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.