My name is Don Drew. I am the president of the Harbour Authority of Bay Bulls. I'm also the mayor of Bay Bulls.
I've been on the harbour authority since 1989, when we formed. We opened for business in the spring of 1990. We have two wharves in our community, both about 200 feet in length. We have 18 active under-35-foot enterprises from the community. We also have about eight enterprises from outside the area that come in here to fish. Also, during the year we have a lot of transient boats coming in that do land in the adjoining community of Witless Bay, but then, because the community itself does not have wharfage facilities there that are sheltered, they come to Bay Bulls to be tied up. We have three of the largest tour boat operators in the province. They operate not on our facility but adjacent to it. We also have a lot of pleasure boaters and recreational boaters.
Our primary users are the fish harvesters. When the moratorium was called in 1992, most of our boats ranged from 18 feet to 30 feet, small open trap skiffs using cod traps and gillnets. Today our enterprises are all consisting of 35-footers. Some are joint enterprises, where two enterprises have one boat between them. That's allowed; we're in a buddy-up situation. Now we're looking to combine under new regulations. The problem we have is that we were limited in space in 1992 with the small boats we had, and now today, with the 35-footers, we're even more limited in space.
As well, the harbour is becoming centralized. You have these other eight boats moving in, and every year there's more and more. We don't want to turn them away. We're all harvesters. We're working this together. Everyone accommodates the best they can.
What it comes down to now is that we're limited in space. A number of years back--actually, just after the harbour authority was formed--we put in a request for a breakwater that we needed. The breakwater was to give full use of our whole facility. Now, especially in a southeast wind, most of our wharf on one side, one of our finger piers, cannot be used because it's not sheltered. We then, because of the breeze coming, also get the tour boats, the pleasure boats, the recreational boats. At times, in a breeze, we'll have as high as 40 boats, two and three abreast, in behind a wharf that really has enough room for ten.
But we make do. We have been making do. And we've looked outside the box. About ten years ago, I approached the local offshore oil company that was operating there and was building a facility. They didn't want fish harvesters on collars, which we were heavily dependent on at the time because of limited space on the wharf. We convinced the oil company to build a wharf and breakwater for the Harbour Authority of Bay Bulls free of charge, with no government money. After two years of negotiations, in 2001 we opened it up. That gave us basically eight additional berths, with no government money.
When that wharf was built, there were negotiations back and forth: “Okay, if he can convince an oil company to build us a wharf”--this came from the department--“maybe the government could step in and build the breakwater.” We still don't have the breakwater. Of the two wharves we had at the facility when, again, the moratorium was announced and we did incorporate, one of them has since actually rotted out. We've built a new one there. We still don't have our breakwater.
We don't blame small craft harbours. They're doing the best they can on what money they have to deal with. The trouble we have is with the limited amount of money going into that operation.
The wharves that we're building in Newfoundland have, generally speaking, a target goal of 25 years of life. I've been fishing for 25 years. The wharf that I started fishing on, which was built just previous to that, has now gone and been replaced. But when you look at places in Europe, people are tying onto the same wharves today that Christopher Columbus and John Cabot tied onto when they left to come across. Those wharves are still there.
We're doing something wrong. We're wasting money. We should be building facilities for the long term. We've been building for the short term down the road, just for what the problem is today. We need a breakwater in Bay Bulls, and I don't hide the fact, but it has to be built properly. What we look at in our harbour authority is building a facility there for the fish harvest--that's number one, because it is a fishing harbour--but also making it self-sufficient.
As I said before, we have tour boats operating there, pleasure boats. I have American swordfish boats operating there. They land $2.5 million to $3 million worth of swordfish there every year, which is shipped out of the province. Along with that we have cruise ships, as most of these harbours do.
All of this brings in revenue to the harbour authority, and the harbour authority is self-sustaining. It's a town council operating on the waterfront, that's what it is, and treated the same.
Those who truck grain from the Prairies or truck manufactured goods from Ontario and Quebec to the States need a highway. The key part of our highway is that wharf. We need that infrastructure put into these wharves, to bring them up to what they should be, to make them sheltered. Without that piece of that highway, we can't do our business.
In my own community, an average vessel, when the moratorium was announced, would have cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000. Today we're into $150,000-plus. We're making big investments. The problem we've gotten into is that in 1992 people wrote off the fishery. The harvesters didn't. We invested big. All of the enterprises at this table have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, into our enterprises and our communities. We're employing these communities. Without us, a lot of these communities wouldn't survive. We need that investment, not only to make them survive but to make them prosper.
