BOUYING UP GRAND MANAN'S FUTURE.

• Author: Harvey, Janice
• Position: Fishery

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...