When asked to describe the first few weeks of the lobster fishery in LFA 34, Hubert Saulnier, who has fished from his home port of Meteghan River for the past 46 years, said that “catches were down but landings were up.”
While it sounds like an oxymoron, he was right. Initial landings were down from a year ago, but since fishermen could fish almost every day during those first two weeks, overall landings were up.
Prices have also been good — staying above $6/pound for that period, up a dollar or more from the previous December.
“I’ve never seen so many fishable days at the opening of the season,” he said.
There’s a saying around these parts that if fishermen aren’t complaining too much, auto dealerships owners will be smiling.
They were smiling.
However, there have been talk of issues the quality of the landed product, especially from harvesters fishing in deeper water, which up to this year were producing a greater share of the catch as fishermen lined up to have super 45-footers built so they could safely fish grounds beyond Lobster Bay.
“I’ve heard from many buyers from here to Halifax say that 60 per cent of what they bought ended up at canneries with only 10 per cent could be shipped to premier markets in Asia and Europe,” Saulnier said.
In one instance, a harvester had 26 crates or 2,600 pounds of lobsters deemed unfit for the fresh market trade.
Stewart Lamont of Tangier Lobster said he knew 48 hours into the season that there was a quality issue with 30 to 50 per cent of the catch failing the grade as a premium marketable product.
On top of this, the Canadian dollar strengthened little in February, creating a 10-point loss.
“This past winter we were paying up to $10 a pound for crates which were 30 to 50 per cent softshell. We must have had rocks in our head,” he said.
Lamont would like to see a two-price system with top dollar being paid for the premium product and a lesser amount for a product destined for the canneries.
As of March, very little product was moving due to the price. There is always a lull following St. Valentine’s Day in North America and Europe and the Chinese New Year in Asia.
Lamont feels the Canadian brand was struck a blow with the quality issue, which could adversely impact the industry down the road if not dealt with.
Efforts are underway in Nova Scotia for quality control measures to be introduced, which could lead to grading the product, a major step in dealing with the ‘crate run’ problem.
Why was the offshore product in LFA 34 so poor this year?
Water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine could be one of the problems, leading to a molt which was two to four weeks later than usual this fall.
Temperatures have remained in the 40-degree Fahrenheit range, except for two days in February when they fell into the 30s.
The processor-canner sector in the Maritime Provinces depends a great deal on product from New England to keep the operations going. Over 69 million pounds were shipped across the border in 2014, but this fell to less than 67 million pounds last year.
Very little processing was done in the U.S. due to restrictions on the sale and movement of cooked or frozen lobster products, so Canadian processors were one of the few markets for the ‘soft’ lobsters landed during the summer months.
This has changed as processing plants in Maine are emerging and laws could be changed in Massachusetts to allow more processing in that state.
The Maine processing sector has grown from five companies in 2010 to 15 firms which handled 20 million pounds of lobster meat in 2013. While these production figures seem paltry to the Canadian output of 150 million pounds, competition for the raw product is bound to escalate as more processing plants emerge in New England.
One of the ways to increase the worth of an industry is by initiating value-added products and the processors are doing just that.
The glut of lobsters evident during the December fishery in LFA 33-34 highlighted another problem which needs addressing in the commercial fishery and that is the unavailability of manpower when needed.
In New Brunswick, one processing plant had to dump a tonne and a half of lobsters because it was short staffed.
The problem involves cutbacks in the temporary foreign worker program initiated by the former Harper government. This policy has already thrown some processors out of business and if not changed will lead to serious problems both in the fisheries and the agriculture sector where there is a heavy emphasis on seasonal work.
The commercial fishery has a manpower problem both ashore and at sea as the workforce ages and it is becoming harder to find replacements for retirees.
