facing a terrible choice. Stay in the community and starve or leave on the chance that the new training will get them a job in some other town. This seems particularly chancy for the older workers, say over 50. If I lived there, on the Schoodic Peninsula I wouldn't want to leave my community, my family, friends and church to get retrained so I could work the job in an office cube that might or might not be waiting for me. I wouldn't want to watch my town die either. Like I said, it's a terrible choice.