Wolf Wilds › Food and Foraging

Photo Kehropaias, CC BY-SA 4.0

Mussels and seaweed

What the shore gives you on this island, and the one thing that decides whether you eat it.

What you need

How

  1. Check the closures first. Areas get closed for shellfish poisoning and for pollution, and a closure is not something you can see, smell or taste on the mussel.
  2. Go at low tide, and go in the cold months if you have the choice. Shellfish are better and safer when the water is cold.
  3. Pick mussels that are shut, or that shut when you tap them. Leave any that gape open and stay open.
  4. Take from clean open water, never near a wharf, an outfall, a slipway or a brook running off a road.
  5. Rinse, scrub, and pull the beard off just before cooking.
  6. Steam them in a covered pot in a little water for five minutes, until they open. Throw out any that stay shut.
  7. For kelp and dulse, cut the blades above the holdfast with a knife so the plant lives, rinse them in seawater, and dry them on a line or a warm rock.

Do and don't

Do
  • Take only what you will eat that day.
  • Keep the catch cool and covered on the way back.
  • Leave the small ones and leave the holdfasts so the shore grows back.
Don't
  • Do not pick anywhere under a closure, whatever the shellfish looks like. Cooking does not destroy shellfish toxins.
  • Do not take mussels from water that gets warm and still in summer.
  • Do not turn your back on the water on a shore ledge, and do not get cut off by the rising tide.

Watch for

Danger
  • Paralytic shellfish poisoning starts as tingling round the lips within minutes to hours and can stop your breathing. It is an emergency. Call 911 and go.
  • Slippery rock and swell take people off the shore every year. One hand for the rock, always.
  • Anything picked below a road culvert, a wharf or a sewer outfall is not food.

Notes

Blue mussels, dulse and kelp are the easy three on a Newfoundland shore and none of them run away.

The closure list is the whole safety system. Everything else on this page is technique.

shellfishshorekelptide

Updated 2026-09-20

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