Last in a four-part series
When Jennifer and Doug Caines approached their fish farm in the winter of 2003, they half expected to find a cage full of dead fish.
It was “the winter from hell” according to Jennifer, and their site on Fortune Bay had frozen over.
At the time, no one thought that you could farm fish anywhere outside the sheltered Bay d’Espoir; trying to put fish out in the open ocean was a recipe for disaster.
“They thought we were crazy,” Doug said. “They said, ‘You’re going to lose them fish.’”
The Caines had different information. After a failed venture trying to farm scallops in the area, they got detailed water temperature data, and they’d been told the temperatures were OK for salmon farming.
As long as the water temperature stays above - 0.7 C, the salmon won’t freeze.
But then the winter from hell came and the the fish cages froze over.
The Caines didn’t dare try to get near the cages.
Even if a boat could have broken through the ice, the fish are habituated to the sound of the boat, and would have come up expecting to be fed. With the surface frozen over and the water underneath freezing cold, that could have been disasterous.
Normally, young fish are fed four or five times per day; fully grown fish are fed once a day. Because of the ice, the Caines were forced to leave their fish for three weeks.
This isn’t as cruel as it sounds, Jennifer said. In the cold water, the fishes’ metabolism slows down, and they don’t need to eat as much.
Eventually, they couldn’t wait any longer; they walked across the ice to the fish cages, cut through the ice and dropped a waterproof camera into the water.
They discovered that the salmon were still swimming around in the comparatively warmer water under the ice.
The company the Caines were working with, North Atlantic Sea Farms, was eventually pushed into receivership by financial issues.
But the winter of 2003 was arguably the turning point for the industry, when they proved that the waters of the island’s south coast could farm fish.
Salmon is king
In Newfoundland aquaculture, salmon is the name of the game. In 2010, finfish represented $110 million — the vast majority of it Atlantic salmon.
There’s mussel farming on the northeast coast, but it represents a comparatively meagre $6 million.
For many people, farming cod was the dream, but it never really became a reality.
Cod take longer to mature, and therefore cost more when it comes to feed. Moreover cod has to compete with other, cheaper to farm whitefish such as tilapia.
This year, a single company — Northern Harvest Sea Farms — will put 100 new salmon cages into the water, representing roughly 3.7 million new fish.
For the time being, salmon is king.
Feeding time
Today, in that same little corner of Fortune Bay where the Caines started nearly a decade ago, there are a few different fish farms.
Jennifer Caines arrives at one site where a worker, Clyde Lilly, is feeding small fish. Positioned upwind of the cage, Lilly uses a blower to arc feed pellets into the water.
As he does it, he keeps glancing at a screen on his boat; with a camera lowered into the water, he can see the fish feeding. When the pellets start floating down to the bottom of the tank, Lilly will know that the fish are full, and he’ll move on to the next cage.
Lilly is one of the south coast aquaculture industry’s true veterans. He started working back in the late 1980s when people first started experimenting with farmed fish in Bay d’Espoir. Back then it was “pretty rough,” he said.
The farms weren’t near any towns, so workers would have to stay in tents.
“We had to walk out over the country six and a half miles to our sites; when the bay was freezing up and the ice was too much for the boats, we had to take our packs on our backs and walk it over the country,” he said.
“At one time, it was almost like slave work. Now it’s all gone high-tech.”
Things are high-tech down the road in St. Alban’s too, where Cooke Aquaculture is set to open a new hatchery.
A giant green building houses 19 massive green tanks. Juvenile fish will be nursed there until they’re ready for the ocean.
Chuck Brown, a spokesman for Cooke, points out that the company delivering on the committent it made in 2006, when it set up shop in the province.
They started with fish farms, now they’re building a hatchery. In the future, the company plans to build a new fish plant in the region.
Aquaculture, Brown says, is here for the long haul.
Twitter: TelegramJames
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