North Haven Lobsterman Tries Kelp Farming For Winter Income

Karen Cooper exudes cheerfulness. Most people might be a bit daunted by the prospect of farming sugar kelp during the cold winter months, but the fifty-year-old North Haven lobsterman speaks enthusiastically about her new business venture.“I started lobstering about 23, 24 years ago,” she recalled. “My grandfather had a sort of lobster pound and bought lobsters on North Haven. I saw a lot of money being made and thought, ‘Why not?’”

Cooper is the daughter of Foy Brown, the fourth-generation owner and operator of Brown’s Boatyard on the island. While involved in the boatyard business, she decided she also wanted to pursue lobstering. “I started with 30 traps that I hand-hauled from my skiff. I remember one day when the boat’s transom turned to the wind and water started coming in and my hands were cramping up and I thought ‘What the hell are you doing out here?’ And then the trap came up!” Cooper smiled. She worked as a sternman for her cousin off and on until finally, about eight years ago, Cooper bought her own 23-foot wooden boat. “It’s a boat built on the island.

I named her Tidal 9 [a play on Title IX, the federal law that mandates equal funding for girls’ sports in public schools],” Cooper said. Being a member of the Brown family came in handy two years ago when Tidal 9 sank at its mooring. “I was down in Brunswick and called [her father]. He said the boat had sunk and he was getting her refloated.” Cooper shook her head at the recollection. “My dad took the engine to Jeff’s Marine [in Thomaston] and it was OK. We got her over to my house, flipped her and fiberglassed her bottom in my husband’s garage. Everything’s OK now.”A few years ago Cooper’s best friend on the island was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The woman changed her diet to a raw macrobiotic one. One day Cooper was having lunch with her friend and shared a bite of her seaweed salad. “I was just curious about it. If it’s something that can keep my best friend alive, then I’m for it,” she said. She looked up seaweed aquaculture on the Internet and corresponded with Paul Dobbins, president of Ocean Approved, a kelp aquaculture company based in Portland. Then she learned of the Island Institute’s aquaculture training program. “I was part of the first cohort [in 2015]. I definitely got in at the right time,” Cooper said. The Island Institute’s aquaculture education program leads its participants through the process of researching and applying for a lease to grow mussels, oysters or seaweed in Maine.

The participants met several times each month throughout the winter in Rockland and visited aquaculture sites along the coast. Cooper chose kelp, rather than mussel or oyster, farming for practical reasons. “It’s the cheapest one to get started in,” she laughed. “Plus it’s one that I can do in the winter, so I can still lobster in the summer. And my father and I had all the things I needed, like moorings and buoys. I had to buy chain and rope.”

By December 2016, Cooper was ready to go. She had found and received her permits from the Department of Marine Resources and Army Corps of Engineers for an appropriate site, a cove with enough tidal flow and wave action to keep the kelp lines clean and at least 30 feet of depth at mean low water. “I drove down to Wiscasset to meet Paul and then got back onto the island and got the seed in the water that day. It was really cold!” she said [technically, kelp reproduces via spores, not seeds]. Like any farmer, Cooper was anxious to see her crop take hold. She and her father checked the lines day after day. Finally, about four weeks later, just when the two thought that all they would ever see was marine slime, the lines began to turn brown. “That was great,” Cooper said.Getting kelp to set its spores happens at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland.

There, marine biology students hired by Ocean Approved set sections of PVC pipe wrapped with coils of nylon line into saltwater tanks full of kelp spore. The microscopic spores eventually settle on the wrapped line, which kelp farmers then uncoil onto their own lines at the site. “I started with 600-foot-long lines to start. This year I am expanding to 800-foot lines,” she explained. She sold all the sugar kelp she grew last winter from the three Limited Purpose Aquaculture (LPA) sites to Ocean Approved. This year she is adding a fourth and final LPA site while her father will start four LPA sites of his own in the same area.When Cooper was first learning about growing kelp at the Island Institute, she was told that the price she could receive would range from 85 cents to a dollar per pound. That was not the price she actually received this past winter. So, looking to the future, Cooper is considering ways to add value to her kelp. “My goal is to have my own product.

I’d like to have a drying house on the island and keep it all local, hire local people,” she said. Discovering a way to make money from the ocean during the cold winter months when she’s not lobstering clearly satisfies Cooper. Growing a living thing successfully may be the bigger surprise, however. “I have no houseplants, I have no garden, and I actually killed a cactus. But look, I’m growing kelp!”