The Working Waterfront - October 2021

News from Maine’s Island and Coastal Communities

THE WORKING

volume 35, № 8

published by the island institute

Maine’s last seafood cannery

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october 2021 n free circulation: 50,000

workingwaterfront.com

HEALTHY HAUL —

Bar Harbor Foods exports Downeast flavors to the world Story by Sarah Craighead Dedmon Photos by Leslie Bowman

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ish canneries once dotted the coast of Maine, jutting off of smalltown shorelines, and employing thousands of Mainers for more than a century. At the sardine industry’s height, more than 50 canneries were in operation at the same time.

Today, there is only one.

Bar Harbor Foods runs Maine’s last cannery on Holmes Bay in Whiting, population 481. Operating in a structure more than 100 years old, Bar Harbor still sells sardines, but in a very modern way—think clear-lidded cans, extra virgin olive oil—and with an extremely modern supply chain. Bar Harbor’s lobster comes from Maine, its clams come from the mid-Atlantic, and its sardines? Latvia.

“We have gone international in terms of some sourcing,” says Bar Harbor Foods Managing Director Denis Minihane, likening the business model to another Maine company, L.L. Bean. “Some of L.L. Bean’s manufacturing is overseas, but their brainpower and design and development remain in Maine,” he says.

In Bar Harbor’s case, raw materials may come from the Gulf of Maine or the Baltic Sea, but everything is designed and distributed from rural Whiting, a coastal Washington County village located 15 miles from Canada, and 100 miles from the nearest interstate highway.

The rural location hasn’t hurt business. In fact, says Minihane, it has enhanced its brand appeal, especially with millennial customers.

“They like the story,” he says. “They like it to be as near as you can be to the sea, produced in a humble facility,

From left, Tim Caldwell, Neil Kirby, and Lucky Skidgell talk at the Belfast waterfront.

Barrels of pogies, often used for lobster bait, are visible in the foreground.

PHOTO: TOM GROENING

without the additives and preservatives, the same way they’re willing to pay more for craft beer and enjoy the value of where it’s being produced.”

Though the cannery is almost 100 miles from its namesake Bar Harbor, the logo and brand are a vestige of a

previous owner, Michael Cote, who purchased the original A.M. Look Canning Company in 2003. The name equals instant brand recognition.

“Everyone knows Bar Harbor,” says Minihane, adding that the company continued on page 4

Feds limit lobstering to protect right whales NMFS imposes seasonal ban on 967-square-miles

By Laurie Schreiber

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long-anticipated ruling by the National Marine Fisheries Service aimed at protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whale was issued Aug. 30. The ruling impacts Maine’s signature fishery on several fronts.

The key components mean lobster fishermen with federal permits can no longer set traps using vertical buoy lines from October to January in a 967-square-mile area of fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine. But a new federal rule will allow those fishermen to apply for permits to use “ropeless” gear.

NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PORTLAND, ME 04101 PERMIT NO. 454

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An estimated 62 fishermen from The regulations place “an unwarStonington to Boothbay Harbor are ranted burden on the Maine lobster expected to be affected by the closure. fishery,” the Maine Lobstermen’s The National Marine Fisheries Association said in a statement.

Service is charged with managing fishThe focus of the rule is on North eries in federal waters.

Atlantic right whales because of their The rule is part of the status as a critically federal Atlantic Large endangered species, with Whale Take Reduction only an estimated 368 left An estimated 62 in the world.

Plan, first implemented in 1997 by a federally The goal is to reduce or fishermen from convened Atlantic Large eliminate the number of Stonington to Whale Take Reduction vertical lines the whales Team. It has been modified Boothbay Harbor might encounter along several times since then. their migration routes. are expected to The plan aims to The rule also: comply with the Marine be affected by the • Closes other offshore Mammal Protection waters off Massachusetts closure.

Act and the Endangered to fishing at certain times Species Act to reduce of year to reduce buoy fishing gear entanglement lines when and where and vessel strikes on whales throughout right whales are present. However, fishtheir range in the North Atlantic. ermen would be able to fish in the areas Maine’s largest lobster industry asso- using ropeless gear. ciation criticized the rule as lacking scientific justification. continued on page 3

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Downeast—striking a blow against ‘the geography of nowhere’

Gigi Georges’ deep dive into the lives of five girls finds gold “ In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal of the rural communities…

But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a revival accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.”

—Wendell Berry

By Scott Planting

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here do we look for hope in difficult times? The recently published Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America, by Gigi Georges, offers clues to where to look for hope in difficult times. Not a pollyannish hope, but the real thing, a confidence in the future we see expressed through the voices of five young women growing up in Washington County, a place for whom it is simply home.

It is their voices we hear in Georges’ book, along with the voices of family and community members who support them, not the visiting experts Wendell Berry alluded to above. Georges gives these communities and the reader a gift, a story of renewal. I know of no other book that gives such a rich portrayal of the complexity of life in a rural community.

Georges offers a window into Washington County through these five extraordinary young women. When we meet them they are students at Narraguagus High School in Harrington. Downeast opens at the 2016 Class C North state basketball championship game played at the Augusta Civic Center, which pitts the Narraguagus Lady Knights against the favored Boothbay Seahawks, with team co-captain Audrey Barton at the foul line.

The Lady Knights pull off the victory and take home the gold ball for the first time in school history.

Late that night, back home in the school parking lot where the town has turned out to welcome the champions, we are introduced to the five girls: udrey Barton, academic and basketball standout, A who will be awarded a scholarship to Bates College  McKenna Holt, captain of lobster fishing boat F/V Spittin’ Image, who is passionate about the sea  Willow Newenham, a photographer who sees deeply into her troubled world and is determined to overcome her family’s struggle with addiction and abuse  Vivian Westford, a talented writer who works hard to find her place in the changing cultural norms of Eastern Maine  Josie Dekker, class valedictorian bound for the Ivy League, who courageously pushes a human rights agenda at Narraguagus High School. 

Georges spent four years getting to know these girls and that time and access is a testament to the trust she built, rare for an outsider. Listening closely, following where their story led, and offering the best of current literature on rural America, she opens the Downeast Maine to the reader.

An hour’s drive east of Mount Desert Island, Washington County has a landscape whose beauty is equal to the island that hosts Acadia National Park.

Yet it could not be more different. The overriding narrative is poverty.

Naming it brings to mind statistics of need—poorest county in Maine, highest unemployment rate, one in four children hungry, opiate addiction epidemic, on and on. The storyline is that high school students should leave and find their futures elsewhere; those that stay can’t leave and are stuck.

This sad narrative is George’s starting line, but though harsh conditions do exist for too many in Washington County, she discovers there is more to the story.

“I saw plenty of challenges, of course, but I saw just as many amazing stories of community, and being connected to the land, and resilience,” Georges told the Bangor Daily News earlier this year.

It is these “amazing stories of community” that I find so powerful. Berry wrote that “we have hardly begun to imagine community life,” and that imagina- and for Willow, through the clarity of purpose that she tion is what Georges opens to her readers. It is a new discovered behind the camera lens,” Georges writes.

She also writes compellingly about the multi-layed landscape for us.

I think our imagination has been so dominated nature and complexity of the Downeast region. It by the notion of mobility that it has been difficult to may come as a surprise to many readers.

We are introduced to traditional lives like that of hear the story of people who wish to stay in a place.

Society tells us we must be on the move in an economy Audrey Barton, whose family lobsters in Milbridge.

“Four generations of Bartons lived on the Back Bay prepared to leave us behind. Philosopher Simone Veil said: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and Road, in a dozen homes with crisscrossing land, with more structures rising as grandkids began to have kids least recognized need of the human soul.”

But this sense of place—strong local, independent, of their own,” we learn. And we meet newcomers to the and inter-dependent communities, this whole—is in region. The Barton family has new neighbors—immilarge part only a memory. And we are all diminished grant families, farm workers from Mexico and Central for it. We live in what James Howard Kunstler calls America—part of nomadic harvesters working in the blueberry barrens and wreath factories who found “the geography of nowhere.”

This geography creates the illusion that it doesn’t steady work in Milbridge and stayed.

One of those families, the Alvarezes, has opened matter where we live or work, because one place is pretty much like another. It fosters neglect, ignorance, several businesses, including what Georges calls the best Mexican takeout restaurant this side of and destruction.

The common ground holding the girls’ story California. “Their work ethic, ambition, faith, and together is the community of Narraguagus High unassailable family ties helped them break down barriers,” she write. “Most arrivals School. Located on Route 1 between found, in Downeast, a community that Cherryfield and Harrington, the welcomed and encouraged them, and grades 7-12 regional school serves they in turn, excelled and embraced Cherryfield, Columbia, Columbia The storyline is their new neighbors.”

Falls, Harrington, and Milbridge. that high school This success story does not miniGeorges introduces us to students, mize the struggles many face. I committed teachers, coaches, and students should think of Willow Newenham’s story: administrators. It’s a good school, and a rare thing to see into the day-by-day leave and find their “When Willow was born, William workings of a public high school. futures elsewhere… and Lily [her parents] were students at Narraguaugus High. Lily was 18.

We meet art teacher Brit “Frannie” William was 16.” William was a cocaine Frances, who at 52 leaves the fast pace addict, Georges writes. Willow’s childlife of northern California for what she thinks will be the tranquility of a new home in hood is marked by movement from house to house Addison. She attends fundraising suppers and finds among family members and friends, all in search of a safe, nurturing home which she never found. Her her way into the community.

“What was so amazing to me,” she said, “was the consolation is managing the Lady Knights basketball number of benefit suppers to support students that team whose team members called her “Mom,” teachers have gotten sick, siblings that have gotten hurt or who helped her discover her love of photography, and wounded, families that have faced an acute hardship. a job working at the Sea Carnations lobster wharf.

“As soon as she could drive, Willow developed a nightEverybody comes, and they drop a lot of money, and time routine that stood in sharp contrast to her chaotic sometimes they don’t even eat,” we learn.

“For these were the rituals—the uncomplicated life. She would slip out of whatever place she happened to gestures and unspoken bonds that came with simply temporarily call home, and steal away to Sea Carnations being there—that allowed Britt to begin to understand Wharf in the dark of the night… There she would stretch her body across the massive dock’s bobbing planks, and the culture of her adopted home,” Georges writes.

Because Britt was willing to step into community stare outward to the vague and unreachable horizon…

Willow knew that this was the place she could find peace life, students responded to her.

“For a handful of students each year, most often within herself and the world around her.”

It’s a difficult story to absorb, but all too common in girls, the connection to Britt straddled teacher and friend… So it was for Vivian, and in turn, for Josie Washington County.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of and Willow… Each girl was drawn to the art room in ways particular to her passion: for Vivian, through Downeast to the discussion of contemporary life in her writing; for Josie, through drawing and sculpture; rural America is the focus on young women.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

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The Gold Ball-winning basketball team from Narraguagus High School, 2016, with their coach, the lobster fisherman “Olivia Marshall” in the book, whose real name is Heather Thompson (back row, far right). The team is aboard the fishing boat Thompson named in honor of the championship team. “Audrey Barton”—whose real name is Kelli Kennedy—is in the back row, third from left. “Mckenna Holt”— whose real name is Laniew Perry—is in the back row, next to Olivia Marshall.

Gigi Georges, the author of Downeast.

PHOTO: COURTESY GIGI GEORGES

“In this seemingly male-dominated culture, local girls are kicking ass,” says Narraguagus principal Lauren Donovan. “Year after year, they rose to the top. They are the leaders, the really good athletes. Dominating academically, and taking top honors in science and math.

Finding their way into medical fields and engineering.”

Georges’ insight is that these five girls represent the best of what is going on in rural America. They honor the legacy of home while bridging to a hopeful future of their own creation.

“Downeast women are fierce,” Georges said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News. “These girls are choosing to maintain a connection to their home, to Washington County, whether they live there or not. It runs counter to the narrative that you have to leave in order to find success.”

Georges’ thesis in Downeast is that young women are finding new ways forward for coastal Washington County. They are figuring out “stay options”—opportunities to make a good life for themselves and their families.

The story in Downeast that for me most exemplifies this new future is Audrey Barton’s. An academic and athletic standout, she earns a scholarship to Bates College. She transfers to the University of Maine at Orono after her first year at Bates to study speech therapy.

Georges explains, “By leaving Bates and intercollegiate basketball behind, Audrey had closed a door that she’d worked hard to open in high school—and walked away from a prize that few from her hometown could ever dream of grasping…Yet the few times Audrey had

found herself wondering if she’d made the right decision it didn’t take more than a good look at all she had Downeast—and all that she could build within it—to remind her that her choice was spot on.”

I find Barton’s decision remarkably mature in its profound appreciation of her home—Downeast—and her desire to contribute to “build within it” as a child speech therapist. For many readers, her decision to give up a Bates degree with all the prestige and connection it brings is unthinkable. But as Georges notes, Audrey’s choices were “transcendently logical and rational.”

In her mind she was contributing to the good of her home—by providing much needed services, and by having a family and sending children to local schools, caring for the wellbeing of aging family members, and by being civically engaged. Georges concludes: “Choices like hers are as valuable as gold to rural communities like those Downeast. They kindle optimism for the future.”

Barton’s choice may seem like a visit to a strange land. Very few of us have any experience of the importance of home at the depth of these five girls. I think this is the value of her book.

Wendell Berry writes that most of us live “on the far side of a broken connection,” meaning we feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility for places like Downeast.

It’s “a division that is rapidly deepening in our country: a division between people who are trying to defend the health, the integrity, and even the existence of places whose values they sum up in the words ‘home’ and ‘community,’” Berry writes, “and people for whom those words signify no value at all.”

I think we do live “on the far side of a broken connection” and the “division” is deep. Our culture does not encourage a sense of place, but it seems to me critical to our future. I have chosen to “stay put,” to learn how to dwell in a place. I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.

Downeast is trying to heal the breach by taking us inside a threatened community, and for all its problems, it is teaching us something fundamental about the value of home. The voices of these five extraordinary young women carry outward like ripples moving from the center of a stone dropped into a pond. They take us to places we’ve never been before: around kitchen tables, into school classrooms, out to blueberry barrens, and onto the ocean in lobster boats, connecting all we observe with trends across rural America.

Our Downeast communities may be “endangered species,” as the core lobster and blueberry industries face huge challenges, yet we see them whole. I am deeply grateful to Georges for writing a book of quality and beauty, heartfelt and thoughtful, about Downeast Maine.

Her love for the girls and her abiding respect for the place shine through. For those of us who have labored in these communities—whether Downeast or anywhere we call home—it is a precious gift and a true encouragement.

RIGHT WHALES

called for a conservation plan “supported by scientific evidence” and includes measures implemented in Canada and by the U.S. shipping industry.

“NMFS has mandated that Maine lobstermen reduce risks to right whales by an additional 98 percent over the next 10 years based on the worstcase scenario, instead of using best available data and realistic assumptions,” the association’s executive director, Patrice McCarron, said in the statement.

“The final rule is just the first round of economic impacts to us, and future restrictions will likely destroy Maine’s iconic lobster fishery.”

The association said it does not believe the scientific record supports implementation of the plan, which has a goal to nearly eliminate risk to right whales by 2030.

The association asserted that • the 967-square-mile area is much larger than it needs to be to reduce risk from the Maine lobster fishery.

• gear marking requirements for Maine “will likely require lobstermen to purchase a second set of buoy lines.”

• the rule lacks “flexibility for lobstermen to innovate and propose equally protective yet less costly approaches.”

Michael Pentony, a regional administrator for NOAA, acknowledged that Maine fishermen are not solely to blame for right whale deaths.

“I wouldn’t blame it on any one industry group, but it’s a shared responsibility,” he said.

While ropeless fishing is still in trials, the goal in allowing its use in the closed areas is to learn how it might be implemented in the future, said Pentony.

“We recognize the technology isn’t as mature as we’d like in terms of being able to implement it across a widespread basis right now,” he said.

Ropeless fishing provides a remote-control mechanism that uses an acoustic communication system between the fishing vessel and the gear on the bottom to raise the trap. A trap can be pre-set with a lifting device, such as a pop-up buoy, air-filled lift bag, or a buoyant spool. An acoustic signal sent from a digital device on the vessel triggers the release of the lifting device and raises the trap to the surface.

But environmentalists said the rule didn’t go far enough and put too much reliance on weak rope.

Adult whales would be able to break away from weak rope entanglements, but calves and juveniles would still be in harm’s way, according to Washington, D.C.based environmental group Oceana.

“North Atlantic right whales are sliding closer toward extinction due to known, human-caused risks, including fishing gear entanglements,” Whitney Webber, a campaign director with Oceana, said in a separate release.

continued from page 1 • Requires fishermen in certain areas to reduce the number of vertical lines by requiring more traps between buoy lines.

• Requires the insertion into buoy lines of links weak enough for whales to break free from the line if whales become entangled.

• Modifies and increases gear marking to introduce state-specific colors to identify the origin of gear that does end up entangling a whale.

NMFS estimates the regulations will result in 69 percent less chance of right whale death and serious injury from entanglement.

The cost to Northeast fishermen in the first year of implementation is expected to be between $9.8 million-$19.2 million, or 1.5 percent to 3 percent of 2019 landings of $650 million. Gear changes will go into effect May 1, 2022, and implementation of the seasonally restricted areas will begin in October.

The costs will be accrued through the time and material it will take to reconfigure gear and markings, and in the impact of reduced catch caused by gear modifications and restricted areas, according to NMFS. The Maine Lobstermen’s Association said it is committed to actions that recover the right whale but

Scott Planting spent most of his career working in rural settings—35 years as pastor in rural Franklin and Somerset counties, then ten years as president of the Maine Seacoast Mission. He lives in Northeast Harbor.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Curtis Gardner, right, loads cans

Robin Haschalk loads product into an oven.

CANNERY

continued from page 1 may one day make a physical connection to the town.

From its Whiting factory, Bar Harbor delivers dozens of specialty products like lobster chowder, clam juice, and, of course, sardines, into almost 30,000 U.S. supermarkets and 10 countries including Ireland, South Africa, and Korea. Pending changes to clam import rules might soon open the European Union market, too.

“I expect and anticipate that’s going to be lifted, which will open an entirely new market for us,” Minihane says.

“We think there’s a huge opportunity in supermarkets in the U.K., and as France and Germany open up, we want to expand into those markets, too.”

International markets have their own rules and so it’s Nagela DeVito’s job to prepare specialized nutrition labels for every country. DeVito is innovation and quality engineer for the business.

“Every time we have to make a label for Canada, we study their regulations because they have different allergens.

In Mexico, it’s completely different, too,” said DeVito, who is also helping to transition Bar Harbor’s recipes to include more gluten-free products, a strategic move to serve a growing market of people with gluten sensitivities or celiac disease.

Sometimes Bar Harbor adjusts recipes to meet international palates, too. For instance, in Canada, Bar Harbor’s smoked sardines are packed in maple syrup.

“Regardless of whether you’re in Whiting or New York, you have to understand the nuances of certain markets,” says Minihane. “You try to sell sardines with maple syrup in the U.S., it’s not going to go too well.”

But sardine sales are going well. In fact, all canned goods are having a moment, thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic and growing interest in shelf-stable foods. Beyond pandemicdriven demand, Minihane sees other positive indicators for canned goods, including an expanding interest in low-carb diets, driving demand for clean proteins.

“To get the equivalent amount of protein in chicken or beef you pay almost three times the price, and with industrial farming behind it,” says Minihane. “The product we have in a can just swims its entire life in the ocean until it’s caught, and it’s never been treated with anything.”

Most of the product line today includes seafood, a fact that attracted its current owner, SeaWatch International, to purchase Bar Harbor in 2016. SeaWatch is the largest wholesaler, harvester, and processor of clams in the world and supplies Bar Harbor with the surf clams needed to make its clam chowders.

To source its sardines, though, Bar Harbor needed to look further afield.

Scarce in Maine waters for decades now, the company first imported sardines from Canada. When that supply chain dried up, it went to Latvia.

“Latvia is where the sustainable elements of the sardine fishery are,” says Minihane.

Sustainability is important to Bar Harbor. This year the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) awarded Bar Harbor Foods its Oceans Champion Award, given to partners that demonstrate excellence in their dedication to healthy oceans and a transparent supply chain.

General Manager Mike Sansing says Bar Harbor goes beyond the standard requirements for supply chain transparency because knowing where seafood comes from is a way consumers can impact the health of the ocean.

“If you go to buy fish at the seafood counter, you don’t know anything about that fish,” said Sansing. Products recognized by MSC bear a bluefish seal.

And Bar Harbor is growing, too, and is planning a physical expansion within two years, likely to be nearby to retain its workforce. Bar Harbor currently employs 31.

Minihane says there will be a processing plant and cannery in Whiting “for a long, long time, because you cannot translate this product having it produced elsewhere. It loses that magic that it has,” says Minihane. “There’s a sparkle in it when it’s from here, and people light up when they see the can.”

Arthur Ingalls, production associate, prepares boxes for shipping.

Mike Stansing, general manager.

From left, Nova Mazur, Jeff Guptill, and David Campbell.

One of several labels used.

. April 2020 www.workingwaterfront.com. October www.workingwaterfront.com 2021

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Ted Ames honored by Bowdoin LIFELONG fisherman and scientist Ted Ames was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Sciences by Bowdoin College on Aug. 14 at its delayed 2020 commencement.

In presenting the degree, Dr. John Lichter, colleague and friend of Ames at Bowdoin, said that when groundfish stocks collapsed in the mid-1990s, Ames set out to understand the decline of fish stocks and what could be done about it.

“Ted was uniquely qualified, being both a fisherman and a scientist,” Lichter said, adding that Ames tapped into the knowledge fishermen have about groundfish populations and behavior that has seldom been appreciated by the scientific community.

“I am so pleased to have this recognition for the work incorporating fishermen’s knowledge into understanding fisheries ecology and dynamics,” Ames said. “This can only help future rebuilding and management efforts for our coastal communities.”

Lichter noted that Ames brought a fresh perspective to fisheries management.

“What Ted came to realize is that contrary to the prevailing view of fisheries managers, groundfish in the Gulf of Maine did not comprise a single large population, but instead occurred in small-localized stocks, which once depleted were not replaced by recruitment from adjacent areas. This insight has profound implications for fisheries management because data collected over an immense area can mask local extinctions, and rules designed for a large spatial scale do not necessarily work at a small scale.”

Ames is the co-founder, longtime advisor, and board member of Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries (MCCF), an organization dedicated to sustaining coastal fishing

through fishermen’s collaborative science and action. His work and MCCF’s sentinel survey for groundfish, a long-term effort to monitor the potential recovery of cod and other groundfish in eastern Maine, have contributed to new federal scientific advice to managers just released this year.

Ames grew up on Vinalhaven as part of a fishing family. He was a Coastal Studies Scholar-inResidence at Bowdoin in 2010-2011. Ted Ames on the Stonington waterfront.

He served as executive director of PHOTO: PAUL MEADOW/MAINE CENTER FOR COASTAL FISHERIES the Maine Gillnetters Association and holds a M.S. in biochemistry from University of Maine, an Honorary Doctorate from University of Maine Machias, and was awarded a MacArthur Grant in 2005.

Ames lives in Stonington with his wife, Robin Alden, former Maine Commissioner of Marine Resources and retired founding director of Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries.

Canada’s Pelee Island gets $20 million internet upgrade

By Dave Battagello

The investment—which features state-of-the-art submarine fiber cable secured to the bed of Lake Erie—is part of the ongoing federal-provincial effort to support WHAT IS BELIEVED to be the longest freshwater fiber link in Canada —almost large scale, fiber-based projects that will provide high-speed internet access to all 75 kilometers (46 miles) in length—will soon be installed to create an upgraded corners of the province by 2025.

“Being a remote island in the middle of Lake Erie can present a wonderful broadband internet connection for every resident and business on Lake Erie’s escape, but it also presents significant challenges for residents and visitors alike,” Pelee Island. said Irek Kusmierczyk, the island’s representative to Parliament. “The lack of fast The federal and provincial governments will jointly fundScale: the 1:12.83 $20 million CHASLE21.PLT 2/10/2021 2:43:50 PM H: 36.252project.

L: 96.247 in Pelee Island is the largest island on Lake Erie and is the southernmost populated and reliable internet connectivity is one of those challenges.”

John Martin, Bud Staples, and Elsie chatresidents around the at the annual residents town meeting.

The island’s 300 Gillespie permanent andwoodstove up to 20,000 seasonal have land mass in Canada.

“This announcement is epic,” said Dave Dawson, the island’s deputy mayor. not been able to fully participate in the digital world, he said. Essex County “This project has been several years in the making and has been a total team Warden Gary McNamara said the pandemic highlighted the need for broadband.

“It has really shown us how vulnerable small towns and remote areas like Pelee effort. Our dream will now be reality.”

Dawson asserted that the upgrade “will impact Pelee’s sustainability, promote Island struggle—especially with home learning, home businesses or working population growth, and allow residents access to basic (online) services in health from home,” he said. “Every home should be connected. This is basically bringing the island to the mainland which I think is a very important step.” care, education, and reliable 911 service.”

Construction to connect Pelee Island will begin almost immediately and is expected to be complete by July 2023. Several neighboring mainland communi- This story first appeared in the Windsor Star of Ontario, Canada, and is reprinted ties will also be connected through the project. with permission.

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Thewww.workingwaterfront.com Working Waterfront . October 2021 2020 . April

23

cRanBeRRy RepoRt

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Way ItIIs.” know it’s a stretch to compare folandother experimented with purple The paint.

IfThe those Jeffwhale Dobbsregulations aerial videos in which stunning lowing Maine whale rope requirelatest require footage reveals thefishermen beauty oftothe are with the a plein air workshop, but ments all Maine lobster usestate’s new coast first part ofon thatthe pairing, it is.could ” markings ropes U.S. theyRoute attach1 isto“thea way person return home from eiFor much the 20th on century, Route ther 1 was thesay that they’d been paintlobster traps.ofDepending how close and way to engage withthey the will state’s coast, the main artery ing in their spare time. If Bruce were to shore they fish, have to add linking locals and visitors to its economy, culture, 2-4 purple marks on each buoy line. writing an essay on how he spent his and opportunities.

On recreational warps that are 100-feet or less there winter vacation, painting would be a Route 1—or, its purple more mark lyricalwithappellation, part of the it. Another part would be the must be one 12-inch Atlantic to Fort I heard him tell his brother description in a fewHighway—stretches fathoms of the trap from and aKey 36- West Kent, 2,446 miles all. It2 fathoms traces itsofbeginnings to walking to get doughnuts, Mark about inch purple mark in within coastal trails along theis13longer colonies. the buoy.

If the warp that 100 in February, with our son Robin, and In an 19 virtual lecture for theour Boothbay grandchildren Henry and Cora. I feet, the Aug. requirement is for a 12-inch Region Historical Earle12-Shettleworth, purple mark near the Society, trap, a second was away with friends in Portland, and former director of halfway the Maine Historic Stephanie was away with friends in inch purple mark to the buoy, Preservation Commission pastnear president of the Maine and a 36-inchand mark the buoy.

Florida.

Father and son were in charge.

Historical Society, story of1,500 “Roadside Maine:we got doughnuts at The “Yeah, Bruce figures hetold will the be putting U.S. Route 1, 1900-1950. to 1,800 markings on his”rope in all; two Cookie Jar and then walked to the of this took place—this beach for a picnic and to throw rocks.” to“All three weeks of extra work ifmassive he doesdevelopment, this change—because development auto- homemade donuts and Eating it without hiring help. of A the number of fish- of the mobile, he applying said of the Route 1 we ropes know today. ermen ”are paint to their throwing rocks at the beach—if that Portsmouth and York. PHOTO: COURTESY MAINE HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION Green Moors Inn, between automobile dramatic the isn’t to a mirror image of many childbyThe resting them inbrought 3-foot long gutterschange way the growing middle classPVC vacationed, and Route made from lengthwise-halved pipe. hood summers on Islesford, I don’t Though Maine often is late to the dance on trends, cars the Samoset, Mount Kineo House—for 1Bruce’s was remade to accommodate thatpaint change. know what is.House, first attempt was with spray q Before World Waron I, to Shettleworth said, those who an extended stay. But when driving from Boston “took hold in Maine very rapidly,” Shettleworth said. but he soon moved the more effiThe state was publishing “Auto Maps of Maine” to lives Maine was within could affordand to latex leavepaint. urban areas in summer would cient brush Barbara Fernald on Islesford (Littlereach both financially and as early as 1920, seeing cars and highways as geographically, cabins and motels began being built. travel, often by train,will to a add resort—the SpringIsland) Some fishermen a 3-footPoland Cranberry with her husband Bruce.

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www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021 opportunities for economic development and tourism. The map “boasts the fact that Maine is open for business, that Maine has all these navigable roads,” a status not universal in those years.

Shettleworth used a series of postcards and photographs from the first half of the 20th century to show the evolution of the highway.

One from 1923 showed Route 1 crossing from Portsmouth to Maine on the “new” bridge, with towers that lifted a middle section to allow ship traffic upriver.

A 1940s image showed the Maine Information Center in Kittery, a neo-Greek building on Route 1.

“By the 1940s, the ‘50s, you were greeted by the Maine Sardines sign, also in Kittery,” he said, showing an image of the 40-foot-high fisherman holding a can.

A photo showed the Chelsea State of Maine cabins in Kittery, with a row of small buildings. Visitors didn’t want the formal nature of hotels, he said, so “You would chart out a route for your vacation and go from place to place.”

Cars lined up waiting for the ferry across the Amenities like electric lights, toilets in every cabin, Kennebec River in Bath. running water, Simmons mattresses, and linoleum PHOTO: COURTESY MAINE HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION floors were advertised.

The Green Moor Inn in York advertised $2 lobster and clam dinners; Eaton’s Campground and Cabins, also in York, offered tent sites. Both were shown in right after World War I along Route 1 and photos from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Shettleworth continued into the 1970s,” when they were said the more adventurous travelers would carry a tent banned by state law.

Fast food came in the form of diners. in their car on their journey to Maine.

“These were based upon the very popular It was in the 1930s that chain motels began to appear. A Howard Johnson’s in Wells opened in 1938, dining cars on trains,” he said. The White Cap “part of a group that opened that year in Maine.” Quick Lunch in Yarmouth, pictured in the The photograph shown was of an attractive colonial 1940s or ‘50s, was shown as an example. Inns began to offer dining, too. One building with a cupola and steep“Trav-O-Tel” featured a sign pitched roof. that read “The fish you eat here After World War II, offerings today slept last night in Casco became more varied. Attractions Bay.” like the Animal Forest Park in York As tourist traffic grew, opened. In 1938, the Ogunquit Amenities like electric transportation planners saw Playhouse opened on Route 1, lights, toilets in every obstacles posed by “the reality hosting shows with contemporary cabin, running water, of Maine topography—the movie stars. And motels began great rivers.” So rather than building pools.

Simmons mattresses, have a ferry crossing from, for It was after the war that motels— and linoleum floors example, Bath to Woolwich, cabins joined together as a “motor bridges were built. hotel”—became the norm. Even as were advertised.

Later, the economic blessing pools and motels became popular, visiof Route 1 began to be seen as a tors had a soft spot for the quaint and threat to community character, historical. “Antiquing became very and bypasses were built to carry popular in the period,” Shettleworth the road around Waldoboro, said, showing a photo of a colonial era Damariscotta, Rockport, and Belfast. In the house with old chairs for sale on the lawn.

Along with cabins and motels, “tourist homes” mid-1930s, Moody’s Diner and Cabins were began to appear. “People had big, old farmhouses, built where the bypass and the original Route 1 and maybe they weren’t productive as a farm so they in Waldoboro intersected.

Construction of the Maine Turnpike “would, would turn them into tourist homes.”

When it became clear travelers and their dollars in some ways, alter the course of Route 1,” were up for grabs on Route 1, businesses stepped Shettleworth said. “You could avoid Route 1. up their game, he said. “Billboards began to appear Now you had a choice.”

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Rock Bound

Home improvement, youth improvement The trades are a wide open, lucrative career path

By Tom Groening I’M BIG A FAN of home improvement TV shows and especially of what is the first of its kind, the PBS program This Old House. I never miss an episode, and even watch the previous projects when they are re-run.

I particularly like the spin-off show, Ask This Old House, which features the crew making house calls. That show features “regular folks” making tweaks to their homes, and they are houses that are much more modest than the big ticket projects the original show tackles.

This Old House began on WGBH in Boston in 1979 and went national on PBS the following year. The franchise made the original episodes available for viewing a year or so ago, and of course I streamed and watched every one. That first project was an essentially abandoned house in Dorchester, purchased for less than $20,000.

For its 40th anniversary, the show returned to Dorchester to renovate a triple-decker damaged in a fire. Along with the regular TOH crew, the project featured many inner-city tradespeople, most of whom were people of color.

The show has made a concerted effort in recent years to underscore the need to fill a growing void of carpenter,

electrician, plumber, landscaper, and mason jobs. The average age in many of these trades is well into the 50s.

TOH has offered apprenticeships on the show, and featured several programs that introduce young adults to the trades and begin to train them for work.

On the recent Dorchester project, the host stopped to interview some of the young people working on the house through a program called YouthBuild.

One young woman—maybe in her mid-20s—explained that she had been working as a security guard but thought training in a trade would provide a better future.

Now, this is me projecting based on very few facts, but I imagined her having graduated high school, still living with her parents, maybe working a late-shift security job at a healthcare facility and getting by fairly well. To be hired as a security guard she would have had a clean criminal record, so she was someone who played by the rules.

Because YouthBuild placed a different pathway before her, this woman’s life may take a very different course. She may become an electrician, working for someone then perhaps starting her own business. She certainly would earn far more than she

would as a security guard, so she could buy a home and start a family. And she would have a fulfilling work life.

This is a desired outcome we all should cheer.

I was powerfully struck by the importance of these nonprofits and what they offer. No YouthBuild, and she probably stays in low-wage jobs.

Have you had to hire a plumber, electrician, or carpenter lately? Even pre-pandemic, there was a shortage.

Five years ago, my plumber told me he stopped taking new customers.

I’ve heard stories about homeowners on islands waiting months for tradespeople. It’s a national problem.

You’ve probably heard people denigrate a liberal arts education as part of the discussion of this skills gap, but that’s an oversimplification. Of course our children should pursue postsecondary education. It’s just that we need to add more options.

Along with the wide-open trades field, technician-type jobs continue to grow.

Can you imagine trying to do a tune-up on your car today? And with we baby boomers hitting old age, we rely on the person doing the CT scan, the physical therapy, and the blood test to be skilled.

The house I live in is a log-cabin kit which I built—with lots of help from

family, friends, and neighbors—and it remains, more than 25 years after breaking ground, unfinished. I am fond of saying, “If I had $15,000 and a month off, I could…” Every year, the dollar figure has increased, and as I approach my mid-60s, the timeframe also grows.

My DIY projects hew closer to another TV show, Home Improvement, in which the hapless host, Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, invariably destroys something and gets injured in the process.

But I do love to work on my home.

When I was in high school, my mother would sometimes let me skip school and take a bus to join my grandfather and work with him on plumbing jobs. He’d probably be shaking his head in dismay at my ineptitude if he saw me working on my house, but I plug away at it.

We built in 1994. Is the house old enough to persuade the TOH crew to come help?

Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront. He may be contacted at tgroening@islandinstitute.org.

Reflections

Understanding seasons on island Off season is time to plan for busy summer Reflections is written by Island Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.

By Kiran Grewal IN THE DEAD of winter, Chebeague Island becomes very quiet. Restaurants and organizations reduce their hours or close entirely, and there are days where the only people entering the Recreation Center are the director of the building and myself. In fact, during this past year, there were days where Steve, the director, was the only person I saw that day.

Several people told me in the darkness of February that the winter was their favorite season, that they preferred the quiet. As someone who had only seen Chebeague in the offseason and wasn’t sure how to meet people when no one was leaving their house, I didn’t quite get it. I couldn’t wait for summer and to see the island fill with life and activity, especially after a long year in the pandemic.

In the spring, I began to understand how big an undertaking creating and running programming at the Rec was going to be. In the midst of running an after-school program and various spring events, I was also creating the summer activities schedule, recruiting instructors, and organizing online registrations.

And then—summer arrived! The island became an exciting and active place, just as I had anticipated.

In many ways, I certainly did get to watch the island come to life. I got to experience people arriving on the boat and families biking through the streets, restaurants and shops opening their doors, and even having the chance to attend events like craft fairs and live music concerts. Chebeague was as picturesque as I had imagined it would be.

As it turns out, implementing an entire season of activities and camps, coordinating staff and lifeguards, and leading weekly kids activities can be a bit draining. Having people of all ages come to the Rec again after virtual programming (or no programs at all) was a refreshing change of pace.

But always being ready to go, even on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings, meant that I didn’t always have the energy to get outside in the nice weather or spend time with friends.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, I find myself being able to take a breath and look ahead to the fall.

Starting to plan for a second year of programming is energizing, especially when I think about the momentum the Rec is building up and how it can continue successfully after I leave.

The changing of the seasons gives me time to reflect on many things: how I’m already a full year into the fellowship, the new members of the Fellows group, the constantly changing landscape of an island (environmentally and demographically), sustainability, and whatever I could end up doing after two years.

In general, I think about the ebbs and flows of my daily rhythm and quotidian island life. The end of summer also means that I, too, can take more time to enjoy the beauty of a calm Chebeague.

I have lived and worked on Chebeague for a year now. I have a

greater appreciation for what each season has to offer, and the drawbacks of living on a Maine island year-round.

There was a lot to learn from the busy summer months, and I am taking those lessons forward with me to better provide programming to the community in a more focused and deliberate way. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that winter is my favorite season, I am definitely looking forward to another one on Chebeague.

Kiran Grewal has a degree in environmental studies and a minor in classics and ancient Mediterranean studies. She served in the Peace Corps as a maternal and child health and HIV/AIDS educator in Zambia until being evacuated due to the pandemic.

She is helping at the Chebeague Island Recreation Center.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

9

A CENTURY AGO— This image shows the launching of the four-masted schooner James E. Newson from Boothbay Harbor in 1920. The photograph is credited in the Library of Congress to McDougall & Keefe.

Op-Ed

Animals are well protected in research Laws and institutions in place to prevent cruelty

By Michael Hays

Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals; U.S. Government Principles for the I READ WITH growing dismay the guest columnist Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used featured in the September 2021 issue of The Working in Testing, Research, and Training; Guide for the Waterfront (“Animal welfare a victim in research”). Care and Use of Laboratory Animals; and American It was, in almost every respect, incorrect and Veterinary Medical Association Guidelines on Euthanasia, (2013). inflammatory.

I served for several years as the required nonFirst, there are laws governing the use of animals in research beyond the Animal Welfare Act, including affiliate on the committee of a large animal research institution and I can categorically the Health Research Extension Act state that more effort is expended in of 1985 which lays out stringent the care and humane treatment of guidelines for care, treatment in research animals than is normally trials (including analgesics, anesMy experience done by a pet owner. Every proposed thetics, paralytics, and euthanasia), use of an animal was reviewed by this pre-surgical and post-surgical is that even the committee and the standard protocol veterinary and nursing care, slightest indication includes using the filter of three “Rs” and, importantly, the organizaas defined by the Guide for the Care tion and operation of animal care that an animal was and Use of Laboratory Animals, 8th committees. mistreated or injured edition: Replacement (methods to These animal care committees are was thoroughly avoid the use of animals), Refinement most commonly called institutional (modifications of husbandry or animal care and usage committees investigated. experimental procedures to enhance and must, by law, include at least animal well-being and eliminate pain one individual who has no associaor distress), and reduction (stratetion with the institution and at least gies for obtaining comparable levels one doctor of veterinary medicine.

The law is overseen by the federal Department of of information from the use of fewer animals or for Agriculture and has multiple supporting guidelines maximizing the information from a given number of and requirements including: Public Health Service animals, without increasing pain or distress).

Island Institute Board of Trustees

Emily B. Lane, Chair Tom Tinsley Vice Chair Charles Owen Verrill, Jr. Secretary Douglas Henderson, Treasurer, Finance Chair Donna Wiegle, Programs Chair Kristin Howard, Philanthropy Chair Shey Conover, Governance Chair Michael P. Boyd, Clerk Sebastian Belle Shey Conover David Cousens Megan McGinnis Dayton Michael Felton Nathan Johnson Bryan Lewis Michael Sant Barbara Kinney Sweet Katherine Vogt Carol White John Bird (honorary)

My experience is that even the slightest indication that an animal was mistreated or injured was thoroughly investigated and, if human activity was the cause of the problem, individuals were re-trained, re-assigned and, in some cases terminated from the institution.

If a problem was caused by process or physical plant issues, it was immediately addressed. In addition, bi-annual committee inspections of all facilities used in the research as well as the records covering every aspect of the breeding, use, and end points were reviewed.

Further, there are international organizations that actively evaluate these institutions to ensure that the highest quality of animal care is used.

One organization, the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International, conducts annual physical inspections of facilities, one-on-one interviews with all levels of responsible employees, and record keeping to ensure the highest standards of animal welfare are maintained. Without this accreditation, the institution is effectively shut down.

If we have learned nothing else over the last 18 months, it is the tremendous debt of gratitude we owe to our scientific and medical institutions for their life-saving work.

Michael Hays lives in Bass Harbor.

THE WORKING WATERFRONT

Published by the Island Institute, a non-profit organization that works to sustain Maine's island and coastal communities, and exchanges ideas and experiences to further the sustainability of communities here and elsewhere.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

An artist’s rendering of what the rebuilt Machias dike would look like shows the walkway and parking area for merchants. IMAGE: COURTESY TOWN OF MACHIAS

Stakeholders find common vision for Machias dike Fish passage, vehicle traffic, and markets would be served

By Sarah Craighead Dedmon

with a designated observation deck above the bridge’s opening, where walkers could enjoy the view of the Machias River.

“There’s never been a better time to fund a project like this,” says van de Sande, evolutionary War-era patriots once captured a British sloop, the H.M.S. Margaretta, in Machias Bay, then sailed the vessel high up the Middle pointing to recent federal infrastructure investments. “It’s a unique situation River, hiding it there near the abundant salt grasses which attracted because it checks all the boxes—climate resiliency, economic development, community health, and environmental restoration.” settlers to Machias in the first place.

Maine Coast Heritage Trust and Downeast Salmon Federation are particularly Today, a dike and causeway span the point where the Middle and Machias Rivers meet, making the Middle River off-limits to enemy ship stashing. That lack interested in salt marsh restoration, which could take place if full tidal action of ship passage is OK, but federal officials this year stated the Middle River must were restored between the Middle and Machias rivers. DSF, a nonprofit dedicated be more accessible to migratory fish, sending a replacement plan ten years in the to rebuilding endangered Atlantic salmon populations, is currently restoring the Schoppee Salt Marsh, just around the corner from the Machias dike. making back to the drawing board.

DSF Habitat Restoration Project Manager Charlie Foster says the next five to Now, the town of Machias, the Downeast Salmon Federation, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust say they have a shared vision that could check state, federal, and ten years could bring transformation to Machias.

“I think it would be a change for the better,” said Foster. “We have to show environmental boxes while checking one for the Machias community, too. No matter what the dike replacement looks like, they say, it should not only improve people that you have to ask for these things, and you have to be vocal for what you want. And if you want vendor space, you have to speak up, and we have.” fish passage, but preserve the dike’s unique cultural and economic value, as well.

Other voices will be speaking up, too, at a DOT public hearing scheduled Everyone who drives Route 1 along the Downeast coastline passes over the Machias dike, or just “the dike” as it is affectionately known by locals. Wide for Sept. 14 in Machias (after publication) to be held outside on the Machias dike, in view of the childhood home of Hannah Rice, for a bridge, the dike holds more than just Route 1 and which stands on the banks of the Middle River. Should the recreational Down East Sunrise Trail. It also holds DOT choose a bridge, her family could lose much of a generous parking area where, on weekends, the dike their land. becomes a linear country fair, with craft, food, and farm “My family stands to lose over 60 acres that have been vendors parked between a food truck or two, with a steady On weekends, the dike becomes in my family for generations, and others stand to lose even stream of pedestrians browsing. a linear country fair, with craft, more, all because a few want to make passage for a few fish This hum of activity is one part of what makes the Machias dike project more than just an infrastructure food, and farm vendors parked… that still get into the Middle River through the current [tidal gate] system,” says Rice. “My parents’ yard would be project, says Maine Coast Heritage Trust Project Manager replaced with floodwaters at high tide and rotting plant Jacob van de Sande. life and mud at low tide.”

“It’s much more than that. This would be one of the The wide causeway and span idea grew out of plans to largest salt marsh restorations in the state of Maine,” says van de Sande. “But there’s also economic development. The dike is an important provide flood protection for low-lying Machias by way of a seawall.

Project adviser Dr. Tora Johnson, who runs the University of Maine at Machias part of this community’s economy.”

In March, Maine Department of Transportation held a month-long public GIS lab, says any replacement must be built higher than the current dike, because hearing—online due to COVID-19—collecting feedback on a dozen replacement flooding events previously expected to occur once every 100 years are now occurring more often—in the past six years, there have been four, including one in 2019 scenarios ranging from adding more culverts to building an open bridge.

That won’t work for us, says Bill Kitchen, Machias interim town manager. And that overtopped the dike and washed out sections of the Downeast Sunrise Trail.

“We can do nothing, we can leave the dike as it is, but nature will solve the he believes DOT is listening.

“From our discussions, I believe the DOT recognizes their responsibility to not problem of the dike if we don’t do anything,” said Johnson.

Whether it’s a causeway or a bridge, Kitchen says any dike replacement must only preserve but improve the economic and cultural value the dike brings to this community,” said Kitchen. “The town’s role is quite simply to make this rebuild support the Machias area’s future success.

“I want us to be the poster project for how construction like this can impact the as good as it can be. It’s going to happen, the question is, what will it look like?”

An artist’s rendering shows exactly what the town and its nonprofit partners revitalization of a rural coastal town,” he says. “There is tremendous economic hope the dike will look like. In the drawing, a new row of trees stands between value on the dike, and I’m not only talking about the vendors’ receipts. The the roadway and the gravel Sunrise Trail, with a broad vendor area stretching economic value is about our quality of life, it’s about landmark pride, it’s about the length of the bridge, now fully open to allow water to flow beneath it. On the community pride, and it’s in the visual impact the dike could have for people who other side of Route 1, a protected pedestrian walkway runs along the roadway, are driving through this community.”

R

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

11

Maine-based hydropower innovator lands capital ORPC secures $25 million investment from Canadian firm

O

cean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), a developer of renewable power systems that harness energy from free-flowing rivers and tidal currents, announced that it has secured a $20 million investment commitment with an additional $5 million coming in the fall.

The investment comes from a consortium led by Canadian Shield Capital in alliance with Hatch. Hatch is a global engineering, project management, and professional services firm with expertise in waterpower and microgrids. ORPC’s existing investors also participated in this round of funding.

The funds will finance ORPC’s growth, including the installation of multiple devices in its targeted markets, as well as boosting the company’s sales and marketing capability, supply chain and engineering expertise, and front office services.

The investment strengthens ORPC’s ability to meet global demand for climate change solutions, clean energy jobs, and environmental and energy justice.

“We have been extremely impressed by the depth of the ORPC leadership team,” said Andrew W. Dunn, managing partner of Canadian Shield Capital. “They have put together a thoughtful, staged plan to bring their products to market and to build broader adoption of this efficient, yet virtually untapped, CO2-free power source, beginning with a series of remote community, off-grid diesel displacements.”

Its partnership with Hatch will assist ORPC in accelerating its international market penetration through access to Hatch, which has worked for almost 100 years in 150 countries on hydropower and water management.

“We see the potential in ORPC’s robust technology and see a path toward much more widescale adoption as part of community power solutions,” said Robert Francki, Hatch’s global managing director for energy and dynamic Earth solutions.

ORPC’s work will take shape in off-grid applications initially, he added, but ultimately will include “grid-scale fleets of devices which will be useful to remote mines and industrial facilities.”

ORPC’s CEO Stuart Davies noted that the company’s two-year operating history in the harsh river environment of Igiugig, Alaska with its RivGen Power System has drawn interest from remote communities around the world to replace diesel generation systems. The RivGen system is a “highly predictable, baseload renewable energy system.”

The investment and the expertise that Canada Shield and Hatch bring will “dramatically expand ORPC’s capability to respond to our target markets, which include communities eager to develop more

Stuart Davies

Andrew W. Dunn

ORPC’s RivGen system.

localized and resilient renewable energy sources,” Davies added.

More than 2 billion people worldwide have limited or no access to electricity, and 700 million of those rely on diesel fuel to operate their local grids. ORPC’s RivGen system in Igiugig, Alaska is the longest operating hydrokinetic device in all of the Americas, according to the company. The installation of a second device together with an energy storage system and smart microgrid controls will enable the community to reduce its diesel use by 60-90 percent.

ORPC is headquartered in Portland with an electronics laboratory in Brunswick, and a marine operations center and in-water product test site in Eastport. In addition to an Alaska project office, ORPC has subsidiaries in Montreal, Dublin, and Punta Arenas, Chile. See: www.orpc.co.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

A winter visit to see the goats at the Blueberry Cove 4-H Camp.

Students enjoy sledding on a hill.

St. George student Juniper shows off her design.

On the St. George peninsula, education continued Joint efforts by school and Blueberry Cove blunted COVID impact

By Ellie Mason

W

hen schools closed in March 2020, the doors to a new after-school program in St. George also closed. In the latter half of its first year, the Blueberry Cove 4H after-school program had finally gotten its feet under itself. The program was formed as a response to families needing reliable, affordable, and local after-school care.

For the past two years, I worked as an Island Institute Fellow on the St. George peninsula, primarily with the K-8 St. George School and the nearby Blueberry Cove 4H Camp to develop and implement an afterschool program for elementary students.

Conversations between Blueberry Cove and the St. George school had led to the creation of the program in 2019. The week of the closure, we had big plans to take

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students up to Aldermere farm in Rockport to learn about the maple sugaring process. Instead, we sat at home staring at each other through our computer screens, trying to figure out what our next steps would be.

The process to reopen was long and complex. Conversations involved school and 4H staff, families, public health officials, and more. For months we worked through new guidance, community opinions, and logistical challenges to redraft this program, which was still in its infancy. The goal was to return students to in-person learning and after-school programming while keeping our community safe.

Much can be said about the setbacks of at home learning, especially for younger students. In rural parts of Maine, many households don’t have access to the technology needed for children to fully connect online. Additionally, a lack of socialization leads to a decrease in social and emotional growth and learning, which has been a key pillar of instruction in the St. George school. We were also aware of the strains on working families which had to reshuffle work schedules for their children now learning from home.

With that in mind, we relaunched the after-school program last September in conjunction with the return to in-person learning at the school. Our plan was to offer our K-5 after-school program every day the school was also open. During this year of COVID we focused heavily on outdoor programming and spent as much time as possible exploring our local school trails around the marsh. We built forts and fairy houses, played lots of hide and seek, made crafts from found objects in nature, and adapted to the changing circumstances in our community.

In the winter our plans changed again as the school started to offer basketball indoors and the gym was no longer available to us. We pivoted to an early dismissal so students could ride the bus to the Blueberry Cove 4H camp and spend afternoons there where they had access to the garden and greenhouse, the farm animals, woods, and the beach.

The sudden change ended up creating a fun and healthy solution that opened the doors for more learning and enrichment opportunities for students.

In the spring, we also worked to add two new programs for 4th and 5th grade which ran in addition to our regular daily after-school program. In March, we offered an art program after school which introduced students to new mediums such as printmaking, collage, and using the laser cutter in the school’s makerspace.

We also offered a garden club where students readied the school garden and planted in the hoop house at the public library. On the last day of “Imaginative Design,” our March program, the school’s instructional administrator told me that in a round of “rose, bud, thorn” most students named the end of the program as their thorn.

As the after-school program enters its third year this fall, and as I leave my role as an Island Fellow in this community, I am proud of what we have created, proud of what we have accomplished, and heartened by the community support and engagement that fueled our successes during this pandemic year.

Throughout the school year, I’d check in with other nearby after-school programs and one by one they would tell me they had temporarily shut down their programs. I often felt like I was out here on my own, navigating a program that didn’t have anything to model itself on.

It was the K-5 teachers, the facilities and transportation crew, and the Blueberry Cove staff who pulled together to keep our program running. As a result, students had a safe place to learn after school and parents were able to return to their jobs.

This year, the program will continue to be offered daily and will continue to focus on curiosity-driven learning outdoors. We plan to spend more time at Blueberry Cove and will be taking field trips around the St. George peninsula to explore local trails, history, and community spaces.

After-school programming in St. George has grown well beyond solely a community vision to something that working families count on and value in our community.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

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Island Institute names new president

Dr. Anthony ‘Tony’ Chatwin has sustainability, climate background

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he Island Institute, a community development nonprofit serving Maine’s island and coastal communities, has hired Anthony (Tony) Chatwin as its new president.

Emily Lane, chairwoman of the Institute’s board of trustees, noted that Chatwin’s background matched the organization’s priorities.

“With more than 20 years of experience in building sustainable communities, developing solutions for carbon reduction, and forging public-private partnerships, Dr. Chatwin is extremely well-suited to lead the Island Institute as it addresses the most urgent issues facing Maine’s coast,” Lane said. “We are delighted to have Tony at the helm as we redouble our efforts around climate action, the coastal economy, and investments in community infrastructure and leadership.”

Prior to joining the Institute, Chatwin led the science and evaluation team at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) where he worked to grow the impact of its grant programs and projects and developed strategies for marine conservation and nature-based solutions for carbon reduction.

He also established several public-private partnerships including the Fisheries Innovation Fund, which supports the effective participation of fishermen and fishing communities in the implementation of sustainable fisheries in the U.S. Prior to working at NFWF, he led the implementation of strategies to improve the sustainability of coastal communities at The Nature Conservancy and Conservation Law Foundation.

“I’m thrilled to be joining the Island Institute’s exemplary team of staff and board,” Chatwin said, “and I look forward to working with its many community members and partners in service to Maine’s island and coastal communities.”

The Institute emphasis on sustainability especially appealed to him.

“I’m truly passionate about sustainability—for communities, economies, and the environment—and I can’t think of an organization better suited to address these opportunities on Maine’s islands and coast than the Island Institute.”

Chatwin, whose children were born in Boston, is looking forward to returning to New England and making Maine his home.

“It’s an exciting time for the Island Institute,” Lane added. “We are in a unique position to help Maine’s coastal communities, just when they need it most, and we are confident that Tony’s experience and leadership will strengthen our ability to build resilience along the Maine coast.”

Dr. Anthony Chatwin

Based in Rockland, the Island Institute—publisher of The Working Waterfront— was founded in 1983 by Philip Conkling and Peter Ralston. Chatwin is the organization’s third president.

Art writer Carl Little honored

Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation name him lifetime achievement winner

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he Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, dedicated to recognizing and rewarding writers who make art accessible to general audiences, have awarded a $50,000 lifetime achievement award to poet and art critic Carl Little of Mount Desert.

For more than 30 years, Little has been one of the primary cultural connections between Maine and New York, writing about the Maine art scene for national publications and about the larger art world for Maine magazines and newspapers, including The Working Waterfront.

Suzette McAvoy, recently retired director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, describes Little as “a champion of art and artists in Maine and beyond.”

“His many books on art, written with enthusiasm and sensitivity, draw on his deep knowledge of art history and his active engagement with artists and the art community,’’ says McAvoy. “His work is, and will remain, an important contribution to the history of art in Maine and America.”

Little began writing about art in 1980, the year he earned an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

He first contributed reviews to Arts Magazine and then in 1986 became an associate editor at Art in America. He continued to write for Art in America after he moved to Maine in 1989, having been introduced to the Maine coast and islands by his uncle, painter William Kienbusch.

In recent years, Little has been a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and Art New England and for 25 years he has written artist profiles and features for Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors.

In addition to art reviews and journalism, Little has published 30 art books, among them Paintings of Maine, Paintings of New England, The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper’s New England, Winslow Homer and the Sea, Art of the Maine Islands, Art of Acadia and Art of Monhegan Island.

The beauty of Little’s popular art books is that they are heavily illustrated and explicated with clear, concise texts. A Carl Little book is like an intelligent conversation about art between interested parties, not a sermon or an argument.

Little has also authored monographs on Joel Babb, Philip Barter, Jeffrey Becton, Beverly Hallam, Francis Hamabe, Dahlov Ipcar, William Irvine, and Irene Hardwicke Olivieri. Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond won the first John N. Cole Prize for Non-Fiction from the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in 2012.

Little is also the editor of Discovery: 50 Years of Craft Experience at Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Art of Katahdin, a collaboration with his brother, painter David Little.

As a poet, Little has published two collections, 3,000 Dreams Explained and Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems.

Personally and professionally, Little is a modest, generous, and collaborative colleague respected and

Carl Little

PHOTO: ERIN LITTLE

liked by everyone who knows him. He has dedicated his writing life to explaining and exploring the art worlds of Maine and New York, a lifetime of art writing that the Rabkin Foundation is pleased and proud to honor.

The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, headquartered in Portland, gives annual prizes to eight visual art journalists from across the country. This is the third time the foundation has given a lifetime achievement award.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

David Gardner, left, from Connecticut, has been visiting Bailey Island since 1940, with Steve Johnson, wait to buy lobsters at Glen’s Lobsters in Mackerel Cove. Johnson purchases the crustaceans for Bailey Island General Store where he then picks the meat for lobster rolls.

Quinn Ranta on the schooner Alert, where he is serving in his third season as deckhand.

,

What’s cooking on Bailey and Orrs islands

Behind the scenes at busy tourist hot spots PHOTO ESSAY BY KELLI PARK

Melinda Richter, owner of Island Candy Company on Orrs Island, makes truffles.

Bethany Lopes pauses briefly during the dinner rush at The Driftwood Inn.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

Passengers on their way to board schooner Alert in Garrison Cove next to Cooks Lobster House

Steve Johnson, whose family has lived on Bailey Island for several generations, spent 60 years lobstering. These days, he picks 40-80 pounds of lobsters daily for lobster rolls. Johnson volunteers his time and has become a sort of figurehead within the general store and community. “It gives me something to do. I’m just doing it for a piece of pizza and a Pepsi. It’s a good thing.”

Some of the staff at Cook’s Lobster House enjoy the nightly tradition of viewing and photographing the sunset.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Our Island Communities Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh row toward the Sirius to board, with a helping hand from Joe Burke of North Haven. The couple charted and flew the great circle route to China, a course still followed by airliners.

PHOTO: COURTESY NORTH HAVEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

North Haven to China, a flight that ‘staggered the world’ Historic journey relied on Anne Morrow Lindbergh flying skills This story first appeared on the website Maine Island Living and is reprinted here by permission.

By Kate Hotchkiss

“A

n hour and a half before they took off, you could have walked across the Thoroughfare on the rowboats,” wrote Ellen Pratt (1906-2000) of the day Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh left North Haven on what became the Great Circle Route to the Orient.

It was July 30, 1931, described by Pratt as “a perfectly beautiful day.” Aviator hero Lindbergh and his co-pilot-navigator-radio operator wife Anne had just spent a respite at her family’s summer home surrounded by friends and relatives.

The trip originated in Washington, D.C., but officially started in New York. For Anne and her fellow islanders, the true beginning of the journey was firmly anchored in the Fox Island Thoroughfare.

Just about every North Havener had a role, either taking a shift guarding the Lockheed Sirius 8 plane purchased two years earlier for $22,825, herding reporters so they wouldn’t overrun the plane or its pilots, providing last-minute supplies, or simply witnessing such a vivid moment in global aviation.

Samuel H. Beverage, avid model plane builder and then age 14, recalls how his very next project was a Lockheed Sirius.

“I forget to whom I sold it. My usual price was 50 cents which was quite a lot of money in 1931,” he remembers.

On takeoff, the plane swooped down low at Seal Cove “and flew down the Thoroughfare very low,” Pratt remembered. “Every rowboat was jammed and everyone was standing, crying, clapping, screaming. I still remember my own tears—it was a very exciting, moving moment in all our lives.”

North Haven was a treasured place for Anne Morrow Lindbergh, filled with childhood memories, and it became the base from which she copiloted her second record-setting flight. According to her sister Constance Morrow Morgan (1913-1995), Anne worked the hardest on writing the North Haven chapter for North to the Orient, published in 1935.

“An absorbed group of aviators, travelers, The book became a bestseller, won the National Book Award, and was the first of several literary triumphs explorers, meteorologists, surveyors, and scientists—men who knew Northern Canada as no other for the pilot-writer-mother.

Of North Haven, she writes: “The visit was an group in the world—stood around him arguing.“ emotional springboard, and, as such, was marked When one of the experts said he would not take with an importance far greater than its brief hours his own wife on a particular leg they were considmight warrant.” Of their departure she adds, “The day ering, Lindbergh reminded him that his wife was was hard and clear and bright, like the light slanting “crew,” a professional confidence Anne was “even off a white farmhouse. The island falling away under more flattered” by than the chivalry expressed by us as we rose in the air lay still and perfect, cut out in the expert advisor.

Charles was fierce about safety. Even so, since they starched clarity against a dark sea. I had the keenest satisfaction in embracing it all with my eye. It was were in an infant industry, danger was inherent, stalking them constantly and most often in the form mine as though I held it, an apple in my hand.”

Little wonder she held the island so lovingly as they of fog.While the trip took them to 18 more locaflew north: The couple’s one-year-old son, Charles Jr., was tions, Anne focused on key stops in her writing, starting with Canada’s Baker Lake, “a gray glassy ensconced in her family’s white farmhouse by the sea.

The Lindberghs flew across Canada to Russia, then lake, bounded by gray bleak shores a little higher than the marshes.” From Baker on to Japan and China. The distances Lake they followed the Canadian made it imperative for there to be shore along Amundsen Gulf on two pilots. Anne’s navigator and the Beaufert Sea, putting them in a radio operator roles were key to the river near Aklavik. success and safety of the flight.

“I still remember my Next they landed in a lagoon at Anne was just 25 when she flew Point Barrow, “the bleak northern the 10,000 miles to China in a tiny own tears—it was top of Alaska,” after dancing dangerplane, her husband Charles 29. a very exciting, ously with thick, incessant fog. From In 1931 and later pioneering there they arrived at the mining moving moment flights, Anne continued as copilot, town of Nome, another ocean navigator, radio operator, flight in all our lives.” landing during which they raced memoir writer, natural diplomat, —ELLEN PRATT the darkness to seek an unknown linguist, as well as what she considharbor on the Bering Coast. ered her most important roles: On to Kamchatka, Russia after mother of six children and wife. She flying over the tiny island of was even an inventor, having the Karaginski, where Anne was able idea of sliding cockpit covers that to communicate in French rather than the beginner ultimately became an industry standard.

Anne was the first licensed female glider pilot as Russian she had learned in preparation for the trip. well, probably as a safety measure so she could glide After soaring along the chain of islands that connect the Kamchatka Peninsula to the big northern the aircraft to an emergency landing if necessary.

As recounted in North to the Orient, after departing Japanese island of Hokkaido, more fog banks haunted from North Haven the couple flew to Ottawa, during the skies, as if hunting them down.

Such weather required an emergency landing in which Anne had what she describes as her “first open ocean after multiple, frightening, failed attempts successful day” on the radio.

That evening Charles mapped their route across at a Buroton Bay landing.

“Does he really think I enjoyed his game of tobogCanada with the help of concerned colleagues. Anne ganing down volcanoes?” laments Anne that day. describes the scene in signature candor:

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

farther inland in Hankow (present day Wuhan).

They had flown there from Nanking before what was to be their last trip over the flood—an extremely important mission bringing a doctor to the ravaged regions. Known for its strong currents and dirty water, the swollen river was particularly turbulent after the rains. Concerned for the plane’s safety, the captain of the British carrier H.M.S. Hermes hoisted the Lindberghs’ Sirius onboard.

A subsequent botched attempt at lowering the plane back into the water resulted in near tragedy for the pilots and a pile of people in a small boat pulled into the dramatic scene by the current. Anne and Charles were forced to jump from the plane as a wing CHINA AT LAST dipped into the rushing river, the cable connecting On Sept. 19, 1931 the Lindberghs arrived at Nanking them to the giant carrier too taut to release the (Nanjing), then capital of China, landing safely on Lotus aircraft. Thankfully, the doctor was not yet onboard as a precaution.

Lake, where Anne notes, “The A team effort involving an flooded waters stretched to the foot American gunboat and Charles of the wall, like a medieval moat.” boarding his upside-down, The couple immediately donated Next they landed in a partially submerged plane to their energy, skills, and equipment attach ropes to the accessible to map an additional 8,000 square lagoon at Point Barrow, wing and propeller resulted in miles of devastation for China’s National Flood Relief Commission. “the bleak northern top of gaining some control.

Because of the severity of Anne would pilot while Charles Alaska.” damage to the aircraft, the took photographs and surveyed Lindberghs would have to take the Yellow River (Huang He) a ship home to America. News flood zone, the most destructive in China’s history. The Lindberghs’ Sirius was the only of the mishap reached family and friends on North plane around that could fly such distances, enabling Haven and elsewhere in the country quickly, causing them to provide these critically important visual concern and disappointment.

To make matters worse, Anne’s father, Ambassador records from which officials planned relief strategy.

To make room for doctors delivering medicine, Dwight W. Morrow, unexpectedly passed away Charles also flew to the struggling town of Hinghwa before they could return. North Haven resident without Anne. Desperate, hungry flood victims Lewis Haskell sums up the collective feeling well: perilously tried to board the plane from their poled “Later we heard that they got in trouble in China sampans, requiring Charles’s selective use of his in the floods that were going on there, fell in the pistol—warning shots in the air—to prevent the plane Yangtze River, and got the plane all banged up.

People worried. It seemed a terrible comedown that from getting overrun and likely damaged.

Despite their success with ocean and lake anchor- they took a boat home. He should have flown home.” ages, the Lindberghs fared badly in the Yangtze River The Lindberghs did not stay grounded for long, and Despite their rough landing in choppy seas, Anne’s subsequent experiences in Japan were worthwhile on many levels. Morgan explains that while Anne was fascinated by all the places they went and the people they met, the philosophies and aesthetics of Japan would have a lasting impact on Anne’s life and writing.

She writes about Osaka next, a city made particularly memorable when her husband discovered a “good-sized boy of 18” hiding in the forward cockpit. Anne worried about what would happen to the young stowaway, a fellow unhappy at home and hoping to land himself in the United States, compliments of the Lindberghs. The couple was, of course, en route to China.

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The Lindberghs with the plane in Japan.

PHOTO: COURTESY NORTH HAVEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

by 1933 they installed a more powerful engine in the Sirius in preparation for an Atlantic survey flight.

Again departing from the Fox Island Thoroughfare, this pioneering trip took them to Labrador, Iceland, Greenland, Europe, and then on to Africa, South America, and islands between. Ten days of this journey is described in vivid detail in Anne’s Listen!

The Wind (1938).

In that 1931 flight to the Orient the Lindberghs enhanced U.S.-China relations, helped those stricken by the massive flood there, and represented the very best of youth and promise while capturing the imagination of the world.

And long before the feminist movement took hold in the U.S., Anne Morrow Lindbergh broke glass ceilings neither she nor Charles acknowledged even as she flew through them.

Observes Morgan of the Lindbergh’s copiloted flights: “The newsreel footage of a married couple working in such equality in a professional situation would have a huge impact on the American imagination of how men and women might work together.” As so aptly stated by island resident Garrison Norton in a letter to the North Haven Historical Society decades ago, “Charles and Anne staggered the world between them.”

Kate Hotchkiss is the author of the historical novel On Harbor’s Edge. She lives on North Haven.

She extends thanks and acknowledgement to the North Haven Historical Society and its supporters, Margaret Eiluned Morgan, Reeve Lindbergh and her book Under a Wing (1998), China historian Steven Hansberger, The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, “Lindbergh’s Chart Flood Area in China” by New York Times journalist Hallett Abend, Yale University’s chief research archivist and Lindbergh historian Judith Schiff, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Spider haven: arachnids of the Downeast coast Species abundant, and invasives have arrived Story and photos by Dana Wilde

T

iny beings were darting around the sunbleached sandy beach. If you weren’t paying much attention you might think they were fleas, or house flies maybe, or something worse.

But in fact they were something much better: spiders. Exactly what we were searching for at the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge a while back.

These were thin-legged wolf spiders, to be precise, of the genus Pardosa. What species of Pardosa was nigh-on impossible to tell there on the beach. We would have to catch a couple, bring them back to the lab, and subject them to microscope procedures if we wanted to find out.

My spider-hunting colleagues and I were taking part in a long Downeast tradition, really. Most of the studies done on spiders in Maine have taken place along the Downeast coast, and our weeklong course in spider identification and biology at the Eagle Hill Institute in Steuben was an extension of that long-running research.

Starting around the turn of the 20th century, naturalists began inventorying the arthropod populations on and around Mount Desert Island. Their lists included insects, spiders, and other tiny invertebrate denizens. By then it was well-established taxonomic fact that spiders are not insects.

Insects have six legs, three body parts, antennae often, sometimes wings, and sometimes stingers.

Spiders have eight legs, two body parts, no antennae,

no wings, and no stinger. And while there are aquatic insects, there are no fully aquatic spiders—just spiders who happen to live along rivers and ponds, cobble beaches, and salt marshes. Some of them can run across the surface of the water, and a few, such as large fishing spiders like those found in Maine, have been known to catch minnows and drag them ashore to eat.

The first substantial list of spider species found in Maine was part of the Biological Survey of the Mount Desert Region, by William Procter, published in 1946 following his inventory of invertebrates there in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. The next comprehensive list of spiders in Maine was Spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) of Milbridge, Washington County, Maine by Daniel T. Jennings and Frank Graham, Jr., published in 2007, based on their collections made from 1991 to 2005 in Milbridge. In October 2020, the Checklist of Maine Spiders, compiled

by Jennings with the help of former state entomologist Charlene Donahue and listing 677 spider species verified in Maine, was published by the Maine Forest Service.

THEY ARE EVERYWHERE

A wolf spider (Schizocosa genus.)

A European hammock spider, also known as Linyphia triangularis or “Linytri.”

Spiders are practically everywhere—including, by common reckoning, the spider that is probably within 3 feet of you as you read this. There are at least 48,700 species (and maybe as many as 170,000) worldwide.

Jennings and Graham’s study in Milbridge turned up spiders from 302 species.

Jennings, Maine’s foremost spider expert, died in September 2020. From the 1970s on, he made studies of spiders more or less throughout Maine, from Washington County blueberry barrens and the Moosehorn Wildlife Refuge to the northern and central woods. But while spiders are abundant everywhere, particularly interesting discoveries have come from the numerous coastal studies.

Graham, while collecting spiders around his home in Milbridge in 1991, found a spider he could not identify. With Jennings’ help, he figured out it was a European hammock spider, aka Linyphia triangularis—never before identified in North America.

Subsequently “Linytri,” as Graham and Jennings nicknamed it, was matched to an unidentified specimen found in Brooksville in 1983, and they determined it to be an invasive species of sheetweb weaver recently arrived somehow on the Maine coast.

And not without effects. Studies found that where the European hammock spider is abundant, as at Acadia, other native sheetweb weavers such as the hammock spider and filmy dome spider have become scarce. Meanwhile in places where “Linytri” is not widespread, such as the Cobscook Bay area in the early 2000s, the native sheetweb weavers remain abundant.

In 2002, researchers working in Winter Harbor found a dewdrop spider (the cobweb weaver Neospintharus trigonum) eating a female L. triangularis in her own web. The dewdrop spider was already known to be a kleptoparasite, or a spider that steals prey from other spiders. Now, apparently, it was eating the web owners themselves.

The implications of this have yet to be sorted out, but it is not always smooth sailing for the invasives.

Jennings had also found a juvenile dewdrop spider in a L. triangularis web farther south in Pittston in 1999, suggesting the invasive spider’s Maine range was affecting ecologies beyond the Downeast coast.

We found quite a few European hammock spiders in our Steuben searches, as well as at least one individual from most of the spider families listed in Jennings and Graham’s Milbridge study—jumping spiders, cobweb weavers, hackledmesh weavers, crab spiders, cellar spiders, orbweavers, ground spiders, and more.

Wolf spiders were by far the most numerous spiders in Jennings and Graham’s Milbridge study.

Those found Downeast range in size from tiny to startlingly large. Jennings and Graham found Pirata

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

Wolf spiderlings riding on their mother’s back.

Spider hunters along the shore at Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge.

minutus individuals, which can be as small as .12 inch in body length, along the shore, and Trochosa terricola, whose females can exceed a half inch in body length, inhabiting mainly leaf litter and salt marsh areas.

In Steuben we found mother wolf spiders on the stony shoreline carrying their round white egg sacs underneath their spinnerets. Others had their newly hatched spiderlings riding on their backs. The Schizocosa genus of wolf spiders, with body lengths typically around a quarter inch, is found around salt marshes, among other places. Trochosa ruricola, found abundantly along Narraguagus Bay by Jennings and Graham, is another invasive from Europe. It arrived sometime before the 1990s and may be displacing its native cousin, Trochosa terricola, on offshore islands.

When I asked Jennings a few years ago what might be the most commonly seen spider in Maine, he said, after a few moments’ thought, “Maybe Pardosa.” And in fact, the thin-legged wolf spiders we saw darting around the beach at Petit Manan Wildlife Refuge might well have been Pardosa moesta—the most numerous species in the Milbridge study.

And just to reassure you as you spot a darting spider or two while you’re exploring the boulders and sandy beaches: Not one of us in our spider course was bitten by a spider, nor did any of us expect to be. All spiders run away from large beings such as humans and may try to bite only as the last resort when cornered. Few spiders have jaws strong enough to break human skin. And on those rare times when a wolf spider

or a sac spider might bite, you may not even know it happened unless you get a bug-bite-like reaction.

Even in that rare case, it’s unlikely to be as nasty as a typical black fly or even mosquito bite. (Note: There are no established populations of the notorious black widow or brown recluse spiders in Maine; it’s too cold in winter for them.)

They may seem scary because they look like little monsters, but spiders are the guardians of your garden. And, as it were, the beach.

Dana Wilde is the author of A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine available from North Country Press (www.northcountrypress.com/a-backyard-book-ofspiders-in-maine.html).

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Designed by celebrated architect, Asher Benjamin, the house was built in 1860 for Charles Jarvis and Mary Ann Black, Col. John Black’s daughter.

With integral period details, the interior is lovely without seeming pretentious or overwhelming. The light in each room is captivating to enhance paint and furnishings. With 8 bedrooms, 2 of which make up an in-law apartment, 3 full baths, 2 half baths, double parlor, library, formal dining room, kitchen with original butler’s pantry, and a third floor for overflow play space, in addition to several fireplaces, this house has great energy inside and out. Tucked in the heart of Ellsworth, this magical property consists of a heated in-ground pool, lovely patio, stately trees and a secluded yard with detached original carriage house which has had extensive renovations. Welcome to the Jarvis Homestead. $749,000

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

So long, Styrofoam?

PEI moves toward polyethylene buoys

By Craig Idlebrook

While aquaculture production of filter-feeding shellfish is generally regarded as fairly “green” and ach year, the PEI Aquaculture Alliance and the sustainable, Canadian organic certification encourprovincial government of Prince Edward Island ages the switch from Styrofoam buoys to new ones in Canada organize shoreline cleanups of the with harder outer plastic shells, Warris said.

“They’ll allow you to continue using the Styrofoam island province. Along with traps, ropes, bottles, and ones that you’ve got, but once it reaches household debris, the volunteers always its end of life, the requirement is that find plenty of fragments of expanded you replace it with hard plastic,” he said. polystyrene (Styrofoam) buoys. The Warris added that more than 20 local buoys, which first began to be used by mussel and oyster growers took part in fishermen during World War II, can As traditional the buoy program. At first, a few indieasily break apart when exposed to rough seas or too much sunlight, or Styrofoam buoys vidual growers applied for funding to replace buoys, but then the Alliance when burrowed into by sea creatures. crumble, they to work with PEI’s Department Recently, however, the Alliance can cause deadly began of Fisheries and Communities to orgacompleted an effort to swap out some digestive issues nize these requests.

87,000 Styrofoam buoys for new highThe organization coordinated with density polyethylene buoys which and reduced local officials to seek a grant through are much less likely to break apart. fertility in sea Canada’s Fisheries and Aquaculture The Alliance received some $270,000 Clean Technology Adoption Program, (Canadian) in funding from the federal creatures… said Kim Gill, manager of aquaculture and provincial governments to buy the with the province’s Department of new buoys and dispose of the old ones.

Agriculture and Fisheries.

Peter Warris, the Alliance’s director of “We had a lot of individual growers projects and industry liaison, said the island’s mussel and oyster farmers were eager to take approaching us for smaller projects. It’s a lot of adminpart in the program because of Canadian organic istration,” Gill said. “So what the aquaculture alliance food certification standards. PEI supplies some 80 did was they suggested a larger funded program, and percent of the mussels for North America, and some then they administered specific projects with these growers have worked with the Alliance to receive industry members.”

PEI is small in population—157,000—and organic certification which can net them a higher in geography—about twice the size of Rhode price in the marketplace.

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Island—and Gill said the collective familiarity there may be part of the reason provincial officials and the local aquaculture industry have a good history of working together.

“We have good lines of communication,” she said.

“Industry is really the backbone of all that happens moving things forward in terms of product development, and even gear and infrastructure changes.”

As traditional Styrofoam buoys crumble, they can cause deadly digestive issues and reduced fertility in sea creatures that ingest the plastic bits, according to Flora and Fauna International, a wildlife conservation organization based in the United Kingdom.

The government of South Korea recently pledged to replace all Styrofoam buoys used in its fisheries with more eco-friendly options by 2025, according to a report in Aju Business Daily, a South Korean newspaper. In Canada, there was a smaller buoy replacement program that took place in the province of British Columbia.

The 87,000 buoys replaced in the waters off Prince Edward Island represent just 6 percent of those used by the island’s aquaculture industry, according to Warris. After the initial success of this buoy swap, Warris said the Alliance will look for more grant opportunities to continue this transition away from Styrofoam buoys. It’s just part of the changing nature of the industry, he said.

“From what I understand, people were using empty bottles as floatation in the past,” Warris said. “You continue to evolve, and you continue to change your best practices.”

AQUACULTURE LEASE APPLICATION

NOTICE OF HEARING

Marine

The Department of Marine Resources (DMR) is holding a public hearing on the renewal of the following lease site:

Applicant Name and Lease Type Culture Type Species General Location, Town Acreage Requested Lease Term Requested

Jesse Leach (lease acronym: BAG SB) Standard Lease Suspended culture (gear on bottom and/or suspended) and bottom culture (no gear) Shellfish and Sea Urchins

Bagaduce River, west of Bear Head, in the Towns of Brooksville & Sedgwick

4.13 acres 20 Years

The public hearing on this application has been scheduled as follows:

October 13, 2021 3:00 p.m.

Brooksville Town Hall 1 Town House Road Brooksville, ME

Insuring the Midcoast since 1898.

If the hearing listed above is postponed or continued, an alternate public hearing will be held on October 14, 18, and 19, 2021 at the same time and location. Notice of a postponement or a continuance will be posted on DMR’s website.

INFORMATION ON DMR WEBSITE: See DMR’s website for the lease application: http://www.maine.gov/dmr/aquaculture/leases/pending/index.html

REGISTERING FOR THE HEARING: The hearing will be conducted in accordance with the adjudicatory proceeding provisions of the Maine Administrative Procedure Act (5 M.R.S.A., ch.

375, subchapter 4). Persons wishing to attend the hearing and ask questions of the parties or testify under oath about the effect of the proposed lease must register to participate. Interested persons need to complete an online registration form no later than 5:00 p.m., September 28, 2021. If you are unable to register online or need assistance with the form, please contact DMR. Online registration can be completed at: https://www.maine.gov/dmr/aquaculture/meetinglist.html INTERVENING: Applications to intervene need to be received by DMR no later than 5:00 p.m., September 28, 2021. DMR will decide whether to grant intervenor applications five days before the hearing. If you are granted intervenor status, you become a legal party to the proceeding. See the contact information below to request an intervenor application from DMR. You do not need to be an intervenor to participate in the proceeding.

(800) 898-4423

Boothbay

New Harbor

Vinalhaven

jedwardknight.com

Rockland

Bath

Wiscasset

Address questions to: Maine Department of Marine Resources (207) 624-6573 DMRaquaculture@maine.gov

For disability accommodations, contact Melissa Macaluso at: (207) 624-6553 Melissa.Macaluso@maine.gov 877-243-2823, TTY 711

RELEVANT AUTHORITY: The rules governing the leasing program are found in Chapter 2 of DMR regulations. The statutory provisions are: 5 M.R.S.A. §9501 et seq. & 12 M.R.S.A. §6072(1) et seq., & 12 M.R.S.A. §6072-A(1) et seq.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

World Ocean Observatory

The ‘ocean’ above us under assault The night sky and the sea as victims of exploitation

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ONE OF THE GREAT ocean experiences is the panoply of the night sky. A vast darkness, shaped by intimations of residual clouds, the crescent moon, complicated by distant planets and stars in their constellations, swept into the arc of the Milky Way, made exhilarating and mysterious by the potential of the northern lights—all as metaphysical and meaningful as pure nature.

I have been anchored offshore Downeast for the past few nights, cool and clear, with the sense of solitude and isolation from the travails of the world where we are. Those satellites enable instant diminished, distant, sublime.

Solitude is such a privilege. We live among communications, cultural and political maddening crowds. We retreat to the ocean as a place exchange, guide our ships at sea and our apart, where the intrusion of circumstance can be harvesters on land. Those satellites enable us to share art and culture worldwide and to guide held, briefly, at bay.

How often do poets and artists look to the sky for the weapons of war to a lone enemy anywhere.

This is the new contradiction now enabled metaphors of freedom and peace? How often do we marvel at the stars when seen in unexpected places? as a modern “music of the spheres.” There may What would life be for sailors, nomads, city-dwellers, be universal betterment there, just as there may be specific evil easily enabled by a tactic creative spirits, if there was no night sky, no stars?

A friend told me a story the other day about a and a keystroke.

Who gave that entrepreneur the right to recent evening camping in Montana, where she had laid down on the ground below that vast western modify our lives in such a way? Who gave him the authority to change sky, far from the ocean, but inspiring the night sky? Who gave him of oceanic feeling. She described a permission to profit from the night as wide and significant as if she privatization of space? Who were alone, disconnected from all the gave him approval to impose his complexities of life, as if she were at individual ambition and vision sea, with only herself for company, She felt violated upon our thoughts and oceanic only her sensibility as companion. and outraged … feelings?

I expected some personal revelation My friend was upset; I am to follow. But what happened to her by the sudden incensed. This new reality is the next was unexpected and disruptive: unnatural apotheosis of man’s consumpthe arrival of a cluster of lights, moving tion and corruption of nature. in company, explained as a cluster of modification of As we deal with the global some 50 low-level satellites launched the night sky… consequence of the values, by an entrepreneur, moving as a coorstructures, and behaviors of dinated technological cluster, as the this attitude—as we see the beginning of an industrial solution to burned and desiccated land, the bring wireless connection, for profit, to acidified ocean, the polluted every individual on earth—in effect, an atmosphere, the outcome over intended system for universal connection, global communication, and logistical efficiency time of this corrupting approach—how can we allow one man to supersede all authority, that would, indeed, transform the world we live in.

She felt violated and outraged, not just by the national and international, to launch this sudden unnatural modification of the night sky, not invasion upon us? It is cosmically extra-legal, just by an invasion of her solitude and privilege, but beyond even the hand of God. I thought about this floating on the ocean also by the implication that those things might now never be possible again, for anyone, given the poten- that connects all things. Dream-state? Or tial of direct surveillance and manipulation of things nightmare. Prospect of the final insult to the natural world that sustains us? on Earth by a power over which she had no control.

The irony is inescapable. The first ocean navigators used the patterns of the stars to locate themselves in Peter Neill is director of the World Ocean an uncharted ocean, observed patterns of experience Observatory, which produces weekly radio that provided certainty of place and direction as they essays heard on WERU-FM, 89.9, on explored and traded across the world. podcast at apple.com/us/podcast/worldThose satellites are the tools of modern navigation, ocean-radio/id425361249, and at www. global positioning systems, that place us precisely worldoceanobservatory.org/world-ocean-radio. in time and space to an extent that we know exactly He lives in Sedgwick.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Saltwater Cure

Don’t mow the milkweed

A small, but effective step to save a species

By Courtney Naliboff NOT TOO FAR from my house, on one of my usual walking routes, is a huge field. A house sits on the field far back from the road, so that any signs of habitation are invisible to passersby, but the field covers an immense swath of South Shore Road.

It greens up in a patchwork each spring, lighter on the drier, high ground and a darker green from ferns and horsetail closer to the trickle of water that runs parallel to it. As the grass gets taller in the summer my dog makes valiant attempts to rout field mice and grasshoppers from between the flower stalks.

Towards the end of the season, a hired mower arrives to level the playing field, as it were.

Mowing the fields is a late summer ritual, and there’s a certain satisfaction in the neat stripes the mower leaves behind. This year, I noticed an aberrant clump of something in the middle

of the patterned land. Upon closer to preserve their habitat—just don’t inspection, I realized it was milkweed. mow the milkweed.

I asked a friend who mows for the This new cluster isn’t the only one left intentionally standing after the late town whether there’s any sort of offisummer mowing. I’ve seen them on cial milkweed preservation policy and there isn’t—it’s left to the the shoulder of the road, discretion of the mower. as well as in the town All the mowers seem to park. Their presence gives me a disproporMowing the fields have gotten the memo.

It seems to be paying tionate amount of hope is a late summer off. The summer gardens at a time when I find I’m grasping to find any sort ritual, and there’s a are full of the lazy flappers, and it’s easy to find of glimmer.

Milkweed, as you likely certain satisfaction a few of the caterpillars know, is the sole food of in the neat stripes in any of those roadside milkweed clumps, the monarch caterpillar. the mower leaves munching away and The monarch butterfly growing to extraordinary population is declining behind. size in a few short weeks. steadily, and some Penrose, Bill, and I took money is now being a few walks specifically devoted to preserving its habitat and protecting them from to look for the charismatic microfauna and were instantly rewarded, just across pesticides such as glyphosate.

I’m glad these initiatives are in place, the street from the field and its cluster.

Life feels like a lot right now. Between but I’m even more glad to see North Haven taking this incredibly easy step climate related weather disasters, fires,

the Delta variant, legal assaults on reproductive rights, Afghanistan—you name it—everything feels sort of out of the hands of the individual. So the simple act of mowing around some milkweed, and the visible impact it has on a butterfly in need of some support, feels especially powerful.

And while it might not mean a thing in the big picture, I’m hanging on to that saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in one place and affecting the weather in another. Just maybe, with enough little things, we can shift the balance and see a way ahead.

Courtney Naliboff lives on North Haven where she teaches music, theater, and writing in the island school and plays in the band Bait Bag. She may be contacted at courtney.naliboff@gmail.com.

Journal of an Island Kitchen

The essential kitchen arts

Shopping, stocking, and organizing ingredients

By Sandy Oliver ART, ACCORDING TO one MerriamWebster definition, is a skill acquired by experience, study, or observation. Let’s tweak that to “and/or” observation.

If that definition works for you, then, because it’s a joy to practice an art, let’s apply it to the part of daily life that starts in the kitchen.

The Art of AN ISLAND PANTRY Most islands don’t have convenience stores open 24/7 to which you can dash out to grab a bag of sugar or a pound of butter. We have neighbors, for sure, and we probably agree that a borrowing raid conducted too frequently strains the bonds of friendship.

Your pantry needs the stuff you use all the time—flour, sugar, rice, pasta, ketchup, eggs. If you love Indian food then you’ll want and need all the special ingredients that provide the distinctive flavors of Indian cooking. If you seldom cook Indian food, lots of jars will languish on the shelf; get a food buddy who also cooks Indian and share.

When a storage container collects dust, it is probably a sign you don’t need to keep the contents constantly on hand, though you might use the ingredient periodically, like during the holidays or

canning season. Always have vinegar, The Art of sugar, salt, and clear alcohol, because MAKING A SHOPPING LIST they are preservatives and can help you The art of making a shopping list is seeing what isn’t there. That’s tougher conserve food in an emergency.

Herbs, spices, and sauces clutter to do than I ever imagined. I try to storage; they retreat to the back of a maintain an ongoing shopping list so cupboard, fade, lose all their charm. So whenever I use the last, or better yet, my pantry spices include all the stan- the next to last of any supply, I add it to dards like ginger, cinnamon, thyme, and the list. We omit that step sometimes oregano, but also lots of cumin because when I am busy, distracted, or just I love cumin, and hardly any really hot dim-witted, or someone else opens the capsicums except red pepper flakes, a last box or can.

I try to make visible the little ground chipotle, rarely need by turning the empty used cayenne, and standard or near-empty storage jar chili powder. upside down. That goes Except for curry and The art of for the fridge, too. Once chili powders, I keep few making a a week I do what I call seasoning blends, because I Empty (trash, compost, can’t stand paying someone shopping list stove ashes) and Fill (wood else to mix a few things is seeing what boxes, oil, detergent, spice together for me. If you don’t jars, toilet paper from bulk cook with lots of seasoning, isn’t there. purchases—like buying premade blends make a lot olive oil in large containers of sense and don’t take up but dispensing from a much space.

I buy spices and herbs that I don’t bottle with a pouring stopper). It makes grow and dry from a co-op and in me slow down and think through my quantities reflecting their use. It seems household supply chain.

I bet you buy in bulk, too; after all, nutty that most spices are sold in identically sized jars. I keep large jars you aren’t going to run often to the of ginger, cinnamon, and cumin, and mainland market considering the time weeny jars of savory and rosemary. It it takes plus ferry fare. Islanders think may be a little compulsive but I observe and organize ahead which makes us alphabetical order on the spice shelves. different from a lot of the population.

The Art of SHOPPING AT A FARMERS MARKET If you go to a farmers market with a recipe in your hand, you’ll only be frustrated. Browse the market for what’s displayed, pick what looks delicious, take that home, then look up a recipe.

If a vegetable looks unfamiliar, ask the grower how to use it.

Learn how to adapt a recipe to supply. I made a seasonal dish the other night out of tomatoes, zucchini, corn, and orzo pasta. The recipe called for cherry tomatoes, in scant supply here at present, so instead I cut a paste tomato up into cherry tomato-sized pieces. The whole thing cooked for so long anyway that cherry tomatoes would have lost their distinctive shape.

When it comes to kitchen arts some of us are going to be Winslow Homer, or Andrew Wyeth, and others Jackson Pollock. If it works for you, then it’s all good.

Sandy Oliver is a food historian who cooks, gardens, and writes on Islesboro. She may be contacted at sandyoliver47@gmail.com.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

23

Guest Column

Bluefin tuna blues: To eat or not to eat?

Questions linger on sustainability of fishery

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

MY FAVORITE SUSHI restaurant is in Rockland— Suzuki Sushi, where Keiko Suzuki Steinberger presides over a delectable panorama of sushi, sashimi, nigiri, and other mostly seafood delights of Japanese cuisine. I love Chef Keiko’s insistence on fish that’s local, fresh, and sustainably harvested, but there’s one variety, in great demand, that I decline whenever I see it on her menu: Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Why? Because from all I’ve read, studied, and experienced over many years, Atlantic bluefin are in danger, over-fished to a perilous degree and at serious risk of disappearing from our seas. Like wild Atlantic salmon, which we no longer harvest, market, or otherwise consume, the time may have come for a similar ban on this magnificent fish.

But am I right? Is this really true?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks looking at what we know and don’t know about bluefin, talking with experts like Shana Miller, Walt Golet, Jennifer Telesca, and others, reading dense documents from international acronymic organizations like WWF and IUCN. The end result, for me at least?

I still don’t feel comfortable dining on what I firmly believe is an endangered fish.

But it’s a complex question. Part of the complexity comes from the fact that these incredible warmblooded fish are virtual torpedoes of the ocean world, one of the largest fish in existence and probably the fastest (they have been tagged crossing the Atlantic in just 40 days), as well as highly migratory and thus hard to trace.

Another piece of complexity, however, is not so well known: There are actually two genetically distinct populations of Atlantic bluefin.

“Draw a line down the globe from Greenland south,” explains Shana Miller. As senior officer for international fisheries conservation at the Ocean Foundation, Miller is a respected authority who has spent much of the last two decades monitoring tuna.

Eastern Atlantic bluefin, she said, breed almost exclusively in the Mediterranean, where they are heavily fished, as they have been back to prehistoric times.

Despite a troubling amount of IUU (illegal, unregulated, unreported) fishing, this population appears to be in fairly good health.

Western Atlantic bluefin are a different story.

Smaller in numbers, their range extends from

Canada to Brazil and they breed in the warm waters have declined by more than half in the same period, of the Gulf of Mexico where pollution may be a factor confirming Miller’s statement about the decline of in their troubled status. Western Atlantic bluefin is Western Atlantic stocks from what they were in the what’s fished, naturally, off the New England coast, middle of the 20th century. And that is precisely the what we’re offered in our seafood shops, restaurants, population that our fishers harvest, however sustainand sushi parlors. And this is where the problem lies. ably, in the Gulf of Maine.

The International Commission for the Not everyone agrees. Impassioned advocates, including commercial and sport fishers, will tell you Conservation of Atlantic Tunas sets quotas and assigns them to member nations. It there are more fish “out there” than a sets separate quotas for Eastern and person could possibly count, that the Western Atlantic bluefin. For 2021, the stock of bluefin in the Gulf of Maine is commission approved a take of 36,000 healthier than it has been for decades. metric tons for bluefin from the Eastern Walter Golet, a professor in the There are Atlantic and Mediterranean, a record University of Maine’s School of Marine high. For the Western Atlantic, the take Sciences with a laboratory at the Gulf actually two is just 2,350 metric tons, a continuation of Maine Research Center in Portland, genetically of the 2020 quota and a reflection of the says stringent regulations have created distinct smaller over-all population. a vigorous stock of Western Atlantic According to Pew Charitable Trusts, bluefin. But should I, as a conscientious populations of which keeps an eye on fish stocks consumer, be eating the fish?

“Absolutely! But If you’d asked me that Atlantic bluefin… around the world, that take allowance is counter to ICCAT’s assessments in 2005, ‘06, ‘07, I might have answered and will lead to overfishing of what very differently,” he said. is already a severely depleted stock.

He credits improved stocks in the Calling ICCAT “a dismal failure,” Pew western North Atlantic to harvest regulations imposed by U.S. authorities, including size has proposed adding Atlantic bluefin to the CITES (72 inches) and gear (only hook-and-line or harpoon convention, which prohibits international trade in allowed) plus a relatively low total allowable catch protected species.

Jennifer Telesca, anthropology professor at Pratt and a maximum catch of one fish per boat trip. The result is a population healthy enough to sustain a Institute who has studied tuna from the perspective of the fishermen, the conservationists, the marketers, robust commercial fishery.

On the other hand, other scientists will tell you even that of the fish, goes even further. Her recent these bluefin are a small fraction of what they once book, Red Gold, is subtitled “The Managed Extinction were—based on the 2020 stock assessment, prob- of the Giant Bluefin Tuna.” And that, she believes, is ably just 14 percent of what there was in the 1950s, ICCAT’s underlying goal.

“And so,” Telesca wrote in a recent edition of Yale according to Miller. And the fish are smaller in size, Environment 360, “the destruction of one of the always an indication of overfishing.

This is a population of much greater concern than planet’s most remarkable beings continues, abetted the relatively healthy Eastern Atlantic stock. That by the very institution that for a half-century has concern is reflected in a recent controversial and been charged with managing—and protecting—the very confusing decision by the International Union bluefin.”

And that’s why I continue to decline the offer. for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), probably the top worldwide NGO for species conservation.

In September, the IUCN moved Atlantic bluefin as a Nancy Harmon Jenkins is a food writer with a whole from endangered to “least concern.” passionate interest in where food comes from and But here’s the catch: According to IUCN’s own how it gets transformed into what we want to eat. statement, although the population of Atlantic Originally from Camden, where she now lives, she bluefin in the Mediterranean has risen by 22 percent has also lived for many years in and around the in the past 40 years, numbers in the Gulf of Mexico Mediterranean.

UMaine launches ‘blue economy’ program Graduate program to be sited at Darling center THE MAINE BUSINESS SCHOOL at the University of Maine will launch a graduate education and collaborative research initiative to support Maine’s marine economy with the help of a $50,000 award from the William Procter Scientific Innovation Fund.

Together with UMaine’s Darling Marine Center, the Maine Business School is launching the UMaine Blue Economy Program where students, faculty, and industry and community partners will work together to conduct research, product development, and commercialization related to Maine’s marine economy.

“UMaine is proud to launch this pilot program that reflects William Procter’s legacy as a businessman, entrepreneur, and scientist,” said Maine Business School dean Faye Gilbert.

UMaine MBA students and faculty will work in collaboration with researchers at the Darling Marine Center on the Damariscotta River in Walpole to gain

the experience and skills to contribute to this rapidly developing sector.

The grant will support an MBA graduate assistant, who will collaborate with DMC director Heather Leslie, as well as MBA student interns and a faculty externship.

“The UMaine Blue Economy Program builds on more than 55 years of creative collaboration at the Darling Marine Center among scientists, entrepreneurs and other professionals,” said Leslie. “It will enable us to deepen partnerships among science and business experts while enhancing UMaine’s contributions to fisheries, aquaculture and other working waterfront-dependent industries of the state.”

More than 10,000 people are directly engaged in the harvest and farming of seafood in Maine, according to information from the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Hundreds of new jobs related to aquaculture

alone are projected to result in the next decade due to the growth of established farms and new development.

Anticipated growth in the ocean renewable energy sector and emerging development trends in Maine coastal counties suggest the workforce, technical and scientific needs to sustain the blue economy will continue to grow.

“The UMaine Blue Economy Program pilot is a leading example of how UMaine’s MBA curriculum is quickly moving toward cross-disciplinary, experiential learning and market-driven programs to drive real change in Maine’s economy and beyond,” says Norm O’Reilly, recently appointed dean of the UMaine Graduate School of Business. “This is the type of program that is well aligned with the mission of the University of Maine Graduate & Professional Center; we see aquaculture in particular as an area of high interest in the future.”

24

The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Field Notes

It’s time to build leadership skills Island Institute creates leadership framework

By Karen Burns DISCUSSIONS ABOUT leadership are everywhere—in books, in the media, in our daily conversations. But what does leadership mean? How do you define an effective leader?

At the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront, we recognize that community projects cannot move forward without effective leaders at the helm. As a coast, we will not be able to confront the disruptive changes that are coming due to climate change without investing in the people who will work on the ground catalyzing change.

We all know a great leader when we see one, and they are active in our coastal and island communities, working on climate projects, serving on town boards, running local nonprofits. For the past 30 years, we’ve been working to support those leaders.

In the past year, we’ve taken it a step further and defined what makes a great leader. Through an extensive process that included interviews with dozens of leaders, evaluations of our past programs involving leadership, and a

literature review, we have developed an Island Institute Leadership Framework that defines seven leadership competencies essential to effective community leadership here. By identifying the key skills needed to guide communities through disruptive change, we can better help leaders be more confident and effective through targeted support and training.

This framework is a work in progress, and we are sharing it over the next year with community leaders, partner organizations, and education institutions that focus on leadership studies. We want to hear from them: What did we get right and wrong?

What are we missing? What stories of effective leadership do they have to share to make it stronger?

So far, the conversations we’ve had about this framework have been illuminating. We’ve found that many of the people identified by their peers as leaders do not see themselves as such.

They describe situations where they are asked to chair a committee or run a project, not because they feel a sense of expertise, but because they feel obligated to their community.

The theme of humility prevails.

They can all name effective leaders but have a hesitation to view themselves as one. Being asked for their thoughts on leadership and how they lead is a foreign concept.

Although the competencies have, in general, resonated with their experiences, they talk about having done these things “by instinct” and not because they’ve actually given leadership much thought.

David Quinney Mee of the Rathlin Development and Community Association on Rathlin Island in Northern Ireland called the conversation we had about leadership “a gift.”

“There are things to do, so we just get on with it. I haven’t had the privilege before right now to think about how we do what we do and how we can do it better,” he said.

Through our conversations, we have learned from those who are in leadership positions that the stories of other leaders, and how they navigated obstacles and built shared visions, are the most useful tool we can provide.

“Every time we hear about what other people are doing, and how they

do it, I learn more,” said Angel Welke, a business owner and community leader on Beaver Island in Michigan.

Talking about leadership in terms of challenges faced and lessons learned is where our leaders excel. By pairing each competency with stories of leadership, our aim is that leaders will learn from each other.

Throughout the process of creating this framework, our design principle has been focused on making it “radically useful” for those who are working to lead through these times of rapid change.

In the months ahead, we are eager to learn how we can adapt this framework and share stories that allow those leading, whether or not they identify as leaders, the ‘gift’ of thinking about their leadership and learning from the experiences of others.

Karen Burns is chief leadership officer with the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. She may be contacted at kburns@islandinstitute.org.

Fathoming

The nuances of defining drought Wettest July not necessarily a fix for Maine

By Kate Tagai IN JUNE, WHICH turned out to be one of the hottest and driest on record, we paddled to a beaver dam on the St. George River just north of Round Pond in Union. The banks rose above us covered in sedges and grasses, bringing our focus to the slow-moving water, the muskrat holes carved in the steep muddy banks, and turtles sunning themselves on logs. We floated for a minute at the dam, which was then more than a foot above the water level, before turning back.

A month later, after one of the wettest Julys on record, we paddled the same waterway. As we floated over a riffle on the surface where the dam lay a foot below the water I thought, “We must be out of the drought now.” But during the evening news, the weather reporter mentioned the ongoing drought. It made me curious.

Maine State Climatologist Sean Birkel, who is a research assistant professor at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, explained that drought is more complex than just how much rainfall we’ve gotten. Precipitation amounts, soil moisture, streamflow, and groundwater levels are all factors.

There are three types of drought: meteorological, agricultural, and

hydrological. Meteorological drought refers to when there is less rainfall than usual. There is a net loss of moisture throughout the region.

Agricultural drought happens when there isn’t enough water in the soil to meet plant needs. They start to wilt, brown, and die. Growth is stunted, so farmers don’t get as much hay from the same acre as they do when the plants get enough water.

The third classification is hydrological drought, when streamflow and groundwater levels are low. It takes longer for water deficiencies to show up but when they do, wells run dry, and the levels of ponds, wetlands, and rivers are significantly reduced.

“An end to a meteorologic drought could technically be seen if there is a return to normal precipitation,” Birkel explains. “But if the dryness persists into another year, it could take a long time for groundwater levels to get back up to normal to end a hydrological drought.”

Normal for a particular region depends on the average rainfall, cloud cover, wind speed, and soil moisture over time. By knowing what to expect, climate scientists can see outlier events like drought.

But when outliers happen frequently, the gauge for what is normal changes.

Western states have had reduced rainfall for so many years that drought is

becoming the new normal. Rainfall averages year over year are falling.

Dr. Birkel was reassuring.

“The Northeast region sometimes sees short-term droughts lasting weeks or months,” he said, but often, not years-long.

There are instances of drought in the historical record, but multi-year droughts with major impacts like the drought in the mid-1960s are rare. The Northeast is at the confluence of the Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic air masses which help create weather patterns with plentiful rainfall “July’s beneficial rainfall, for example, brought conditions back to normal across much of coastal Maine and inland Downeast, even though drought conditions had developed after a warm winter with less than normal snowfall, early spring runoff, and a drier than average June,” Birkel explained.

Climate scientists use different tools and timelines to track and measure a drought.

The Palmer Drought Severity Index estimates relative dryness using temperature and precipitation data. The Standardized Precipitation Index accounts for rainfall totals over a set period (for example three, five, or 12 months) in relation to historical normal. The Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index accounts for surface evaporation, plant transpiration, as well as precipitation.

And there are useful maps from the U.S. Drought Monitor (droughtmonitor.unl.edu) which show precipitation, stream flow, and ground water data paired with on the ground observations.

Maine’s statewide annual precipitation has increased by 6 inches since 1895. Climate models project Maine continuing to become warmer and wetter with more extremes such as heavy precipitation events.

Next month, the beaver dam may still be under water, or the beavers may have built it higher, but now I know a little bit more about the complex systems that are behind the rising and falling river.

For more information on Maine’s climate future, check out the Maine Climate Office website (mco.umaine. edu) for access to historical climate data, weather forecasts, and climate information.

Kate Tagai is a senior community development officer with the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. She may be reached at ktagai@islandinstitute.org.

www.workingwaterfront.com . October 2021

25

Cranberry Report

Remembering my ‘summer girl’ days An off-season visit that led to a life-long love

By Barbara Fernald HOW DID WE GET to September already? July felt like August and August felt like a gust of wind. Surely, after the time warp that was summer 2021, I could avoid experiencing the strange mix of emotions that hits me around Labor Day. But no, here it is, right on time.

I feel a sense of loss as I note the houses that are no longer lit up at night, the bike-less yards, and the absence of bird song. I have gained more time to myself, but that means I also have more time to feel the poignancy that tries to inhabit my heart. Luckily it doesn’t last long, especially when I remember it was not always this way for me.

I arrived on Little Cranberry Island in September 1976, a “summer girl” who came to the island after summer was over. I was beginning an open-ended stay in my favorite place in the world and fall melancholy was totally off my radar.

To top it off, my brother had secured a job working on a lobster boat and was due to arrive the week after I did.

Neither of us had discussed our plans with the other until a few weeks before we reached the island.

To be grown siblings sharing a family the Frentrop family, a house once house, with no parents in sight in a belonging to Waitie Gilley across the place we both loved, was a wonderful street from the post office. My brother stroke of serendipity. My brother was was fishing with Mark Fernald taking a break from his studies to expe- and by then I was working, too.

It took me eight days rience something totally of fishing with Bruce different while trying to Fernald, over several figure out what to do next.

I had always weeks, before he finally I was taking a break from offered me a job as his my boyfriend in Rochester, been in love crew. By that time we hoping he would miss me with the island, had developed an attracenough to eventually ask me to come home for but I was falling tion toward each other so either I was a really good good. Meanwhile, I hoped in love with worker or he wanted to also find a job on a boat my boss. to ensure I would stay and I was looking forward around longer. (I think it to experiencing my first was a little bit of each.) autumn on the island.

I spent an idyllic fall on the water Fall was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined. We watched the colors seeing so many new things. Each trap change on Mount Desert Island as we that came up was a surprise, introstayed in the family summer house. ducing me to all manner of sea creaThe northeast gales churned up the tures I didn’t know. So many times I water in the Eastern Way in a manner would imagine friends from college working away in their offices and think, I’d never seen.

With no heat or insulation, we “I wish they could see where I work!”

I stuffed many bait bags, strung many made do with a small wood stove in the kitchen and a space heater in redfish racks, plugged many lobsters, the bathroom, but we had to move and scrubbed many buoys. As the days out by November or risk frozen got shorter we often left before sunrise pipes. We ended up renting from and came home in the dark.

It was hard work. The smell of bait permeated my clean laundry. The wet wooden traps weighed about 80 pounds, two-thirds of my own weight at the time, but I was young and determined to be capable. I had always been in love with the island, but I was falling in love with my boss.

I spent the winter months breaking up with my boyfriend in Rochester, while my brother stayed on the island filling out applications for PhD programs in geology. When I returned in March, I hoped it would be to stay forever. That plan took a few more fishing seasons to work out, but here I am, still with Bruce, remembering the magic of my first September visit to Islesford 45 years ago.

The island has changed over the years, just like anywhere else, but there is yet plenty of magic to be found, especially in September and October.

Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island). She may be contacted at fernald244@gmail.com.

Observer

A tale of summer folk and ‘the help’ Contentious relationship that lasted decades

By Phil Crossman LAST APRIL, before heading up for the summer, Rutherford “Ruthie” Lodge, age 99, of Chestnut Hill, Mass., settled down to reflect on the passing of Hannibal McDougal who had died during the winter at age 101, and on the long history the two shared. It had been thus, these parallel lives, ever since Rutherford commissioned the building of the “cottage” high on the bluff back in 1926 and had taken on young Hannibal as caretaker.

Linen writing paper embossed with “Above the Fray,” under which appeared an ink rendering of the cottage as viewed from the shore below, was at the little writing desk in each of the nine waterfront guest bedrooms, each also with a bath and an expansive view of the Thoroughfare and North Haven village with the Camden Hills looming over its shoulder.

Out back, beyond the fray as it were, and looking out over the clothes yard, were six small and sparsely furnished bedrooms and a bath reserved jointly for the butler, chauffeur, house maid, cook, scullery maid, and governess.

The “help,” as they were known, were transported up to the island each

spring from Chestnut Hill. A few days accepted and then began a long and later the “family” would follow, settling tumultuous marriage of independence in comfortably to their freshly quaffed to interdependence.

During the next half century Ruthie summer accommodations.

Accustomed at the time to selecting or his wife Grace, often in a great huff from among a broad field of suppli- and usually with good cause, terminated cants, often Irish immigrants, to fill Hannibal’s employment several times out the ranks back in Massachusetts, and Hannibal resigned as frequently.

One morning, during a contentious Ruthie was unaccustomed to the summer, Rutherford contrasting nature of re-hired him in spite of applicants from North the fact that he hadn’t Haven and Vinalhaven. been fired. But an hour Following each interview, A final swig later, Grace did fire him he’d found himself feeling after he invaded her tea somehow diminished and propelled party and behaved inapby the middle of August him to the propriately to one of her had settled apprehensively guests. into a kind of subsercorner cabinet Hannibal retired to the vient mindset, as if the where he kept boathouse, a sanctuary course had been set and over which he exercised it was he who was being a 12-gauge dominion and to which scrutinized. shotgun. he often retreated to lick Toward the end of his wounds and observed August, desperate to that the North Haven have someone in place by Dinghy races, directly Labor Day, he’d offered the job to Hannibal, who seemed the least offshore, were laboring through one suspect of the lot, and Hannibal, after false start after another.

A final swig propelled him to re-negotiating the salary, restricting the hours during and the reasons for the corner cabinet where he kept which he could be called, and gener- a 12-gauge shotgun. He bellowed ally doing Samuel Gompers proud, through a megaphone that it was high

time they got underway, discharged several rounds above the assembled boats and watched with satisfaction as they scattered, some directly downwind along the course, others otherwise into the wind and still others on a hasty tack for the lee shore.

Ruthie, who was a volunteer monitor, went charging up the ramp and, unaware that Grace had just fired him, told Hannibal that this was the final straw.

Eventually, the relationship between them came to resemble any of several good solid island marriages.

Rutherford, alone now since Grace had passed away a few years back, had broken his hip and, for the first of 77 summers, would not be returning to the Fray. His old nemesis and frequent solace had died at just the right moment.

Phil Crossman lives on Vinalhaven where he serves on the town select board. His books include Away Happens and As the Crow Flies. He may be contacted at philcrossman.vh@ gmail.com.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

Vinalhaven plants music garden Public art installation doubles as instruments Photos by Bill Trevaskis

said he was inspired by the Rockland Children’s Museum’s found-object instrument sculptures, but knew he’d found the perfect outdoor instruments after a visit to the Southwest.

Fortuitously, the school had access to a Widow’s Island Fund grant in 2020, and with administrators and staff on board, Trevaskis was able to move forward with the installation in the spring and summer of 2021.

The school partnered with island contractors to prepare the site, pour cement, and modify the

A

uniquely beautiful garden has sprouted at the Vinalhaven School.

Kids and adults alike can be seen playing with a new outdoor instrument installation adjacent to the playground, exploring the resonant pitchedpercussion sounds of the school’s Music Garden.

Music teacher Bill Trevaskis, who had dreamed of a music garden since joining the school staff in 2016,

instrument posts to avoid drilling several feet into the ground. Trevaskis plans to design interpretive signs with his music students for the garden, but visitors and students alike are already making the most of the opportunity to play.

“I wanted to normalize making music, put it into the world to be enjoyed by anyone of any age, not an exclusive thing you have to buy or go to a room to play,” Trevaskis said.

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Penelope Feezor approaches the instrument.

Vinalhaven High School senior Von Jones helps out with the installation.

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The Working Waterfront . October 2021

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