PEISome fishermen around Malpeque Bay say the area’s harbour has become impassable for boats after Fisheries and Oceans Canada decided not to dredge the notoriously challenging channel this fall.Lobster fisherman says North Shore harbour ‘turning into a kind of ghost town’Marilee Devries · CBC News · Posted: Oct 20, 2025 3:25 PM EDT | Last Updated: 3 hours agoSome who fish out of Malpeque Harbour say the channel into the wharf isn’t passable for boats right now, so they need to find workarounds. (Aaron Adetuyi/CBC)Some fishermen around Malpeque Bay say the area’s harbour has become impassable for boats after Fisheries and Oceans Canada decided not to dredge the notoriously challenging channel this fall.DFO made that decision because it recently built a new landing site at Keirs Shore so mussel harvesters can avoid the narrow, twisting corridor of the harbour while their boats are heavy with catches. For years, there have been incidents of boats running aground and capsizing in Malpeque Harbour. While the new landing site addresses some of the safety concerns, fishermen said it isn’t a substitute.“That wharf wasn’t designed to replace Malpeque Harbour,” said lobster fisherman Timothy Wall, who is also a member of the harbour authority. “It’s just a loading and offloading zone. There’s no place for them to tie up, there’s no place for them to gas up, it’s just a small wharf…. We still need a fall dredging in Malpeque.”The new landing site at Keirs Shore is now used by mussel farmers around Malpeque Bay. (Aaron Adetuyi/CBC)Mussel fisherman Carlos Doull agrees. “We get stuck every time we try to go through,” he told CBC News. “It’s really frustrating [for] us right now.”He said harvesters have been adding hours to their days by sailing out of Ellerslie, which is across the opening of Malpeque Bay to the west.Wall said he’s never seen Malpeque Harbour so empty at this time of year. “There’s usually 25 or 30 boats in here,” he said. “It’s turning into a kind of ghost town as far as boats go.”The Malpeque channel is typically dredged in the spring and the fall. In September, Fisheries and Oceans Canada confirmed in a statement to CBC News there were “no plans to carry out fall dredging at Malpeque Harbour.” The statement cited the new Keirs Shore landing area, which DFO said “provides a site for aquaculture harvesters to safely offload mussels.”‘It’s been bad, and it keeps getting worse,’ says Timothy Wall of the need for dredging in Malpeque Harbour. (Aaron Adetuyi/CBC)Wall said he can understand DFO’s desire to be as efficient as possible. “But sometimes you remove something and then you say, ‘Well, maybe that shouldn’t have been removed,’ so you have to re-evaluate and do a U-turn and say ‘well, maybe that should be put back in,’” he said. “We’re hoping they realize the importance of the dredging going forward.”’It’s a slow process’Wall said there are also concerns among the lobster fishermen who use the harbour that not dredging this fall will compound the issues they may face in the spring. “What’s [already] a yearly problem could be potentially even worse next year,” he said. Mussel fisherman Carlos Duoll says the wait to unload at the Keirs Shore landing site can be up to one or two hours. (Aaron Adetuyi/CBC)Looking to the future, he said there are ongoing discussions about possible solutions. “We’ve looked at breakwaters, we’ve looked at, you know, building a new harbour,” he said. “But it’s a slow process and there’s still environmental assessments going through and the funding of it, so it could be a while yet, but we’re optimistic that something could happen down the road.”In the meantime, Doull said the fishers are making do. “It’s pretty hard for all of us to do our jobs, but we’re all hanging in there and we’re all going to get it done.” ABOUT THE AUTHORMarilee Devries is a journalist with CBC P.E.I. She has a journalism degree from Toronto Metropolitan University. She can be reached at marilee.devries@cbc.caWith files from Connor Lamont
P.E.I.’s Malpeque Harbour impassible after DFO skipped fall dredging, fishermen say
