More Bad Clams

I just ran into an interesting story in the BDN. http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/131930.html . When there's a lot of surface runoff, like there has been around here in the last week or so, water from storm drains and catch basins overwhelms the sewage treatment plants. Storm water mixed with sewage goes overboard into the rivers, streams, harbors and bays adjacent to the treatment plant. Just like it always did in the good old days, right. Anyway, tide flats are polluted temporarily as their filter feeding residents work through the bounty of organic matter. Harvesting shellfish is supposed to stop. Eating clams from polluted flats makes people really sick.

Sounds like people at the state are getting annoyed with the folks in Machias for their management of sewage. The worst part is it puts diggers out of work for a while and "erodes consumer confidence" in clams. Who wants to pay 20 bucks for a clam dinner that's going to make 'em sick...and once sickened by bad clams it's a long time before somebody orders up another plateful.
Got any tartar sauce?

Bad Clams

The hits just keep coming. The Stinson Canning closure is still on the front page of the paper and I heard on the radio, as I was driving to work today, that Maine should expect severe red tide blooms this summer. Biologists predict the bloom by counting algae cysts [which act like seeds for the next crop of algae] on the ocean bottom in the fall and the number is up by 60%, prompting a warning that flats might be closed again next summer. The DMR monitors shellfish for red tide toxin that causes PSP (Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning) and closes areas to harvesting clams and mussels when the toxins appear. This means no work for diggers and expensive clams. I once asked a DMR biologist, who was injecting lab mice with ground up clams to see if they containted the PSP toxins, if there was home test I could do for red tide. He asked me if I had a cat. Yes, I had a cat. "Feed him a couple of clams. If he's OK in half an hour or so, go ahead and eat some clams. It works, but only once," he said. I never tried it.

I used to work in a boatyard with a couple of guys who dug clams to augment the $5.00/hr we were making scraping and painting boat bottoms. They'd dig before or after work, or maybe cut work altogether if the digging was good. They looked forward to 'double tide' days with two low tides in daylight hours because they could make a lot of money. I admired how hard they worked to scratch out a living between the yard and the clam flats. Back then the 25 million pound Maine clam harvest earned about 8.5 million dollars and clams in the shell brought about 33 cents a pound, Diggers were paid by the bushel. Last year about 9 million pounds were worth 12 million dollars and brought $1.31 a pound. The size of the harvest has seen a gradual, but troubling decline over the 40 years.

A lot depends on which way the wind blows on the Maine coast. This summer offshore winds at the right time could push the algae off shore and spare some, or all of the coast a PSP scare, but onshore winds could increase the problem. How bad will it, be? Depends on which way the wind blows.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZJeRs_-FkA&feature=related

View from the Pool

The hammer's fallen on the Maine sardine industry. http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/137081.html
I've been reading a lot about it lately and I'm still thinking about my trip to Prospect Harbor last week. I'm worried about what the herring limits might mean for other fisheries or lobstering too.

One day a while back I was knocking around the Boston waterfront and found a bronze marker noting the location of the first successful cannery in the US. I can't remember the name on the marker, or exactly where it is or what the date was, but I'm pretty sure the whole herring factory era lasted less two hundred years. That's several lifetimes, but just a blink in the larger scale of time. In that time it supported a lot of households in Maine.

In the 1980s it was a boom and bust business with huge landings and low prices one year and higher prices but fewer fish the next. One fisherman friend told me with a sardonic grin once that has soon as he got a good shut off of fish somewhere people came out of the woodwork, old friends and relatives he hadn't heard from in years showed up to help him harvest the fish and to share in the profits. It was hardly worth the effort and cost of doing business after he got through sharing the wealth he said. But he couldn't stop looking for herring and hoping every year that the August Darks would find him sitting on a cove full of fish. There might be enough to pay down some debt, help out his relatives and friends and maybe even get another twine dory in anticipation of a better year ahead. It's that sort of optimism that will see the community of Prospect Harbor through this latest bit of bad news.

Hard Times at the Factory

Today I'm thinking about sardines. That's because I recently read about the closing of the last sardine cannery in the US in Prospect Harbor, Gouldsboro, Me this week. The Bangor Daily News story told of 130 people losing their jobs and how the most recent round of herring protection measures means that the cannery can no longer get enough fish to can. Back when I was reporting fishing news rthere were 35 herring canneries in Maine and thousands of people earned their living in the factories, on the boats or in the supporting services and stores all along the coast of Maine. At the time, Stinson had operations in Prospect Harbor, Belfast, and Rockland. Now they're all gone as are the dories loaded with twine in coves and harbors, the purse seiners, and the sardine carriers, the most graceful of commercial boats on the coast to my eye. I guess it really is the end of the sardine as we knew it, and I'm sad about that. I knew some of those people who made a living cutting up fish and putting them in cans or catching them after long cold nights of tending nets. They were good people who worked hard and were quick to help others.


So on Thursday, my friend Dick and I packed up our cameras and headed down to Prospect Harbor to see for ourselves how Gouldsboro might make out without the herring fishery. The closure of the nearby US Navy base there, downturn in the tourist economy and hard times [dare I say collapse] of commercial fishing, limited shell fish and urchin fishery paints a grim picture of this ironically picture perfect section of the coast. We checked out Main Street. Dick and I visited an optimistically trendy coffee shop with empty tables, and comfortable couches, shelves of teas and a case full of baked goods. We were the only customers. Across the street there's a genuine five and dime store and three empty store fronts. That's it. No gas pumps, no pizza shop, just the “For Rent” signs.
We drove much of the day taking in the sights and really thinking about what it would feel like to call the peninsula home. I told Dick about the follow up story in the BDN which said the state was sending a task force down to meet with the cannery workers about retraining for new jobs. We spent a lot of time looking around behind empty buildings and along shore for where those jobs might be. Unless we missed some secret underground bunkers packed full of jobs, I'm thinking those cannery workers are facing a terrible choice. Stay in the community and starve or leave on the chance that the new training will get them a job in some other town. This seems particularly chancy for the older workers, say over 50. If I lived there, on the Schoodic Peninsula I wouldn't want to leave my community, my family, friends and church to get retrained so I could work the job in an office cube that might or might not be waiting for me. I wouldn't want to watch my town die either. Like I said, it's a terrible choice.