Fishing Difficult Waters

Jonesport through the Bay of Fundy

by Sandra Dinsmore

Low tide in Minas Basis, Bay of Fundy. Tide changes can be 50+ in the upper bay. The change occurs in 6 hours, emptying the upper bay. NOAA photo

Most people have heard that Canada’s Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. In 1975, The Guinness Book of World Records stated that the tide at Burntcoat Head in the Minas Basin on the Nova Scotia side of the Bay of Fundy can be 53 feet higher than at low tide. The average height variation in sea level from tides is three feet. At mid-tide, Fundy currents exceed 8 knots or 13 feet per second. Each day 160 billion tonnes of seawater flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy during one tide cycle. (A single tonne equals 2,204.6 lbs.) This is more than the combined flow of all the world’s freshwater rivers.

Water runs through Fundy’s Minas Channel so fast fishermen leave that bottom alone. As 78-year-old Minas Basin fisherman Glanville Travis says of the Minas Channel, “You don’t fish right there.” He starts to explain, then interrupts himself, saying, “It’s an area you have to learn.” The areas lobster fishermen have to learn, depending on where they fish, include the entire Bay of Fundy and Maine waters and bottom from Jonesport east. Travis says, “It takes three or four years to educate yourself to this type fishery.”

“We have different areas and different tides in different places in the Bay of Fundy,” Travis adds; “Nothing is ever the same.” Then, too, the waters have different currents and different back eddies, and they change. The one constant is that the tide goes from incoming to outgoing every six hours and whether high or low, when it reaches its ultimate height or ebb, for about an hour the tide, in a way, rests. This hour is called slack tide. Fishermen from Jonesport to Eastport and Perry, and the 99 license holders who fish the Bay of Fundy used to have to wait for slack tide to haul their traps. Some still do. The Fundy tides are so high and so strong they run buoys and plastic balloons under the surface.

Although not as extreme as the tides in the Bay of Fundy itself, downeast Maine’s tides are high and powerful fueled by two of the Bay of Fundy’s four sub-basins: Passamaquoddy Bay, off Perry; and Cobscook Bay, off Eastport. The southwest limit of the Bay of Fundy runs through Machias Seal Island and Little River Head. These tides and currents also affect downeast fishing.

From Jonesport east having to work around tides, currents, and eddies is part of the deal for lobster fishermen. Cutler’s John Drouin, 49, can attest to that; he has been fishing those waters since 1979.

When Drouin started, he could only haul his traps during slack tide because otherwise his buoys went under. But with inflatable Polypore trawl balloons and anchors—Drouin uses 35-lb. fluke-type anchors on either end of his trawls—he says, “We can haul all day. It’s a struggle at times, but as with any issue, we all learn to adapt.”

And adapt to tides, currents, and eddies downeast and Fundy fishermen certainly have. They are masters at it. Some fishermen, Drouin said, weld railroad track iron in the shape of a triangle on their traps, having measured the size required to become the weight needed: roughly 200 to 250 lbs. Drouin himself used to weight his traps with cement. He said a five-gallon bucketful weighs about 125 lbs. But despite his traps carrying all that weight, during full tides and storms, they would still get dragged around the bottom.

The Cutler fisherman stopped using what he calls heavy traps around 2001 partly because lifting them made his back sore and partly because of improved hauling equipment. He went from a 12- to a 14-inch pot hauler and said, “Bigger hydraulic pumps and motors help break the anchors out of the bottom, and bigger and better gear means less wear and tear on the components.” Drouin’s catches average just under 1 1/2 lbs. per pot in summer and up to 8 lbs. per pot in fall.

Greg Thompson, 65, lives in and fishes out of the Dipper Harbour/Point Lepreau, New Brunswick area. Although he’s directly on the Bay of Fundy, where tides and currents are strong, he and other fishermen in Lobster Fishing District 36have enough water to float their boats all the time. Thompson’s been fishing for around forty years. “Traditionally,” he says, “the farther out you go the better the fishing. So people were always trying to find a way to get out just a little farther.” He observes, “The fishermen in my father’s and grandfather’s time didn’t get many traps hauled in a slack. The wooden buoys didn’t “watch” (stay visible) very much, and [manila rope caused] so much drag. Now they’ve figured it out,” Thompson stated, “the hydraulic trap hauler was probably the biggest factor in the growth of technology.” He adds, “The Styrofoam buoy and poly rope came along at the same time. All these made fishing in the tide much more, I’ll say, profitable.”

Extraordinary tides are just one aspect of those Fundy and Fundy-influenced waters. Drouin says, “We have bottom from Jonesport east that goes from 25 fathoms down to 80 fathoms, just like jumping off a cliff. Then it goes right back up to 30 fathoms.” (A fathom equals six feet.) Drouin describes very hard bottom as looking like an EKG readout and says, “No one is going to fish singles in water depth like that.” Nor can they fish trawls, Drouin adds, because the bottom is too rough. “The line would chafe and part in no time,” he opines, adding that gear would get stuck, or “hung down” on this mountainous bottom of rocks and ledges. Drouin notes that fishermen would not get many traps hauled in a day if they hauled single traps from 80 fathoms, adding that to put that much rope on one trap would cost too much. It’s all part of what Drouin and other downeast fishermen have had to learn about their fishing grounds.

As 78 year-old Glanville Travis, who fishes the almost unbelievable waters of Nova Scotia’s Minas Basin, reports, “It takes three or four years of your life to educate yourself to this type fishery. It’s like an apprenticeship with Mother Nature as the teacher.” He explains, “We have different tides in different places in the Bay of Fundy.” As if that weren’t enough, Travis states, “We have a rise and fall of tide in the Minas Basin of 42 feet.”

The wharves where Minas Basin fishermen keep their boats have only enough water to float them at high tide. “Our tide leaves the wharf and recedes back about a mile or a mile and a quarter,” Travis says. “You’re sitting on a mud bank.” Two hours before high tide and that hour of slack water when the tide is changing are all fishermen have for steaming and hauling time. Only during those three hours is there enough water around their boats and their wharves to make it safe enough to travel. When Minas Basin fishermen leave their wharves, Travis says, “We go for the duration,” meaning until the tide is high enough again for fishermen to return and tie up their boats.

Asked how strong the tides are where he fishes, Thompson replies that although tides can reach 2 knots under certain conditions in the Dipper Harbour/Point Lepreau area, regularly they’re one and a half knots.

When fishing single gear smaller buoys go under when the tide is running, so Thompson says, “We only haul them when the tide is slack.” Doubles, he says, “Are enough to hold a longer line and bigger buoys,” which at a knot and a half, fishermen can see, or watch. “Up to 2 knots,” he reports, “Everything goes under.”

Because trawl fishing came along late in Thompson’s life, he says he never switched over to it because of the rigors of trawl fishing. “We have a season of November and December,” Thompson explains. “Those fellows fish in very harsh conditions with gear out in the middle of the Bay. It’s all with tides, and it’s almost always rough. You have to have a lot of stamina to fish that area.”

Offshore in order to fish trawls at 60 fathom, Thompson said Fundy fishermen run 200 fathom of warp and have enough buoy because they anchor their gear. Most trawls run from 12 to 20 traps though the occasional fisherman will run trawls of 30 to 40 traps. Thompson said fishermen put an anchor on either end of a trawl as well as warp.

Although it seems a far from easy way to fish lobster, Thompson said, “Once your boat is rigged properly, it’s actually quite efficient. There are fishermen who can go out and haul 300 traps in ten hours.” (The Canadian government allows fishermen in Lobster Fishing District 36, the New Brunswick side of the Bay 300 traps versus the 800 the US government permits.) Thompson explained the boats are rigged up to deal with snarls, fishermen set their traps carefully, have a well-trained crew, and they have rigged the boat for safety. “When you run this [trawl] gear overboard,” Thompson says, “there’s no stopping it. They have to have everything arranged so when it starts to go everybody’s all clear. In the fall season a trawl fisherman can land 30,000 to 40,000 lbs.

Travis, despite fishing Fundy’s most difficult waters, says he can’t complain, and with good reason. He says he has seen a standard four-foot wire trap weighted with a minimum of 150 lbs. crammed with 40 to 50 lobsters. You can’t beat catches like these.

“Every six hours it’s high water or low water and the tide is slack at those times,” explains Thompson. “On a normal tide, the high tide would be 24 feet, considering a zero low water. When there’s a full or new moon, you’re talking 28 feet, and maybe once a year it will reach 29 feet. When it does, you have a lot of tide because when it reaches 29 feet, you also have zero low water. So you have 29 feet of water that has to move out of the Bay in six hours. This makes a very hard tide.

“On what we term neap tide, a tide of minimum range occurring at the first and third quarters of the moon, you probably have high water of 22 feet and low water would be six feet above. In this case, you have 16 vertical feet of water that has to move out of the Bay in six hours. The 16 feet is a little more than half 29 feet, so the tide doesn’t run as hard to move that much water in six hours as it does on the full tide.

“On the full tide, particularly if there is an easterly wind on the high water, then your tide runs extremely hard. When that happens, an awful lot of gear doesn’t come to the surface.

“With that much tide, Thompson said, “we feel our gear is whale-friendly. The ground lines are pretty much on the bottom, and with the trawls there are only two vertical lines for 20 traps.”