The question was why. A DFO regulation was put in. When everybody was harvesting 300,000 seals, they wanted to make sure that there were enough seals for the inshore harvesters to get as well, and not just for the people who had all the money for a big boat. That was the reasoning.
On a 65-footer, there are three main age groups of seals that you can get. You can get the beaters, which are the young ones. They're the ones used in the garment industry. That's 99% of all the seals, or more. On a 65-footer, you can get up to 5,000 beaters. They don't take the entire seal. They skin the seal on the ice and they take the skin with the fat, and some flippers for flipper pie.
At the next stage are the one- to two-year-olds, which are the bedlamer seals. You can fit approximately 2,500 of those on a boat. Bedlamer seals have very good backstraps, a loin that runs down the back. There's no fat and no bones; it's pure meat. There's not even a grain like a steak. If you're going to sell to a restaurant, that's the roast that you want to sell. On a beater it's too small, so it's not economically viable for the fishermen to take out. On a beater you're getting about 10 kilograms of fat per seal, and on a bedlamer, let's say about 25 kilograms.
Then there are the adult seals. A big adult seal can have 50 kilograms of fat and a much larger backstrap. The backstraps will range anywhere from two and a half to five kilograms. Again, this is huge meat. It's not quite as tender as a bedlamer for the restaurants, but if you were going to make jerky en masse, for instance, or if you were going to make stews or pet food, then that's the one you want to go to. That's the most economically viable one for a fisherman. If he was going to take an adult seal off the ice for full utilization, he'd take the pelt with the large fat and then he'd cut off the backstraps. We also have markets for hearts and for kidneys, and of course the penises are always viable from the adult seals.
You can get 800 to 1,000 adult harp seals on a boat. Again, the numbers all start changing if you start talking about hooded seals, which are two or three times the size, or grey seals, which are a couple of times the size as well.
How they bring these in is, again, by shooting them and skinning them. Holes for the flippers are cut off on the pelts. They run a rope through five or six of these. They pull it in with the crab hauler, bring it up with the boom and bring it down. They have all the infrastructure they need.
If the weather and the ice allow it, a single sealer can make six trips. If you're talking about adults to bedlamer to beater, they can start in December and they can go all the way into May and June. They can easily make six trips each, weather and ice permitting. That's where climate change makes a big difference.
For this year in particular, the ice was completely unpredictable. There would be no ice coming in, and then it would come in heavily. The wind would all of a sudden push it against the shore and break it up. It would disappear and then come back. It was very difficult.
Right now, one of our sealers just had to stop sealing and go all the way up to Bonavista so that his 65-footer wouldn't get crushed by the ice that was being blown towards him. He has to land in Bonavista, and we have to truck it up to the plant in Fleur de Lys, because the ice is blocking his way and he can't make it to our plant. It's very weather- and ice-dependent.
