Coastal Foraging in Nova Scotia | Catch N' Cook Island Camping

What's going on guys, this is Noah with Northern Scavenger, and we're currently canoeing to an island on the ocean to do a two day camping trip. We're going to be snorkeling and coastal foraging. The main goal is going to be scallops, and everything else is just mustard on the hot dog. There's like 10 of them. Let's go! It is late September here in Canada, on the eastern shore off the coast of Nova Scotia, and pretty soon it's going to be way too frigid to be doing this. So hopefully we're in that pocket of time when the water's clear before the hurricane season and it doesn't get too frigid that we're going to get brain freeze. Guys, there's a decent camp spot over here. Yeah? Yeah. This is better than anything we were finding. We found a good leeward spot on this island. It's sheltered from the wind, it has flat ground, and it's a good spot to be diving and snorkeling from. And that's what we want. That's why we're here. I mean if this trip is all about foraging and stuff, we might as well forage our bedding as well. So we're just going to get right into it, jump in the water, see what we see. I have a 5'4' wetsuit, which is probably pretty warm for these conditions, but there are a lot of holes in it so I shouldn't be too warm. I'm actually more worried about being too cold because of all the holes in it. When I'm snorkeling in a new spot, I like to start off by getting a lay of the land in the shallower water. To me, this is also the most interesting area because of all the marine life that lives off the sunlight. But when we're looking for scallops, we need to go a bit deeper because they need the cooler water. Jan caught a European Green Crab. We'll talk more about these guys later on in the video. Scallops are one of my favorite shellfish to eat, and part of it is the fun of the hunt. In Nova Scotia, you need a license to harvest scallops, and the daily limit is 100 per person. I still find that's excessive, and we usually only take enough for a couple meals. It's important to practice sustainable harvesting to help maintain healthy populations for the future. Just took a quick break to unload some scallops. The water temperature is not too bad. I was getting a tad cold near the end there, but we've been in here a solid 3-4 hours. On the ocean floor, there's lower areas, and all the shells just accumulate there. Eventually, if you can think of it over time, that pocket will get compressed and heated up to form a rock. What do you think limestone is made out of? A lot of shells. A lot of calcium carbonates of the shells breaking down over time. And here, you can see it in motion. Pretty cool guys! For my setup, I have $10 mech neoprene socks, over a $100 wetsuit I got 5 years ago now that has a lot of holes, and some old neoprene 5mm gloves. This wetsuit is a 5'4". I got 12 pounds of weight around my waist, and apparently the amount of weight you need on you is enough that when your lungs are full of air, you float, but once your lungs expel all the air, you actually start to sink, kind of like a submarine. I found 12 pounds works pretty well for me. I'm about 180. Let's go check this spot out. So we already have a good haul of scallops, but I wanted to get into a few other things to round out our seafood dinner. Ah, we got on them! Oh ho ho, there's a haul! Holy green crab! Look at this! If you don't know a lot about these green crabs, they are incredibly invasive, and they're actually listed in the top 10 most invasive species in the world. What these green crabs do is they actually outcompete the native crabs around here, which are the Atlantic rock crab and the Jonah crabs. They also devastate the eelgrass, which is around here. The eelgrass is really important to our habitat here in tidal zones because they work as a refuge for small shellfish and small marine life. And what these green crabs do is they actually cut it and uproot it, and they just flatten these fields of eelgrass. And you can actually see these crabs eating and chopping up this eelgrass. Tonight we're actually going to try to eat them. Don't know how it's going to taste. They're very small, so it would be a lot of work to get the meat. It's an interesting concept to try to do something with such an invasive species. The first thing is to figure out, does it even taste good? Ready guys? It'll last long, eh? Look at this. European orange crab now. It smells good. What's the strategy for breaking up the legs to get at the meat? Maybe just get a small stick. I think for the arms, that shouldn't be a big deal. It's hot. We are experts. Yeah. And I got mashed crab meat. Oh yeah, there we go. Oh, there you go, Tristan. That's it. I mashed it. Is that one claw? Yeah, it's most of a claw. Mmm. Mmm-hmm. That is good. That's really good. Does it taste like what you'd think a crab tastes like? Yeah, like it's got a lobstery flavor. Yeah. Yeah, that works pretty well. Rock on a rock. We're out of the water, and we got a good, diverse mix of seafood and seaweed. We got scallops. We got blue mussels, European green crabs, dulse, Irish moss, and kelp. I'd say that's a successful dive. Lots of good stuff. And these European green crabs, first take, they are a lot of work, but they taste pretty good. If there's a more strategic way to open these, that would be a really good option, because you could harvest them very quickly out here, and you'd be doing the ecosystem a service. Oh, there's a perfect piece of meat. For a lot of the seafood we're making, I'm going to make a dipping sauce, and it's going to be a simple butter, parsley, garlic dipping sauce. Melt over the fire, and then we can dip our stuff in. Instant melt. Melted very quick. So our next round is going to be mussels, and I'm making a pretty special sauce. Chopping up some onion and some garlic. It's all about those onion aromatics. I'm going to put that into a chardonnay. I do not know much about wine, but I talked to the lady at the liquor store, and she said a chardonnay is good for mussels because it has a rich, full taste. And then on top of the mussels, sprinkle on some garlic butter and some parsley. The mussels hook onto each other, and you find these pillars of mussels on mussels. They attach by this fibrous material called their beard. It was hard to get the beard off. It was pretty strong, and we don't have any sort of scrubbing device, so I pulled as much as I could, tried it with a knife a bit, but this will do. They're clean anyways. We're going to be putting about two cups of chardonnay wine into the pot. First one is for the ocean. Thank you for the plentiful harvest today. Two cups for us. Throw the onions and garlic in. Let that simmer for five minutes. Then add the mussels. And then once the mussels start to open up, you add the butter and the parsley. Oh, my gosh. We're not done. Some freshly chopped parsley. Wow. Get the juices in there. That's it. That's it right there. I'm going to go for it. Go for it. Oh, you can taste the wine for sure. It's huge. Once you get the adductor off, it pops open because the adductor muscle is what keeps the scallop closed together. That's also the thing we're looking for in here. You can see you've got the roe, you've got the adductor muscle, which is the white, fleshy part of the scallop that we eat, and then you have organs and its butt sack. You flick this back like a skirt, find where that adductor muscle is, and you just feather off its clothes. I find sometimes I actually cut the adductor in half and there's still a decent size left on the other side. That is always worth eating. One more for the mountain. How are we feeling? This is the third course. A little butter and a little parsley. We're going to cook these scallops in the shell. What we're going to do here is get a nice coal base and put these right on the coals, and that broth is going to cook the scallops. I get the first one. Guys, you should get one. How was that? Oh, that was so good. Yeah, perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Tristan's first wild scallop ever. I feel like that's the best thing we've had all night. That's saying a lot. We just had a three-course shellfish meal. It was so good. We're eating like kings out here and harvesting stuff that we have in our backyard. We started off with the European green crab just boiled in salt water, and then we went with the blue mussels steamed in a white wine, parsley, buttery combo, and then we finished off with scallops cooked in their own shells with the same sort of combo that we used for the mussels. Each was better than the next. So good. So content. Today is looking a bit different than yesterday. It's a lot more gray, strong wind from the east, and out here, if the wind's from the east, it's a sign that bad weather is on the way. Right now we're just having our breakfast and some hot beverages, and then we might get out on the water to do some more snorkeling and eventually paddle back to the mainland. The wind was getting worse, so we decided to pack up camp first and then head out for one last snorkel mission and hopefully still beat the weather. The wind was creating a lot of chop, and you could see here that the visibility wasn't the best. It sort of felt like we were in a big fishbowl being sloshed around like a goldfish. The chaos was surprisingly quite peaceful, but we still couldn't see much, so we had to keep moving. It's a little stirred up, eh? I thought about going to the back, right through here. That might be our best bet. I'm down. There's seals over there. A group of seals just watching us. There's like 10 of them. We snorkeled around this island, and we came up to, I don't know, like 10 seals that are very curious about us. They're keeping their distance, but they keep popping their head out and splashing around. Some of them are getting kind of close, though. We're going to swim back this way, and we're going to see if they follow us. We started getting a little more confident and swimming towards the seals to see if we can get some GoPro footage underwater, but they were really good at staying just out of range. We were also noticing all the baitfish swimming around in the area, which is probably why the seals were there. By the time we got out, the wind really picked up, and we still had a two-kilometer crossing back to the mainland. We knew we still had our work cut out for us. We're crossing back to the mainland, and it's already pouring rain. There's a number of factors that made this really sketchy. The first was we had three of us in a boat, which made us very top-heavy, and if a wave hit us in the wrong spot, we could easily fall out. There's a big one coming right here. The second was these waves were breaking, and they could fill up a boat quicker than we could bail it out, and that would sink us. We're far away from shore, and there's a long distance before we reach the Leeward Bay. Let's go! We're getting a surf in, too. Guys, that got really sketchy out there. It got really sketchy, but we made it. I would not advise that. That was very stupid of us, but it was a lot of fun.