Learning the ropes: a beginner's guide to mussel farmingStorms and stress but signs of success for a fledgling mussel farmer

We won’t forget 24 January 2025, when Storm Éowyn hit the UK.

After a series of named storms at the end of last year it didn’t seem that threatening – we’d had worse weather systems without names being attached to them – until some local creel fishermen reported their anemometers were hitting 110 miles per hour.

Our little voe boat was secured by four mooring ropes to a pontoon in one of the most sheltered bits of the loch, but a text message later relayed our worst nightmare: our boat was thought to be upside down on the rocks. Would all of last year’s hard work be undone?

Setting up our 2023 spat lines in beautiful Loch Eishort meant locating the mooring blocks that had been left unmarked by previous owners, lifting and checking the mooring ropes and removing any old equipment still attached to the lines. We made the new 220 m header ropes up on the shore, tying on the floats every 20 m before towing each mussel line out to the site for deployment.

All went well and we spent the next few days hauling the header ropes over the bow of the boat and tying on the 600 dropper lines all coiled ready for spat collection. Our first two years’ lines (deployed in 2022 and 2023) were close together and about 60 m south of this new third line, which sits much closer to the centre of the loch.

We set the collection ropes exactly as we had done previously and waited for the spat to settle. But a couple of months later there were more sea squirts than mussels. As is often said, each site is different and it seems this part of the loch is different to water just 60 m away. It was time for a rethink.

Every mussel farmer will be shaking their heads, because we decided to do nothing. We chose to wait and see if there would be a second spat fall in late August/September. Our decision wasn’t whimsical or lazy, we were in the depths of building our house, we had no hydraulic lifting gear and the day job (to pay for it all) required regular overseas travel.

Caravan life is a rite of passage for many who’ve made Skye their home and after 2 ½ years of no mains water, a bucket toilet and limited electricity, we could finally move into our almost finished house in early 2024. It was an enormous relief to be in, albeit with only a mattress on the floor, a couple of old computer chairs and a homemade table. But we had functioning toilets, showers and central heating.

With the move complete, it was time to check if our wait-and-see approach to spat fall had paid off.

Of course it hadn’t. We realised the header lines were sitting much lower in the water than our first lines, so we lifted the dropper lines, cleared sea squirts and shortened the ropes so the coils lay higher in the water. But it needed more tension, so we used our two electric winches - with 1.8 tonnes of pulling power – to do the hard work. They’re powered by a 12v DC battery and hooked up to a large marine battery and were our best purchase of the year.

Suddenly we went from hauling ropes by hand, to lifting whole sections of line to the surface where we could reach over the side and work on the ropes and floats without breaking our backs. I cannot undersell the difference these little winches made to our work days. We used them to add a bit more tension to our header ropes and crossed our fingers that February might bring some early spat.

A modest spatfall was reassuring and we then added more floats to lines one and two in preparation for the mussels increasing their body mass in the spring. Line two gave us much pride, as it actually looked professional, with all the floats regimentally spaced and all sitting with their mid-lines just above the surface. Line one looked like a row of derelict houses in comparison, but was visual proof of our learning curve.

At this point the news that Neogen had stopped selling the rapid testing kits used by shellfish farmers to meet Food Standards Scotland’s requirements for selling farmed bivalves sounded like something we’d deal with later as, surely, there was an alternative readily available?

Experienced mussel farmers would rightly be concerned by our coiled spat lines on line three. February had seen only a minor spat fall so we let the coils stay there for the May spatfall and trusted we’d overcome the issues caused by byssal thread growth binding the ropes and stopping us from dropping the spat for on-growing.

By late August 2024 line one was terribly overweight and was now 38 months old – without heavy equipment we’d not been able to lift it to add more floats or start the harvest. Line two looked great, with 52 floats holding up a bumper crop of mussels and line three was ready to uncoil.

A couple of days swimming along line three’s coils and unfurling them got them ready for ongrowing – perhaps not the conventional method, but it worked. It also provided a different perspective: lying low in the water we watched in amazement as a white-tailed eagle knocked a greylag goose into the loch not 30 m from us. Mussel farming has its amazing moments.

Back on track, by September 2024, it was time to start our overdue harvest, but we had to ensure all the right paperwork was in place . We now have a new appreciation of the administration involved in being registered not only to grow mussels but also how to get the permissions to distribute and sell them live. First things first, test the water and the product. The impact of losing the Neogen rapid testing kit now became clear – there seemed to be no readily available alternative other than a German test kit costing tens of thousands of pounds.

However, our local environmental health officer, Coila, directed us to the Cefas online dashboard system. This gives monthly updates within registered Pods (areas of water under shellfish management sampling protocols) and opens or closes areas based on water quality test results. Coila also talked us through our responsibilities for recording, reporting and how to write a hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP) plan for the business. Yet another new skill learned.

In the first week of December we received very welcome news, we had temporary approval to distribute live mussels for sale to the local market. Now to find some customers.

By happy coincidence, the owners of the Stein Inn bought our caravan and we were soon able to supply them with mussels for their end-of-year celebration. Our first mussel sale was delivered on 30 December and the feedback was excellent. It was a fantastic feeling to finally make our first commercial sale.

Then Storm Éowyn changed things. Our trusty voe boat was indeed dashed against the rocks. Armed with a spotlight we’d found it in the dark but couldn’t get to it and on our return at low tide the next day it was gone. We searched with sonar, we dived and walked the shorelines around Loch Eishort but we still haven’t found it.

Necessity is the mother of invention and we had to harvest our next 50 kg order using a tiny inflatable dinghy but, with more and more orders coming in we decided to risk trying to float the eight tonne aluminium mussel barge that we’d bought with the farm, but which hadn’t been in the sea for a decade.

After much work with winches, snatch blocks and fence posts we finally got her down to the shingle beach and crossed our fingers as the tide came in. Another moment of elation as she floated – taking on a mussel farm as complete novices truly is an unbelievable rollercoaster journey. We finally got her engine started and soon she’ll be harvesting mussels for our new restaurant clients. A new boat, a new chapter and we know we’ll be learning the ropes all over again.

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