HUNTING STARFISH
P.E.I. fisherman diversifies his tourism offerings with kid-friendly starfish hunts
GEORGETOWN, P.E.I.— We don rubber boots, grab pintsize plastic pails emblazoned with starfish stickers and start combing the shore of the Brudenell River.
“There’s our first one right there,” skipper Perry Gotell says.
“They’re not hidden, but you have to look. What they really like is to be in among the rocks and tucked in.”
He plunks a starfish, also known as a sea star, in one of our buckets.
The tide is out on the salt water river and it’s closing in on the dinner hour. We admire a veritable banquet of shelled creatures, including quahogs, steamer clams, wild mussels, periwinkles, razor clams, oysters and even a hermit crab.
We pick up starfish galore, some are purple, reddish, brown or dark green and robust, others are turning grey and pale blue as they die.
Some are perfectly splayed out. Others aren’t so pretty. We find one fully wrapped around something it’s trying to eat.
It might seem odd to pay to go on a starfish hunt, but think of it this way: You can’t randomly pick a beach, show up and expect it to be low tide and full of starfish. Plus it’s way more fun to have a storyteller guiding you.
Gotell is a natural storyteller, a fisherman who turned in his lobster and crab traps nine years ago to launch Tranquility Cove Adventures.
“People want different and we’ve seen that very early in the game.”
He takes people out on Tranquility, his P.E.I.-built wooden fishing boat, for giant bar clam digs, fourhour adventures that involve wetsuits, snorkels, water socks, clam rakes and beach cookouts. Two-hour deep-sea fishing trips are another option.
Yet Gotell, who has two grown daughters, wanted to create a family-friendly adventure that would appeal to young kids. In 2016, he launched starfish hunts on the Brudenell River just outside of Georgetown near his riverfront home and has taken more than 300 people out (after quietly testing the concept last summer). Technically it’s a “starfish and pearl hunt” because you get to pick two or three wild mussels and crack them open to look for tiny pearls.
“We’re the first ones in the world to do it,” he says. “I don’t believe in copycatting. I believe in breaking new ground. I also think soft adventure has been overlooked and underrated.”
Who knew starfish can be considered a nuisance? Here on the Brudenell, the mussel and oyster farmers hate them. Gotell once put10,000 seed oysters in and “the darn starfish” pretty much ate them all.
We pick shellfish off the beach, from shallow water and rocky crevices.
“Now you’re getting the eyes for it,” he says halfway through our journey.
The starfish journeys only happen from July to September and revolve around the tide. It might be at 4:30 one day, 5:30 the next. Gotell gets the tide charts a year in advance and studies them.
One thing he knows for sure, his guests always find starfish. No one gets skunked. Sometimes kids want to put their starfish back and that’s OK.
Every starfish has a funny orange spot in its centre. Gotell has actually never figured out why. (Google later tells me it’s a madreporite, an organ that pumps water into the sea star’s body.)
But Gotell is full of other interesting factoids.
If you rip a starfish into five pieces (of course you wouldn’t) it will grow into five starfish. If one of its five arms gets eaten, it will grow back.
Our buckets full, we head back to his yard where we pick up a rubber hammer and check inside the mussels for pearls. No luck.
We spread out our starfish on drying racks. For the first day, you can manipulate their arms and shape them while they’re pliable.
For the second and third day, you turn them frequently as they dry. After that, you can store them and they’ll stay coloured or you can let them bleach white in the sun for a week.
“It’s hard to believe what’s out your back door,” Gotell muses. “What I’m still looking for, though, is the six-legged starfish. There has to be one — there’s fourleaf clovers.” Jennifer Bain was hosted by Tourism PEI, which did not review or approve this story.