Peter Andrey Smith
Weir Fishing for the Last Sardine Cannery in North America
Seeking Herring by the Mouth of the Bay of Fundy
Just after daybreak, Jeff Foster motored the Loose Change, a 30-foot seine skiff around the headlands of Canada’s Grand Manan Island. Heavy September winds kicked up steady sets of four-foot waves and a swift tide rushed into the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, roiling the surface with frothy chop and forming a long eddy that appeared to stretch to the coast of Maine, six miles to our west. The boat was running full throttle against the tide and the wind, like a souped-up lawnmower pushing through an overgrown lawn.
Foster stood in the noisy little booth of a wheelhouse, rocking forward and back in the rolling swells. He popped a menthol Fisherman’s Friend lozenge. The damp morning air smelled of eucalyptus and burnt motor oil. Foster headed down the backside of the island on a seven-mile run to check Money Cove weir, a heart-shaped enclosure made of 55-foot sweet gum stakes driven into the sea floor, topped with birch, and dressed with netted twine. With any luck, there would be fish inside. “We been a good six weeks here without any herring,” he said.
Foster, a thin, muscular guy with forearms covered in tattoos, had on a well-worn chamois shirt and neon-orange bib pants. He’s a lifelong islander who speaks in the parsimonious, drawn-out way typical of Down East. When he described the fish he was after, it almost sounded as if he were chasing heron. We reached Money Cove and he steered the skiff into the mouth of the weir, idled the Loose Change, and leaped into a little flat-bottomed boat that we’d been towing. “You ever been in a dory?” he asked. “These things’ll scare you to death before they drown you.” The dory pitched and tilted as we circled inside the weir. Foster unspooled a weighted copper wire, dropped the lead end into the frigid water, and throttled the dory’s outboard. When the weight hit the mass of fish, the line shook. I couldn’t see anything, but Foster guessed the weir had between 50 and 60 hogsheads — over 30 tons — of herring. “Yeah, I’d say there’s a boatload.”
Out on the water, Foster is something of an anomaly. He not only catches fish for a living but he catches them in a weir. “A lot of the other boys can’t do two things at once. They just go lobster fishing,” he told me. “All I’ve got is the weirs. In the winter, I go in the woods and cut wood.” From June through October of 2011 — in other years, it could be as early as April and as late as November — he fished three weirs on Grand Manan. He doesn’t use bait. He waits for the tides, the winds, and the weather to align, at which time he expects that, of all the places where herring could swim — some 30,000 square miles in the Gulf of Maine alone — the fish will find their way through a narrow gap into a weir, which sits like a frog with its mouth agape. Remarkably, this is exactly what happens. Sometimes.
Atlantic herring (Clupea herengus) are a peripatetic species, wandering up continental shelves on both sides of the Atlantic in dense silvery schools. In fall, juvenile herring tend to migrate into the shallow waters to feed on plankton, shrimp, and mini crustaceans (copepods), and to spawn. On Georges Bank, a single undulating school — hundreds of millions of fish — can stretch for 25 miles before the fish venture into shallower waters for a night of, in the words of biologists, “synchronized reproductive activities.” Herring are unpredictable, so tricking them into a stationary net requires keen observation and good luck. Foster was one of many people who repeated some variation on a story in which an older, wiser man makes this observation: “There isn’t a fish in the ocean that will drive a man any crazier than a herring.”
When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August darks,” when the tides are on and running hard, phosphorescent organisms can light up, or “fire,” weirs, almost like daylight. Light provides a good example of the enigmatic nature of herring. While they flee the electric lights onboard purse seiners, so the boats fish in darkness, as the day dims toward twilight, herring tend to migrate upward to feed near the surface, sometimes chasing luminescent organisms. (When you gut fish in the dark, you can find tiny glowing orbs in their stomachs.) In the late 19th century, dorymen exploited this behavior by lighting birchbark and kerosene torches over their bows and scooping the fish out of the water. One night when they were in their teens, Foster’s sons Carter and Justin collected wood along the beach and lit a huge bonfire under the high cliffs near their dad’s weir. The following day, the Fosters hauled in the biggest bunch of herring they had ever seen.
The night before we visited the weir, under a waxing moon and the spring tide’s swift three-knot current, the herring swam into a leader net stretched between the weir and the rocky shoreline. Now they were trapped in the weir, unable to find their way out past the tricky inward-curving mouth. Foster called the catch in to the cannery as he motored back to Whale Cove. He planned to wait until the evening: an hour and a half to low water, when the tide empties Money Cove, the time would be right to seine.
Fishing means waiting — waiting for the annual northward migration, waiting for the herring to come off bottom, waiting for the right conditions to haul them in. With waiting come risks and rewards. Captive herring can be poached by horsehead seals, which roam like packs of hungry coyotes. Herring kept in temporary captivity don’t eat much. “A herring will tend to clean up,” Foster said. “It makes for a more desirable pack of fish. They always claim that the weirs have a better-quality fish.” Herring caught offshore, in purse seines or trawlers, often come in “feedy,” meaning they have full stomachs that can hasten decomposition or cause “belly burst.” The stomachs may also contain shrimp, so the fish aren’t kosher. Even more remarkable is that by the time a weir-caught herring is packed inside a shiny little three-by-four-and-a-half-inch aluminum can that sells for $1.29, it’s simply a Brunswick sardine.
“Sardine” is a slippery term. Originally, the word referred to pilchards (C. pilchardus) caught near Sardinia. In the 19th century, “Russian sardines” — actually juvenile herring (C. herengus) from Norway that were canned in Germany — commanded the New York market. The 1870 outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War provided an immediate incentive for finding a replacement on this side of the Atlantic. George Burnham made the first attempt in Maine using French methods, but he failed on account of “inability to get rid of the herring-oil flavor.” The foggy Bay of Fundy doesn’t dry fish out prior to canning quite the way Mediterranean air does. In 1875, however, fish tycoon Julius Wolff figured out a way to pack “home-made Russians” in olive oil, at the Eagle Preserved Fish Company in Eastport. By 1901, the sardine market had been cornered by 68 Maine canneries, although, as Hugh M. Smith, a US fisheries commissioner, wrote, “The taste for French sardines has been acquired and perpetuated in the United States because of the long-continued unsatisfactory quality of American sardines.” It’s hardly a surprise, then, that some brokers not only fought to retain the term “sardines,” but also in some cases attempted to exploit the Mediterranean cachet by calling a pack of fish “genuine French sardines” and a “product of France.”
In 1921, anyone could buy a five-cent tin of sardines and a package of Uneeda biscuits and call it lunch. Canneries opened in California, where John Steinbeck immortalized their stink and grating noise. At the peak of production in 1950, Maine alone produced more than three million tins. “Silver darlings” filled many an autoworker’s lunchpail, but unlike lobster, East Coast sardines never transcended their reputation as cheap canned fish for the poor residents of cold-water flats. Americans turned more and more to boneless canned tuna. Today, “sardine” remains an imprecise marketing term that refers to at least 21 different species of young fish in the Clupeidae family, and the geographic labeling is equally misleading. Norway’s fjord-caught sardines are often packed in Poland, French ones come from Moroccan packers, and some Brunswicks are caught in the Gulf of Maine. Apart from a few fish packed for tourists at one cannery in California, only one sardine cannery, Connors Bros., survives in all of the United States and Canada.
The town of Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick — population 952 — slopes down to the bay. Offices for Cooke Aquaculture and Connors Bros. line Main Street, alongside square wooden houses. The grocery store stocks sardines on wooden pallets; they’re available by the can or the case. The high school hockey team is the Silver Kings. At the end of the road, the M/V Grand Manan V ferries residents and tourists over to the island. In the harbor, carrier boats and the boats of Connors’ own fishing fleet pump tons of herring into the plant through a long metal tube. The fish slide down a conveyor belt, slip through metal devices that grade them by size, and are flumed into holding tanks, where they’re held on ice or in refrigerated saltwater. Tony Hooper, a Connors executive, told me, “What we caught last night at midnight will be in the can by noon today.” I met Hooper on a Friday morning after fishing on Grand Manan. He showed me his extensive collection of canned sardines — “product of Poland,” “product of Thailand,” and “product of Malaysia” — and then took a barrage of phone calls. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” he told one caller. “Everyone’s having problems. It’s frustrating.”
Connors is owned by Bumblebee Foods, and while the San Diego-based company closed and demolished Grand Manan’s cannery in 2004 and closed Stinson Seafood, the last packer in Prospect Harbor, Maine, in 2010, Tony doesn’t think one off-year for fishing will shutter the last cannery. “This has been a down year for the weirs, but we’re far from the point where we’d think about closing down the plant,” he said. “As long as there are fish in the Bay of Fundy, there will be someone packing sardines in Blacks Harbour.”
Atlantic herring stocks appear to have rebounded from their collapse in the 1970s. Still, no one can explain why fewer and fewer fish appear to be coming into the weirs. This year, fishermen observed abundant quantities of herring offshore, but the fish migrated inshore less frequently. The change in behavior might be due to temperature fluctuations, the ebb of plankton, fewer predators, or pollution associated with runoff or salmon farming. If herring get smothered by purse-seine nets or waste in a weir or a cove, they don’t return to that place; some people believe farmed salmon, which are fed dead herring, also keep the fish away. “There’s nothing definitive,” Gary Melvin, a herring biologist, told me. “Every time you try to create a general rule or view of things, you find the exception.”
A couple of workers milled around outside the cannery that day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a catch that apparently was not arriving after all. Inside, employees wearing white hairnets, blue smocks, and yellow earplugs stood along various packing lines. The open cans are stacked on racks and pushed into pre-cookers, where they are steamed. Then the cans are drained and filled again with spring water, oil, mustard sauce, tomato sauce, or soybean oil. A machine slaps on a lid, and the sardines are sterilized and sealed inside big cylindrical pressure cookers called batch retorts.
Fresh-caught herring are sweet-fleshed and soft. Once they’re steamed and packed in cans, they have a stronger, saltier taste with a more pronounced oiliness. The fattier the fish, the stronger the flavor, which, depending on your feeling about herring, can be a good or bad thing. (But if you’ve tasted the contents of a bulging can of Swedish surströmming, fermented herring, these seem pretty tame.) The herring caught in the summer are generally fattier than those spent after spawning. Fat content also varies from year to year; 2010 was overall what you might call a low-fat vintage. Sardines also take on the characteristics of their environment, and compared with their Mediterranean counterparts — or Norwegian brislings, which the smaller ones more closely resemble — an East Coast sardine reflects the crisp, cold Bay of Fundy, a place full of zooplankton flushed in and out on the tides. Some people can taste the difference between a Newfoundland herring and one caught off Grand Manan, but these subtle regional differences matter much less than the quality of the catch before it’s packed. At Connors, weir-caught herring command a premium since the fish can be frozen for processing later and some of those caught early in the year can be packed manually, eight to ten to a can, under Brunswick’s Jutlands label. “Weir-caught fish are firmer. Feed makes a fish go soft. Trouble is, they’re harder to get,” Brandon Hawkins, another Connors employee told me. “It’s a dying art. Forty thousand dollars a year is a lot of money to put into a weir. To maybe catch a fish. Or maybe not.”
Herring might not be the most desirable fish for humans to eat, but they provide the basis for the lucrative northeastern salmon and lobster industries. Most of the herring caught in the Gulf of Maine — double or triple the volume that goes for human consumption — end up in what is essentially one of the world’s largest, most profitable aquaculture enterprises: lobstermen bait their traps with herring and continue to feed undersized lobsters until they reach market weight. Consequently, bait herring coming from the bottom of a 10,000-pound haul can have the texture of oatmeal, the stink of surströmming, and the flavor of cat food. Since lobster represents the dominant industry in Maine and on the southern Fundy coast, quality hardly matters, and as everyone told me again and again, “Weir fishing is a dying art.”
As planned, in the late afternoon Jeff Foster’s crew, an assortment of friends and relatives, gathered at a gravel lot off Whale Cove Road next to a dilapidated wooden “office,” which used to be a car garage. They ran two dories out to the Loose Change, unfolded and refolded the seine, tossing the day-old fish to the gulls and joking about hangovers and bait bags.
Once they reached Money Cove, however, they were all business. “Okay,” Foster said, “let’s do it, boys.” He dropped the lead end of the seine. The crew held onto the weir stakes and pulled the skiff around clockwise, so that the seine lined the inside of the weir from the surface to the seafloor. Artie Neves, the diver, went under to make sure nothing was tangled up on the rocky bottom. Meanwhile, Carter had hopped into a dory and gunned the outboard at the opposite end of the weir, making sure the herring headed towards the seine. Eventually, Foster winched in a rope, closing the bottom of the seine. The herring were spawning and the dark water was full of roe. The air smelled fishy, and for the first time I could see the herring — a silvery mass flitting about, around and around, in perfect sync. The men all leaned over the starboard side, rolling the seine in and making the boat’s slight list toward the catch all the more expectant. The crew worked together to pull in the net and dry up the catch. The shimmering fish were concentrated in a flapping heap.
Waiting alongside, the Michael Eileen, a refurbished wooden sardine carrier, dropped the end of a large plastic hose into their midst. I had heard that herring make a squeak when they surface, but the only noise was the sound of the vacuum sucking up the fish. Water poured off the carrier’s deck as the herring shot through the hose and into the carrier’s hold. Iridescent scales floated on the water. A few of the crew lit up cigarettes or cracked open cans of Bud Light. “When we put the twine back on in June, we got 350 hogsheads, but haven’ t really done much since,” Foster shouted to the carrier crew. “It’s been a good six weeks. What a summer.” The Loose Change righted herself as the pile of fish disappeared. Outside the weir, the sun set a fiery red on the Maine coast and the moon rose a brilliant red over the island’s cliffs. Someone finally shouted, “You got ’em!” The day’s catch: 62 hogsheads of herring.
That night, the crew motored over to the gully to try to fix a broken stake on another weir. They worked against the tide until a rope suddenly separated: the whole expedition was for naught. The crew is a reticent bunch, and they said even less than usual on the trip back. Yet, beneath it all, there was a feeling that you never knew what tomorrow would bring. On the sonar, little blue dots glowed all along the island’s ledge. The herring looked as though they were coming in, although when I talked to Foster later, he said they didn’t catch anything. After years on the water, he admitted that he was still learning. “They’re a strange being,” he said. “If we knew everything about a herring, we’d have annihilated them.” ●
