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Looking out for the dry days!

A local saying in Shetland is “never cast a cloot till da mont o May is oot” and for those of you who don’t know what a cloot is – it refers to clothing and is an offering of wisdom suggesting it is not wise in to get too summery with your wardrobe choices till June. Well if the weather recently has been anything to go by I would certainly agree with this advice.
Wind, rain, more wind and some snow has marked the last few weeks and I should know this was always going to be the case as soon as we lifted out our workboat to clean and paint a few weeks ago.  Progress has thus been slow due to the weather delays but as I write - the forecast for the coming week is looking more promising so we hope to get the boat back in the water soon.
There is certainly plenty of work for the boat in the planner to be getting on with.  We have been harvesting plenty of mussels recently with our other boat as always, but this is also the season to get new ropes into the sea to catch the juvenile mussels, and we always aim to get this done late spring and early summer.  Our marine biology is a little behind our mainland Scotland colleagues, given we are so much further north, but time marches on very quickly and once the sea temperatures start to accelerate we need to be ready.
This year we will be putting around 30,000 ropes to sea to collect the small mussels.  These go to our most sheltered sites which give us the best chance of getting good settlement of mussels.  It is not an exact science however and for various reasons some years the spat collection is not as good as we would like.  This is a big worry for us as we need mussels to make our farm operate.
This year for the first time we will also be trialling a totally new method of spat collection with the beginning of the Scottish Shellfish Hatchery Stepping Stone Project here in Shetland.  Scottish Shellfish along with experts at NAFC will be using a hatchery to breed juvenile mussels to put out to our sites throughout the summer.
If successful it would give us a new source of mussels to grow on our farms.  But it is early days and there are more questions than answers at this stage so we will just have to see how it goes but exciting times none the less.
In the meantime we just need to focus on meeting our biological deadlines so if we could just get enough dry days to get this boat back in the water, we could then launch her and then get on with the 30,000 ropes we need to get in the sea.  As ever we are totally tied to nature in this business but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

View our timelapse video below.

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Preparing for our first harvest

We're into March already and although the weather is coming at us with its usual vigour, we are slightly encouraged by the stretching day length - at long last - though there's still plenty of the winter to come.

I often wonder how people coped in winter hundreds of years back, living in the rough stone huts, the ruins of which now cover Mull in their hundreds. However wet and cold we get, you always know that once you are home, it will be warm, dry and dinner will be ready. It's always very humbling to walk the silent deserted glens, passing by the ruined townships that once were homes of so many hardy people, victims of an agricultural and economic disaster on a massive scale, when things were so bad that to leave, or being forced to leave, was the only option for most.

Back in real time, there's still plenty to keep everyone busy, and thankfully some undercover jobs for the worst days. The mussel ropes will need reconditioned, this is a task that occupies every bad weather day through our winter months, on better days we've got boats to overhaul, moorings to replace and mussel sites to inspect for storm damage. This week we have one boat on the slipway for a new shaft bearing and a paint-up. With any luck we will be starting the first harvest next week - fingers crossed...

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Oysters ready for a Spring take-off!

Winter time is turning into one of the busiest harvesting periods for the oyster farms with excellent sales through December, a small respite in January and then even better sales through February culminating in the big push for St. Valentine's Day. This is surely a boon for all oyster farmers in what used to be traditionally a quiet time of year. So well done to SSMG staff for working hard on the marketing to make this happen.

An article about our own farm in the Waitrose magazine will have no doubt helped sales. It is great for consumers to understand what goes into producing a quality oyster and of course the photograph that accompanied the article highlights the wild, remote location.

While all this is good news for oyster turnover, it also brings with it some logistical problems particularly for Island farms who are always constrained by transport problems in winter.

The weather this winter has been particularly unpredictable, with a number of named storms creating havoc with ferries and for us potential problems in meeting delivery dates. However with a careful watch on the forecasts we have juggled deliveries to meet all our commitments - and now the Spring approaches surely it will get easier.

Coupled with this poor weather is the unusual fact that there has only been one week of proper working low tides since November. Low pressure systems that bring all the storms and push the tide high, conversely, don't go out far. Intertidal oyster farming depends on the tide dropping enough for the tractor and trailer to get round the trestles and pick up the oyster bags that are strapped to them. Our own farm anticipated this might be a problem and had built up good stocks of marketable oysters higher up the beach, accessible at all but the poorest of tides, still, this didn't stop us plunging up to the top of our waders to get oysters when it looked like we needed more. A small hole in the wader at this time of year and boy do you know about it!   Like other oyster farms we managed to keep grading even when it looked impossible, it is amazing what you can do when the pressure is really on.

The last big tide in February allowed us to work longer and with our first delivery of seed, thankfully gave us time to have all this securely strapped down at low water, before the next storm rolled along.

There is much work awaiting us as the weather improves and the tides finally reveal all the oysters that have been lurking under the water for the last three months. Our farm is investing in new equipment including a water grader -- this should improve the stock and allow us to grade the smaller oysters throughout the year. An added benefit allows us to grade at any time of year rather than trying to do everything in a short time in the Spring as we normally do.

So there we have it - the oysters have hunkered down, battled against the winter odds and are ready for a spring take-off much the same as those who farm them!

Have a good season.

Nick

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Growing our Mussels

As a mussel farmer one of the most important jobs after catching enough wild spat (mussel larvae) on our ropes in the spring is to ensure we give them enough space to grow and thrive.

As a cooperative we are a group of farmers and recently we have been helping a neighbouring farm to thin down some of his 2014 crop of spat which was much too dense on the ropes after an especially great settlement last year.  After a year the ropes were groaning with over 6000 small mussels per metre and so needed a little more space so as to enable them to access enough food and nutrients from the water in the tidal flows.

We took two of our boats to his site and set about stripping, de-clumping and then re-seeding the mussels back onto new rope he had just imported from New Zealand.   We had a daunting 96 km of rope to fill and at the start of the job we wondered if we would have enough mussels to complete the job.  But the initial dropper samples had been accurate and we managed to thin the mussels down by almost six times onto the new rope.

How do we manage to get them onto new rope I hear you ask? Well that’s a good question and we have a machine to help us with that job.  It is a hopper, belt and measuring wheel arranged to dispense the special growing rope with a covering of mussels which are held in place by cotton socking. This socking will biodegrade over the next few weeks and give the mussels just enough time to throw out some new bysses (threads) to hold onto the ropes themselves.

When we come back next year to harvest, the ropes will be again groaning with weight (we hope) but instead of being just 25mm long they will be well over 60mm each and full of meat ready for market.

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inverlussa sunrise
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Sunrise in Inverlussa

The autumn is with us now on Mull, the red deer are rutting and the roaring of the stags carries for miles, echoing through the mountain glens. And to our relief it’s been exceptional weather, so far we’ve had six weeks of more or less calm dry days and on the better ones, sunrises worth getting up in the dark for.

  • Beautiful Sunrises...

    inverlussa sunrise

 

Our harvesting of marketable mussels has all but finished for present and the rest of the year will be occupied with mussel husbandry, machinery repairs, overhauling boats and reconditioning mussel ropes for next year. On top of this, some of the older moorings on the mussel lines are around 20 years old now, and we really need to replace some of them. Plenty to do guys!

Although the shortening days and disappearing plankton which the mussels feed on will slow down the growth of mussels and also most other filter feeding shellfish, we always hope that as least it may slow down the growth of the other unwelcome shellfish visitors, which the mussels are host to.  The barnacles and tube worms which can grow on the mussel shells don’t cause any harm, however they do give the cooks more work in preparing, and we are always trying to find some clever way of avoiding them when we grow the crop. Or, if they do appear we’re always on the lookout for a new machine which can remove them, sadly that machine is yet to be invented, so we can only ask for patience please, and hope that what is inside the shell is more than worthwhile compensation for the odd barnacle on the outside!

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