Setting day in sight
Lobster fishers hit the water Sunday for another season
GLACE BAY — Keagan Muise can't wait to head out to sea.
The 19-year-old Glace Bay fisherman is understandably excited about the start of lobster season. His family has a new boat called the Captain Crazy, the price of lobster is favourable and on Monday, the sun was shining on the east Cape Breton Island port.
“Yes, I'm excited — I'm ready to go now,” said Muise, who like all fishers in Nova Scotia's Zone 27, has been busy preparing for Sunday's scheduled start to lobster season.
“We've been working for the past three or four months getting ready to go for this week. We do the traps over the winter and then we do the ropes and paint the buoys. We got a new boat so we had to change all our numbers. All our ropes and buoys are back at the yard so we have to take them down here to the wharf.”
BUSY TIMES
The Glace Bay wharfs are busy now as Muise and others transport boats, traps and gear to the waterside. It takes lots of preparation and now it's just about time for the hard work to begin. But despite the taxing nature of the job, the mood is light around the docks.
The Rollin Stoned slowly passes by just minutes after being launched from the nearby boat ramp. A crew member straddles the side of the boat and banters with his buddies onshore. There's lots of laughter, lots of joking around.
Muise has an audience of his peers, all of them older, as he talks about his love of the vocation.
He can't answer without some good-natured ribbing from the men he trusts his life with while at sea.
“I first went out (lobster fishing) when I was really, really young, but I didn't get serious about it until high school,” said Muise.
“But he's a pro at it now,” interjected Ronnie Melnick, a veteran fisherman who will crew on the Captain Crazy with Justin Marchand and Muise. The latter's father, Duane, owns the five-yearold “new” boat that was built in Prince Edward Island but recently purchased in Pictou.
Retorted Muise: “And I say it's going to be a great season.”
CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
On the nearby and aptlynamed Atlantic Street, Rodney Billard is busy stacking traps for transportation to the docks. The now 56-year-old has been fishing for 40 years.
“I went right out of school and right onto the boat,” said Billard, who is cautiously optimistic that the 2022 lobster season will be as good as the 2021 season.
“The cost of bait is up and the cost of fuel is way up, but hopefully the catches will be good.”
Nova Scotia's heavily
regulated lobster fishing industry has different seasons across the province. The only zones larger than eastern Cape Breton's Zone 27 are zones 33 and 34, both located in southwestern Nova Scotia. The seasons there start in November.
So far, prices have been high. Indeed, earlier this year lobster prices spiked at up to $20 per pound at Nova Scotia wharfs. It's gone down since and those in the know say they are likely to further decrease when more of the highly-desired crustaceans hit the market.
On the Water Street side of the Glace Bay harbour, Munden's Lobster Pound is open for business. According to Nancy (Munden) Sullivan, the lobsters they are selling this week are from Arichat on the southwest side of Cape Breton, where the season is already underway.
“We never know exactly what the price will be and it's the same this year, but it will probably drop before our season opens,” said Sullivan, whose 90-year-old father Jim Munden was, at last word, still considering whether or not to fish again this season. He started in the industry when he was nine.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the age spectrum, 27-year-old Carson Paige has been skippering his own outfit since he was 21. But fishing was in the family and the Main-a-Dieu fisherman grew into the business at a young age.
“I was fortunate. It was a good opportunity that came at the right time,” said Paige, who is fishing on his wife's grandfather's license.
“There are lots of young guys that are into it and want to be into it, but with the way things have been going the price of a license has been driven up really high. It's very hard for young people to get into it now. But when licenses are going for upwards of a million dollars for the full enterprise, it makes it hard to get into. It definitely helps if your family is already into it.”
While the official start date for Zone 27 is Sunday, May 15, that could change. A conference call between fishers and the Department of Fisheries is set for today. On the agenda is whether permission will be given to set the traps a day earlier on Saturday with the reason being that Sunday has traditionally been the only day of the week that the fishers don't work.