Lobstermen often express frustration on losing buoys to weather or being cut by propellers. Often the buoys wind up on islands, wedged between rocks on remote ledges or hung up like ornaments on shoreline tree branches.
Now a dedicated corps of folks who clean island shorelines are working to return the buoys to their owners.
Every year, the Maine Island Trail Association (MITA) hosts cleanups that bring over 200 volunteers out to clean the shorelines of islands along the trail. These volunteers inevitably come across lobster buoys, but due to lobster gear molestation laws, have traditionally left them behind. Some buoys are mangled beyond repair, but many are salvageable. It can be disheartening for the volunteers, who care deeply about the work they are doing, to leave buoys in places where they know they are unlikely to ever be retrieved. While the volunteers are primarily not fishermen themselves, they recognize the challenges that lost buoys present to lobstermen, including the financial burden.
In an effort to engage this volunteer force in assisting with recovering lost lobster buoys, MITA began implementing a buoy return program in the fall of 2012. Maria Jenness, MITA’s stewardship manager, worked with the Maine Marine Patrol to obtain permission to remove buoys during island cleanups. In conjunction with local harbormasters, locations were identified where buoys could be left for retrieval, primarily at fish piers or outside harbormaster offices. On a single cleanup, volunteers may find as many as 80 salvageable buoys from a handful of islands.
There have been some great success stories resulting from these efforts. In Stonington, MITA volunteers met lobstermen at the dock when they were dropping off buoys. The lobstermen immediately started sorting the buoys by owner, and all expressed their appreciation for the work the cleanup volunteers were doing. Some even asked if volunteers could bring in broken buoys too so they could make toggles out of them.
The success of the program relies not only on volunteers bringing buoys in, but the lobstermen retrieving them. MITA is looking for assistance in spreading the word throughout the fishing community about their efforts. If lobstermen don’t know that buoys are being brought in or where they are being left, they are unlikely to get them back. That retrieval piece is critical to the program’s success.
The learn more about the program, contact Jenness at 207-761-8225 or stewards@mita.org.
The Maine Island Trail is comprised of over 200 sites from Kittery to Cobscook Bay, open to small boaters for low-impact recreation. The sites are owned by private and public individuals and organizations, and managed in partnership with MITA. In exchange for island access, MITA provides stewardship. As part of this, MITA hosts about 12 large-scale regional cleanups annually, typically involving twenty or more volunteers each and removing upwards of 50 bags of trash in a single day. In addition to these big cleanup events, MITA volunteers check on the islands throughout the summer. In 2013, 200 volunteers made 700 island visits and removed over 500 bags of trash from shorelines.