With over 120 miles of coastline, you might think that finding access to the water in St. George would be easy. Residents of the area who work for a living fishing, farming shellfish, digging clams, or who need to find parking for the public dock or the Monhegan ferry, know how difficult it is to access the water and how much more difficult it will be for their children.
A culture clash is brewing on the waterfront, and the issue is aesthetics.
Two years ago in Port Clyde, Glen Hall’s company, Superior Bait, and the trawlers supplying it were kicked off of the deep-water dock that had supplied their access for years. They now operate out of the Port Clyde Fishermen’s Co-op.
Likewise, coastal aesthetics have had the Dowling family’s Otis Cove shellfish aquaculture operation on the move for the last few years. They have moved some aspects of their operation to their property inland.
The demand for parking in Port Clyde and Tenants Harbor near public access points is increasingly inadequate.
Four generations of fishermen at the Port Clyde Fishermen’s Co-operative took time during a beautiful fishing day to talk about waterfront access issues. The fishermen’s credit union, started in Port Clyde in the 1940s, evolved into a co-operative in the early 1970s as a mechanism to provide fishermen with bargaining power with dealers. At the urging of the elder co-op leaders, about ten years back members bought the land where their co-op now resides.
“Ten years ago is when it started” reflected Carl Schwab, one of the early co-op founders, “around that time a new group of Mainers started arriving.” Since that time, “the co-op has evolved into a solution for working waterfront access … these kids have no where else to fish from … and they will not be able to buy access in the future.” He says this pointing up the cove to a house that recently sold for about $800,000 with a tidal dock. Carl pointed out that he is the only person with a year-round residence in his cove. He is disheartened when, at night, hishouse is the only one with lights on there.
The fishermen are not surprised at the amount of development in and around the St. George Peninsula; after all, they find the coast as beautiful as the next person. Jerry Cushman, a fifth-generation fisherman with a nephew coming up in the business, puts it this way: “The co-op is the only way my nephew will get to fish.” To Cushman and others at the coop, “the future of our way of life depends on the Port Clyde Co-op surviving.”
While fishing co-ops are creative private solutions to waterfront access, fishermen will tell you that even co-ops are not permanently secure. If all the lobstermen at a co-op voted to sell the property, they could do it. Co-op leaders know this, so a large part of their energy involves teaching their values to younger generations of fishermen.
Danny Morris is teaching his son the business through the Port Clyde co-op. Men who recognize the value in working together to preserve their access to the water surround Danny’s son.
Dave Schmanska (pictured here), the St. George harbormaster, would like to find ways to resolve the tension between long time residents and newer residents. “The next few years will bring some changes to the waters of St. George, including re-organizing the inner harbors of Tenants Harbor and Port Clyde,” he said. “These changes have become necessary due to the dramatically increasing pressure on our harbors, both in mooring requests and general development of our waterfront.”
For Schmanska, expanding the working waterfront requires people to get involved, even if they are already busy. “A very important issue right now seems to be involvement,” he said. “To equitably manage these waters we need people who are committed to solving the problems before us.” He urges people in St. George and elsewhere to “get on the boards and committees in town, and keep this the town that you know and love.”
According to a recent report by Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI), there are 380 boat access points in St. George; commercial fishermen use 66 percent of them. Only five private and public facilities are dedicated to fishing. Ninety-two percent of fishing access is achieved through private residences and is therefore at risk.
The issue of working waterfront aesthetics has been pushing Jesse and his father, Tim Dowling, owners of the Port Clyde Oyster Company, around St. George for the past few years (Oyster growing is a business often confused with, but unrelated to, the salmon industry.) Recently, they moved their nursery inland, responding to growing pressure from new St. George residents. “It is the wave of the future,” states Tim, “and this way we don’t have to deal with all of the complaints.”
More than two years of public hearings and negotiations with community members led the Dowlings to move their two-acre oyster floats around St. George waters. After settling in Otis Cove, “we moved our gear from the surface to the cove floor, to avoid the aesthetic problems raised by some residents,” states Jesse Dowling. But some new residents to the riparian waterfront in Otis Cove are still unhappy. Conflicts with aquaculture make it difficult to build new docks, but their aquaculture lease was there first and so it will stay. Tim Dowling feels strongly: “Whose aesthetics are we going to use?” he asks. To him and his son, “the working waterfront is the entire coastline including rivers.”
Fishermen voiced their concerns about the battle over aesthetics to their legislature in the late 1990s. This local activism led former state Rep. David Etnier, now Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources, to support then-Sen. Jill Goldthwait’s “Right to Fish” Act. Enacted in 2001, the law came about “because legislatures along the coast were hearing from fishing families who were under threat from new residents complaining about the sights, sounds, smells of commercial fishing operations,” Etnier said.
Third in a series on Maine’s working waterfronts.