BOUYING UP GRAND MANAN'S FUTURE.

Despite predictions of doom, traditional fisheries are still the backbone of the economy of this New Brunswick island

I only have to look at the phone book to understand that the Grand Manan of my childhood is long gone. My family names, Harvey and Brown, Ingersoll and Russell, and further back still, Benson, Foster, and Wilcox, are still there after two hundred years. But in those tiny printed columns is name alter name I don't recognize: Bacon, Badeau, Badger, Bakke, Beaudet, Bear, these "Bs" interspersed among the familiar Bagleys, Banks, Basses, Bensons, Boyntons, and Browns were not in the Grand Manan listings during the 1950s and 1960s. Search any other letter and you'll get the same result: Dozens, perhaps hundreds of newcomers to the remote rock that natives, meaning people born there, proudly wear on their sleeve like a heart. It's mysterious, then, that Grand Manan has been continuously occupied by twenty-five hundred souls, give or take a few, since the late 1800s. It appears the influx of come-from-aways has done little more than offset the inevitable annual exodus of a certain number of native children looking to find their adult niche somewhere beyond the rocky confines of island society.

Grand Manan's life force--its economic mainstay and its identity--is still shaped by the traditional fishery, arguably the healthiest in the entire Bay of Fundy. While fishermen and fish are fewer in number, more money is made in the fishery today than ever before, with prices offsetting declines. Fishing boats still crowd the wharves, which themselves are in constant need of expansion. Granted, some of the boats tied up at the wharf service the economic newcomer, salmon aquaculture. Jobs in that growing industry have replaced jobs lost in fish processing and on boats as the fishing fleet has contracted for various reasons. Other boats, when they shed their lobster gear in June, don colorful striped awnings, install benches and binoculars, and head out with tourists to the modern-day whaling grounds, rather than rig up for the summer herring runs.

Of course the island has changed. So has the fishery on which it has been built. In my relatively short lifetime I have seen the smoked herring industry disappear. From a thriving industry comprising hundreds of independently owned fish stands (the complex of stringing, smoking, and boning sheds needed for each operation), now there is one. The rest have gone the way of historic sites, dilapidated monuments to a bygone way of life for hundreds of families who owned and worked in the fish stands. The inshore weir fishery, in the southern end of the island is also gone, several of the former weir privileges given over to salmon aquaculture sites. With one or two exceptions, all that remain of this traditional summer fishery are the deep-water weirs on the back of the island, remnants of a glorious past. Herring carriers, beautiful streamlined vessels that turn heads when spied plying the coastal waters or tied up at the wharf, used to follow the mobile seining fleet all around the Scotia-Fundy region. The new generation of seiners that came on in the 1970s could carry their own herring, and an entire sector of the fishing fleet shrank to no more than a handful of boats that carry herring from weirs to factories. Several fish draggers and herring seiners have also disappeared from the fleet.

Yet, the island bread and butter remains fish. Weirs are still used, primarily in North Head, White Head, and in deep-water sites off the back of the island. Herring is still processed at the Connors Brothers sardine factory in Seal Cove, the single largest employer on the island and one of two plants remaining of a huge sardine-packing industry in the region earlier in the century. A few draggers and more gill-netters and handliners still land the highly prized haddock and the lesser pollack. Scallops and sea urchins fill in the gaps in these year-round enterprises.

While each of these fisheries is distributed around the entire Grand Manan fleet, depending on the skill and persuasion of the individual fisherman, nearly all boats fish for lobster. Through waxing and warring of fish stocks over the past thirty years, this one peculiar creature has flourished. The past decade has been dominated by record catches and record prices, making lobster the mainstay, in some cases the motherlode, of fishing families' incomes.

Alongside the ubiquitous Cape Islanders that serve all these diverse fisheries, gear like dories and skiffs, hacks, kibbins, and burlap sacks are still dedicated to the hand-harvest fisheries. Clams, dulse, periwinkles, and more recently rockweed remain important supplements to many island incomes. So while many fishing communities find themselves in crisis, both materially and spiritually, Grand Manan has managed to hang on, indeed, to thrive. And while some islanders may be tempted towards smugness in considering their position, this anomaly has more to do with nature and fortunes of fate than any superior grasp of the art of fishing.

Grand Manan sits at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, surrounded by oceanographic and biological phenomena of global significance. These outer Fundy waters are a virtual smorgasbord for fish, marine mammals, and birds from the smallest to largest. It is no accident that the deep basins between Grand Marian and Digby Neck, Nova Scotia, are the summer feeding grounds of hundreds of great whales, including most of the remaining population of the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Nor is it by chance that bird-watchers from around the world make annual pilgrimages to Grand Manan. The Outer Bay attracts the largest concentration of nonbreeding, surface-feeding seabirds in the northwest Atlantic. Marine creatures of all sorts find in the waters off Grand Manana reliable, hearty meal. At the base of this salty food chain are creatures as inauspicious as the whales are awesome. The "lower orders," these marine invertebrates are called. And yet without them, many invisible to the naked eye, there would be no life in the oceans.

Mature biologist Art Mackay grew up in the outer Fundy region. His fascination with the lower orders reflects a depth of understanding of the real driving force behind Fundy's fecundity that is often lost on those whose sights are set on the large, charismatic residents of these waters. Indeed, the lower orders themselves attracted international attention to Grand Manan as far back as 1852. That year, Dr. William Stimpson, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, spent the summer on Grand Manan cataloging approximately two hundred varieties of marine invertebrates. Most of these were new species, never before identified.

The Bay of Fundy's biological richness is driven by the massive tides that slosh in and out of the funnel-shaped bay twice daily. Not surprisingly, "the Ripplings," as the tide eddies several miles from shore are known, is today a well-known fishing ground off White Head Island. This and other similar grounds are unique in their physical as well as biological features. Here are upwellings, special areas where tides and currents combine with the ocean floor topography to move vast quantities of nutrients off the deep bottom and into the water column. Thus suspended, these nutrients fuel the production of plankton, which in turn fuels great feeding frenzies by species higher on the food chain. Gulls and other seabirds congregating over tell-tale glassy streaks surrounded by rippling and fast-moving water are good indicators of small-scale nutrient upwellings. A huge nutrient upwelling is found off the southern tip of Grand Manan, generated as the powerful current flowing into the bay around the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia connects with the ebb and flow of the gigantic Fundy tides, all the while being forced between numerous banks, ledges, and shoals. On these shallows, sunlight interacts with nutrients to produce even more plankton.

All in all, it makes for good fishing. Fishing grounds with names like Murre Ledges, Finnegans, Gravelly, Bulkhead, Crack Grounds, Northeast Bank, Southwest Bank, and Flaggs Bank were first mapped in 1887, and many are still fished today. Cod, haddock, pollack, herring, flatfish, shark, shad, sturgeon, gaspereau, salmon, and striped bass make annual migrations into the Bay of Fundy to feed. Some migrate in from their spawning grounds on Browns and Georges Banks offshore. Others move in from the Gulf of Maine, while still others travel from as far away as Florida to feast at Fundy's table.

Two of the more notable items on the planktonic menu are copepods and krill. Crustaceans no bigger than a flea, copepods are the most numerous of the zoo-plankton community in our temperate waters. While these weak swimmers generally spend their time three hundred feet or more below the surface during the day, moving to the surface at night, when caught in a cold-water upwelling they are forced to the surface where they are feasted upon by surface-feeding birds such as phalaropes. Shrimp-like krill are served up on a platter in the same manner. They are especially noticeable because of their red pigment, and when they are forced by the currents to the surface en masse they can turn acres of water red. Characteristically, fishermen call it feed, and feed it is. Everything from shearwaters, sooties, gulls, and herring to humpback and right whales feast on krill. There can be no doubting the significance of krill in the Fundy ecosystem. Humpback whales are known to consume one-and-a-half tons of krill, or about a million calories, each day. Longtime whale researcher Carl Haycock has observed humpbacks entering the Bay of Fundy in summer with their backbones clearly visible beneath their skin. When they leave at the end of the season, they are "bulging with blubber," well provisioned for their three-month winter fast dorm south. It is no wonder that a proposal to introduce a commercial krill fishery on the adjacent Scotian Shelf drew outrage front fishermen, conservationists, and coastal communities, eventually forcing the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to reject the notion of fishing so low on the food chain.

Yet the bay is much more than a summer-feeding ground. Lobster and scallops, the most valuable species fished, are year-round residents. So are some herring, juvenile cod and pollack, adult groundfish, and Atlantic salmon. Besides feeding, these species frequent nursery, spawning areas, and local overwintering grounds. Flaggs Cove in North Head is, in fact, the only recorded lobster "maternity ward" in the bay. Tiffs is an area where females prefer to go to dig nests and extrude their eggs. Divers who have witnessed the migration of thousands of very large females into Flaggs Cove during August and September describe the scene as absolutely phenomenal.

While the human population has not grown in over one hundred years, the standard of living certainly has. To a great extent, prosperity can be measured by trends in transportation. Tiffs is all the more true on an island, where in this case, the ferry rivals the fishery as a topic of public and private preoccupation. The Grand Manan ferry, which doubled vehicle and passenger capacity when it came into service in the early 1990s, routinely leaves frustrated travelers stranded on either side of the crossing. During the tourism season, two ferries running six crossings a day produce the same result. Much of this can be accounted for by the growing salmon aquaculture business, which is dependent on trucking for delivery of feed, smolts, and oilier supplies, as well as the export of the product. But a great deal of it is also passenger traffic, as islanders routinely travel to the mainland for shopping and medical services. Another indicator of unprecedented prosperity is a labor shortage. A late twentieth-century phenomenon is the import of families from Newfoundland to work in fish plants, on fish farms, and perhaps to a lesser extent on boats. This has come as women have largely withdrawn from the fishing-based work force, in large part due to family incomes that are stable enough to allow the luxury of forgoing what used to be essential work in sardine factories or smoked herring stands. Having said this, the changing face of the job market cannot be discounted. Several lobster canneries operated until early this century. As many as one hundred smoked herring operations ran full out for nearly the same number of years. For a time in the 1970s, two sardine factories operated during the summer, as did a groundfish processing plant. Sea urchins have also been processed on Grand Marian. Priority always went to women with families, since the contribution to the family income was generally essential.

Today, Grand Manan's fish-processing industry is a mere shadow of its former self. Gone are the smoked herring stands, the groundfish plant, the urchin roe processing, and the second sardine factory, some victim to shrinking fish supply but others to competition and changing markets. Yet this job shrinkage has not resulted in a glut, of women in the labor force. Most women no longer aspire to work in the fish. The remaining sardine factory straggles to attract a full complement of packers each year. Besides the fact that there are some new options (increased tourism is taking up some of the summer labor force, although earnings could well be better in the fish), there is also less of a need for many women to work. If more palatable jobs are not available, many, it seems, are in a financial position that they can choose not to pack fish.

Nonetheless, livelihoods are no less dependent on fish. The Grand Manan economy has been built on a diverse and therefore resilient fishery. Unlike the specialized fisheries elsewhere in Atlantic Canada where entire communities were dependent on one species (cod) or groundfish more generally, the Bay of Fundy fisheries have targeted several species over the course of a year. Thus, as annual fluctuations have occurred in one fishery, others have picked up the slack. The typical fishing year on Grand Manan and other Fundy communities resembles a bit of a seafood smorgasbord, utilizing different utensils and progressing through the various courses with brief respites between them to allow for digestion and renewal of appetite and gear.

The inshore fishing year begins in January, when many boats gear up for scalloping. They lay off in March and begin the transformation of boats and gear for the spring lobster fishery, which runs from April till late June. Those who will fish groundfish (cod, haddock, pollack) will quit lobstering early to get ready for a late-May, early June start, for handlining, gill-netting, bugging, and dragging. This fishery has traditionally run through the summer, but increasingly, small quotas are caught quickly, or worse, the fish are so scarce it doesn't pay to take the boat out day after clay. In either case, they tie up early. Weir-building begins when lobstering ends, in anticipation of the summer herring runs. These are dismantled by September, when the risk of using everything to a fall storm becomes too high. Fishermen then spend the fall getting ready for the bumper fishery of the year, the November-December lobster season.

All of these operations are conducted, with only a few exceptions, from forty-five-foot or smaller all-purpose boats called Cape Islanders. These marine workhorses are the model of efficiency and flexibility, lending themselves to quick conversions as the seasons change. A strictly modern conversion, for which it is also highly suitable, is from lobster boat to tour boat, a use to which several have been put as alternatives to summer groundfishing or weir tending.

For Grand Manan, the lobster boom has postponed much of the tough medicine dished out by declining groundfish stocks. But to be sanguine about the situation in the fishery would be foolish. As diversity in the natural world builds resilient, adaptive systems, so does economic diversity strengthen both home and community economies. Family incomes, while stable, are much more vulnerable than ever before. Lobster has come to fill a far greater share of the annual family income; thus the consequences of a downturn in that fishery, like in the others, would be disastrous. The probability of tiffs is hotly debated. Faced with record high catches, scientists are warning of troubling changes in the populations: The average size of lobsters has dropped and too many are caught before they have a chance to spawn. Fishermen argue the stocks are very healthy and stricter conservation measures are not needed. Whether or not the stocks are heading for trouble remains to be seen.

While scientists have done little investigation into the direct links between the widespread destruction of fish habitat and fish stock collapse, instinctively people living in coastal communities know this is happening. Estuaries--the zones where fresh river water mixes with salt ocean water--are fertile feeding and nursery grounds for many commercial species of fish, including groundfish. They rank with rain forests and coral reefs as some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. A 1997 survey of estuaries in the Bay of Fundy and Gulf of Maine done by the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston revealed widespread habitat loss caused by pollution, shoreline development, causeways and dams, and bottom dredging and dragging. Grand Mahan's fishery has been seriously affected by the confluence of all these factors. If fish stocks are to recover and the fishing economies of Grand Manan and other coastal communities to survive, there must be a fundamental shift in thinking, in knowledge, and in practice. The Bay of Fundy Marine Resource Centre and the Conservation Council of New Brunswick recently led a project with Bay of Fundy fishermen, including Grand Manan fishermen, to "write the rules" for community-based ecosystem management of fisheries. These have been accepted and embellished by fishermen in Stonington, Maine, and other areas.

The forecast for the Bay of Fundy fishery, of which Grand Manan is a vital part, may look stormy. Yet if there are seeds of hope, they can be found here: in the natural features that promote biological productivity and in the ingenuity and skill rooted in two centuries of fishermen.

Janice Harvey is marine conservation director for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. A Grand Manan native, she is also a columnist for the Telegraph Journal, in Saint John. A previous contributor to Americas, Tim Peters is an award-winning photographer whose work has been widely published. The book Rhythm of the Tides, on which this article is based, is available this summer through his web site: [e-mail].