N.L. town’s tourism in bad odour

ST. BRIDES, N.L. • A Newfoundland harbour is being overrun by thick piles of kelp that are snarling fishing boats, fouling the air and driving away tourists amid concerns that the rotting stench will only get worse with warmer weather.

Gerald Dalton, vice-president of the harbour authority in St. Bride’s, said Wednesday the brown kelp is building up and getting trapped in the harbour, entangling fishing vessels as they try to get into dock and creating a smell he compared to sewage.

Dalton said the buildup of the brown goop is the worst he has seen since he moved to the community on the Avalon Peninsula’s southwestern tip in 1968. He linked it to a wharf installed around 1995 that prevents the kelp from being flushed back out to sea.

“Every year it’s gaining and gaining and gaining,” he said from St. Bride’s. “It’s really bad when it’s sitting there rotting in the summer. When you’re driving through the community — even with the windows up — you can smell it.”

Photos show mounds of the smelly stuff clogging the shoreline and strewn across a long wharf that intersects the harbour. Dalton said the bay is so choked that a 45-foot fishing boat spent about 20 minutes trying to get into port this week after getting caught in material he likened to soggy cereal.

He said he has seen the harbour turn a shade of white in the summer heat as gases bubble up from the seaweed on the harbour floor.

Some people who run hotels in the community say their businesses are being affected as tourists turn up their noses.

Pat Manning, whose Bird Island Resort sits on the shoreline near the harbour, said he has had customers check out, cancel their reservations or go elsewhere.

“I have had people not come to my place because of the stench,” he said.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans said it has issued a tender to dredge the harbour and remove 8,000 cubic metres of the kelp, which it expects to be done by the end of March.

Bill Goulding, regional director of Fisheries’ small craft harbours division, said the kelp will be piled on DFO property near the harbour to dry or be picked up by people who want to spread it on their gardens.

Dalton said piling the dredged kelp on land could just enhance the smell. He said locals want it taken away and part of the wharf removed to allow the harbour to flush out the kelp.

DFO is awaiting an engineer’s report that could recommend the removal of part of the wharf from the man-made harbour that has a breakwater on both sides.

“This is unique,” Goulding said. “We don’t have kelp accumulations like this, so what’s going on here that makes St. Bride’s unfortunately the place where all the factors like current, shallowness, the breakwater ... pile on here?”