Effectively, southwest Nova Scotia is only about 10 weeks. Eighty per cent of the lobsters caught in the wintertime are caught in the first nine days of the season here. The balance is caught throughout the rest of the winter period. Effectively you only start fishing again in late April-May, because the water temperature doesn't warm up. So you probably get a week to two weeks in December and five to six weeks in the April-May period before the fishery is over. Towards the end of May, the fishery peters out and runs into problems.
All segments have the same issue with time. Planning the harvest...maybe we don't take as much out of the water. You have processors in New Brunswick and P.E.I. who put tractor trailerloads of lobster in the yard, crank down the temperature when there's a glut, and freeze them in the tractor trailer. It's 40,000 pounds at a time.
Let me assure you, nothing freezes before it rots in that thing. Then they put them in a freezer and process them later into broken meat, into a byproduct that's just abhorrent. If we looked at what gets dumped on the shore here from what's being held in crates and cars at the wharf, the mortality that goes on.... I've watched them pull away from the wharf by the boatload and dump them out in a hole in the ocean or on land. The amount of product that's actually destroyed because of the way we catch it.... If we don't have the capacity to handle it properly or take it to the market--or if neither we nor the market has the capacity to properly store it--then we shouldn't be taking it out of the water. That's my contention. We could leave it there for the future.
Our holding capacity is about three million pounds. We have developed a holding system that's based on the animals' natural overwintering environment, and we invested a tremendous amount of money and biology and science into it. We crank the temperature down to two degrees Celsius so that the animal effectively hibernates. We also predetermine whether the animal can be stored. Our biologist does blood-protein testing and puts it through an MRI-type machine, so we know the animal is actually full-meated and adequately healthy to survive.
The traditional holding systems and the copies that are based on our system lack the level of sophistication necessary to adequately hold the lobster. You're quite right, the lobster is held until the market ripens or until the market is short, but the lobsters are generally severely weakened by the process--unless you actually put the investment in place to make sure they're not weakened by the process, obviously. If they're severely weakened and they go begging to the market, that creates this tremendous shell disease and a number of problems within the distribution system.
In terms of mortality for your customers who are trying to distribute, the system is by far not a perfect system. The old holding worked well when you paid 25ยข a pound for the lobster and you could sell it for $2.