Fiona damage to mussel leases creates tangled mess on P.E.I.'s south shore

Mussel fishers in Nine Mile Creek, P.E.I., have spent the weeks since Fiona gathering up the buoys, lines and cement blocks swept away during the storm. 

Some of the debris was carried as far away as Orwell on the Island's south shore, more than 16 kilometres away.  

Gerry MacDonald fishes lobster and mussels out of Nine Mile Creek.

He said they have been able to retrieve about 15 per cent of the mussel lines and anchors, but the rest will need to be replaced in time for next season.

"Devastating. All of our equipment is gone, in a pile out there, so [we] have to rebuild right from the start, and clean up the mess besides," MacDonald said.

"We've got some buoys back, but the mussels, they're all in a pile. Cement blocks are pretty well broke off, and the lines are all chafed and ruined."

'All got tangled up'

MacDonald said he, his brother Donald, and Andrew Bryanton each had 20 lines, that all drifted toward the Charlottetown Harbour.

"They all got tangled up in each other," MacDonald said.  

"We think that a tree probably come off the shore, and once it hooked in one line, it was just a domino effect."

MacDonald said they are trying to retrieve as many of the mussels as they can, but have lost more than 80 per cent of them as well.

"The mussels were too small to harvest, so we couldn't do anything before the storm," MacDonald said. 

"We're close to the shore, and we didn't really expect anything to happen to our mussel lines, but anyway, that's the storm."

Harvesting what is left of the mussels is also time-consuming because of all the tangled lines, taking three times as long to harvest, bringing in debris as they find it.

"Usually we can go out within an hour, get a load of mussels, and it's about three hours to a load roughly now," said Andrew Bryanton.

The P.E.I. Department of Fisheries sent out a barge this week to pick up a large bundle of buoys that has been stuck in the Northumberland Strait since September.

"The outside leases took off and went down to Orwell in a ball, and were there for a long time and couldn't be moved," said Donald MacDonald, who fishes out of Nine Mile Creek and has a lease near where the tangled buoys landed. 

"It was a ball of buoys, and it was stuck solid in 30 feet."

MacDonald said there will be longer term impacts from the Fiona damage, and most at Nine Mile Creek will have fewer mussels in the water next season.

"We have our seed which we had salvaged a bit, but it also cleaned our seed out too, so 70 per cent of our seed is gone, which sets us back for next year," MacDonald said. 

"So the following year, we should be back in the game. We're gonna re-line, re-block and go again, and hope there's no more Fionas."

MacDonald said the mussel fishers will be taking precautions to try to avoid another massive loss of gear. 

"Whichever way the wind blows, if it's that amount of wind, we're not safe," MacDonald said. 

"We're putting more blocks on, heavier line on, and more anchors in, and hope for the best. But you don't know, right?"

The mussel fishers at Nine Mile Creek said they have applied to Fiona compensation programs. 

Earlier this fall, Peter Warris of the Aquaculture Alliance said the initial estimate of damage from Fiona was roughly $70 million.

That included damage to gear, mussel socks and seed, which Warris said would impact the industry for years to come.