Latest addition to mussel-farming fleet christened by first lady

BAR HARBOR – Though the wind blew raw and shivery and the sky hung leaden over Frenchman Bay Tuesday afternoon, it was a great day for a christening.

A crowd of a few dozen people gathered at the town pier to watch as first lady Karen Baldacci cracked a ribbon-wrapped bottle of champagne over the white and turquoise hull of the mussel-farming vessel Stewardship.

“Stewardship?” Baldacci asked as she wound up for the pitch, double-checking the name of the converted 1971 U.S. Navy landing craft with its crew. “OK, Stewardship. Gotcha.”

After a well-placed hit, the smashed glass lying in a pool of liquid was the visible symbol that the large vessel – Maine’s most recent addition to its growing fleet of aquaculture boats – is ready to husband and harvest some mussels.

Owner Theo De Koning is a fifth generation mussel farmer who moved here last year from the Netherlands with his family to bring technology and know-how to Maine’s aquaculture industry. His company, Aquaculture Harvesters LLC, has formed a partnership with Great Eastern Mussel Farms Inc. of Tenants Harbor, which will market the harvested shellfish.

De Koning came to Maine for the opportunity. “There’s a kind of potential here which people have not seen, and it is spectacularly beautiful,” his wife, Fiona De Koning, said. “Geographically, the Netherlands is quite small and there are 80 companies there already.”

Maine’s long coastline and cold, clean waters can be considered a frontier for the fledgling mussel farming industry, which now brings in about $7 million a year statewide. With more political support and technology, it could generate much more money, its proponents say.

“The potential on the coast of Maine is very large,” said Sebastian Belle, the executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association. “We could easily have a $100 million industry here. It wouldn’t take a lot.”

Shellfish aquaculture poses fewer environmental risks than fish farming, De Koning said. “We don’t add any food to the water,” he said. “You create cleaner water in the bay. [The mussels] are actually huge filters.”

Mussels can be farmed on hanging ropes or on rafts that perch atop the water, but De Koning has brought from the Netherlands a low-impact method of harvesting the shellfish with a sledlike mussel drag that is pulled by the boat.

“Our drag doesn’t go into the ground,” he said. “It goes under a layer of mussels and over the bottom.”

The drag was imported from the Netherlands along with other specialized equipment, and De Koning spent about six months refitting the Stewardship.

Though the actual harvesting of market-sized mussels will begin this summer, he and his crew have been working six days a week to gather seed mussels from around the bay and replanting them in more mussel-friendly areas.

“It’s like looking for a good slope on a hill for vineyards,” he explained.

In a year and a half, 50 acres of water column can produce enough mussels to feed 100,000 people a meal, according to De Koning. That’s about 200,000 pounds of mussels. But getting to that point will not be easy.

“It’s just hard, but we’ll get there,” he said.

De Koning said that the cost of refitting the landing craft, leasing farming sites around the bay and starting a company has been high, and a spur to remain in business in Maine for the long haul.

“I love the challenge,” De Koning said. “It’s great, it’s exactly what I wanted … but I wouldn’t like to do it again. We’re not going back.”