SAM CHAPMAN, who raises oysters besides owning a shad hatchery with his family in Waldoboro, majored in geology at the University of Maine in the late 1960s and helped out at the Darling Center. One day in 1972 (after a stint in the military), he decided to take a look at the new aquaculture facility that had been built for a new program to develop shellfish aquaculture in Maine. “I took a walk down to the building, and there was this big garage door and all sorts of pipes hanging down, and tanks gurgling, and here’s this little guy running around, obviously very busy,” he remembers. The “little guy” was Dr. Herbert Hidu, who had been hired by the university to set up a shellfish aquaculture program (WWF Aug. 2004).
“I asked him, `Do you need a hand?'” Chapman says. Hidu answered, “Yes, that tank over there isn’t working right. Can you fix it for me?” Chapman says he had never seen the setup before, but recognized what the problem was. “I took the whole tank apart and put it back together the way it should be and put the oysters back in,” he recalls. “Of all three tanks, that one ran the best. Later, Hidu asked me, `What are you doing next fall? Do you need a job?’ And I said, `Sure, I’ve been looking for one. What do you want me to read to prepare for it?’ He told me, `Don’t you read anything. I don’t want you coming down here with any preconceived scientific notions.’ And that’s how I got into aquaculture.” He managed the hatchery at the aquaculture center for 20 years.
BILL MOOK, owner of Mook Sea Farms and other oyster operations on the Damariscotta River, graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in environmental science. He taught science and biology in the U.S. Virgin Islands for a year, and then for two years in Connecticut before deciding to focus on marine science. “One of the reasons I chose University of Maine was Herb Hidu,” he says. “I was very interested in aquaculture.” He worked on a soft shell clam grant at the Darling aquaculture center, but also got sidetracked into working with Les Watling on benthic ecology. While writing his thesis on benthic ecology, he took a job in 1982 at Bristol Shellfish Hatchery to make extra money. “One day,” he says, “the owner fired everyone except me and told me I was in charge of the hatchery. We got new employees and brought the place to the break even point, but it never was a good location because it didn’t have access to warm water.” He left after three years and started his own hatchery further up the Damariscotta River. “Herb Hidu was definitely a driving force in the development of shellfish aquaculture in Maine,” he says, “but you also have to mention Sam Chapman, who was in charge of the wet lab facility. Herb did research projects that had bearing on what we were doing and the techniques we used, but in terms of the hatchery end, I learned more from Sam than Herb.”
DICK CLIME, owner of Dodge Cove Marine Farms, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and as a youth, never lived or worked by the sea. After graduating from Cornell with a degree in genetics, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years in Paraguay working to improve health and sanitation in rural areas. “We were living a pretty basic existence,” he says, “but occasionally had free time to take the long bus ride to Buenos Aires. I was always looking for reading material and liked to visit the English bookstores there. On one trip I picked up some old textbooks on oceanography. They fascinated me and caught my attention enough that I decided to explore going to graduate school to study oceanography.” He was accepted by Texas A & M and University of Maine and chose Maine because he liked this area of the country. He was one of the first graduate students to work with Dr. Hidu at the Darling shellfish aquaculture center, which gave him his initial exposure to oyster aquaculture. “I thought there was a potential to commercialize oyster raising here,” he says. As a result, in 1976 he started his own company, the longest running oyster aquaculture farm on the Damariscotta River.
CARTER NEWELL, who graduated from Colby College in 1977, says he had to leave Waterville and go to Mumbles, Wales, to learn about Dr. Hidu’s shellfish aquaculture work at the Darling Marine Center. Newell majored in biology, and while at Colby, earned a Watson Fellowship to study in Wales. He packed up his fiddle (he is an accomplished musician and plays with the traditional group, Old Grey Goose) and spent a year studying snails. While in Wales, he traveled to the northern part of the country to visit a marine lab, which he says was the first to culture algae and shrimp. “I thought this aquaculture was an interesting thing, and asked where I could go to study it,” he says. “They sent me to Hidu at University of Maine.” Now, Newell works as a biologist for Great Eastern Mussel Farms, is a partner in Pemaquid Oyster Co. and is completing his doctorate at the University of New Brunswick with a thesis on the feeding behavior of mussels. He can sometimes be heard singing sea shanties in the early morning on the Damariscotta River while he tends Pemaquid’s crop.
CHRIS DAVIS, partner in Pemaquid Oyster Co. and teacher at University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, majored in marine biology at Colby College, but after graduating in 1978 took a training course at the Yacht Design Institute in Blue Hill and sidestepped into a career as a marine architect. He worked with Chuck Payne in Camden designing barges and other boats. After five years, he decided to return to marine biology and entered the graduate program at University of Maine at Orono. By then, the shellfish aquaculture program was well established at the university’s Darling Center, and Davis, like several other growers, worked on research there under Dr. Hidu. He had been preceded at the center by Carter Newell, a college classmate at Colby. “I worked with Carter on a couple of aquaculture projects, including raising conch on islands south of the Bahamas and work with Great Eastern Mussel Co. in Maine,” he says. They decided to get together with a third Colby graduate, Jeff McKeen, and three other partners to start Pemaquid Oyster Co. in 1995.
JEFF McKEEN graduated from Colby College two years before Davis with a degree in philosophy. He later earned a graduate degree in folklore from University of Maine. He has worked as a carpenter, completed freelance projects in folklore, and, with Newell, plays in Old Grey Goose. “I was friends with Chris and Carter at Colby,” he says, “and when they got the idea of starting an oyster farm, they wanted other partners. I joined in, and since I was a carpenter, built all the equipment – the rafts, boats and other things – and then I learned my biology and waters skills on the job.” McKeen says Ed Myers, who rented wharf space and a mooring to Pemaquid Oyster, often dispensed a lot of “salty advice” to him since he had been a landlubber before learning to raise oysters. “The story I always remember about Ed is the time I went down to the wharf in winter and found the cove iced in from the wharf to my boat. I told Ed, `I can’t get out to the boat,’ and he said, `Why don’t you just kedge out?’ I asked him what he was talking about and he explained that I should get into my skiff with a little anchor, throw the anchor onto the ice, pull the boat forward and throw it again. I thought it was a great metaphor for when you come up against any obstacle in life – kedge over it.”