The western flank of Maine’s largest bay, Penobscot, stretches from Port Clyde at the southern end to Searsport near the mouth of the Penobscot River. Along this 30-mile stretch of coastline are ten major ports and harbors and a dozen smaller anchorages where fishing vessels and recreational yachts share mooring and wharf space, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not. These ten harbors are all experiencing the pressures of rapidly gentrifying waterfronts, but subtle differences in their local marine ecology provide important insights into their differing strategic responses.
Port Clyde is the easternmost village with a diversified fishing economy along the coast of Maine. All the rest of the harbors eastward to the Canadian border are thriving lobster fishing ports, but not a single cod and haddock trawler remains in a harbor west of Grand Manan Island, which lies in New Brunswick.
Port Clyde tenuously retains its groundfish fleet because it is the easternmost harbor within a day’s journey of valuable cod and haddock grounds in the Gulf of Maine; grounds that may finally be rebuilding. A dozen Port Clyde groundfish boats have organized themselves into the Midcoast Fisherman’s Alliance (MFA) to serve as an effective voice for their interests. MFA has also begun to work closely with local lobstermen to preserve access to Port Clyde’s working waterfront and hopefully protect a more diverse fishing fleet in the process. MFA’s innovative proposal is for the groundfish boat owners to put up private capital, matched by public working waterfront bond funds (Vote yes on 4 in November!), to develop a portion of the lobstermen’s co-op wharf to service the larger vessels. The lobstermen will benefit from improvements in the wharf and lower operating costs while the groundfishermen, who are being displaced from their previous wharf space, will be guaranteed permanent access in the future.
Tenants Harbor, Sprucehead and Owls Head have all become entirely dependent on their lobster fisheries during the past decade and a half as first cod, herring and scallop fisheries declined followed by the decline of shrimp and urchin fishing. Luckily for these lobster villages, they are located on the edge of some of the most productive lobster grounds in the world, centered on the islands of the Muscle Ridge Channel and within easy reach of the lobster migration routes into and out of the bay each spring and fall.
Nevertheless, continued waterfront access for these lobster fleets is not guaranteed. The Sprucehead Lobster Co-op took advantage of the pilot Working Waterfront bond fund program to buy its wharf for $975,000, including $450,000 in public funds, to protect working waterfront access there forever. Lobstermen in Owls Head are exploring a similar strategy after one of two commercial lobster wharf properties was recently put up for sale.
Further north in Penobscot Bay, the productivity of the lobster fishery decreases and the value of recreational yachting dominates the harbors. This is not just happenstance: north of Rockland, the waters are very deep within a mile or two of shore; there are fewer islands immediately offshore where lobsters can crawl to shed and mate, and most lobsters have already been trapped by other fishermen on both sides of the gauntlet at the entrance of West Penobscot Bay. Thus, Rockland supports between a dozen and a score of lobster boats; Rockport less than half as many and Camden only a couple, including part timers.
Of course, working waterfronts have always been about a lot more than the fishing industry, which is merely its most recent and iconic tenant. It is important to remember that boatbuilding, cruise ships, manufacturing and other activities are part of the working coast that require waterfront access also.
Rockland’s working waterfront is the largest harbor east of Portland and supports an impressive diversity of marine industries. It is the homeport for the herring purse seine fleet for half the year; for Prock Marine’s barge operation; for the railroad hub shipping cement from the Thomaston plant. It hosts Maine’s largest concentration of windjammers and the U.S. Coast Guard base. But as elsewhere to the north, there is an increasing number of yachts in Rockland’s expansive anchorage. Belfast’s working waterfront, once the site of an unsightly chicken processing plant, has been recently rezoned for mixed use — high-end residences plus space for a half-dozen or so mostly part-time lobstermen who are desperately looking for a permanent home (see the story in this paper).
Rockport and Camden have been the home harbors of expensive and legendary yachts for well over a century. Both of their working waterfronts are anchored by well-established boatbuilding, repair and maintenance yards at Rockport Marine and Wayfarer Marine, respectively. Rockport Marine, located in the red sheds at the head of the harbor, specializes in the construction and maintenance of elegant wooden yachts, but has recently expanded with new boat storage sheds on Route 1 due to limitations of space at its waterfront location. Wayfarer Marine in Camden also specializes in yacht repair, maintenance and storage. Some of the boats are locally owned while others hail from an increasing number of international ports of call as yachts grow ever larger in size.
Wayfarer, which developed a new marina at the head of the harbor near its red sheds a few years ago, has recently proposed to dramatically expand its yacht repair business, with the help of a new owner who had come to town as a senior manager at MBNA. Wayfarer plans to develop its historic Bean Yard in outer Camden harbor into residences, to raise capital for doubling its commercial facilities in the inner harbor and north on Route 1 at the foot of Mount Battie. In an effort to win local approval, Wayfarer has agreed to a binding working waterfront easement on 90 percent of the four acres of its inner harbor land that would protect 1,400 linear feet of shoreline from all non-marine development in perpetuity. The Wayfarer proposal, which requires an approval by voters for a zoning change, has sparked an intense and bitter local debate that came to a head at the end of a series of public information forums sponsored by a local citizen’s organization, the Camden Area Futures Group, of which I am a director. One of the reasons that Wayfarer’s proposal remains controversial is perhaps because relatively few people understand the concept of a working waterfront easement, where owners either voluntarily give up substantial other development potential and essentially zone the waterfront within the boundary of the easement for marine uses in perpetuity. Easements cannot be undone later without the approval of the Maine Attorney General’s office, which acts as the ultimate guardian of the public trust in such agreements.
If Camden voters do not approve the Wayfarer expansion plan — two earlier versions have been rejected — Camden’s permanent working waterfront easement disappears. Although its marina will remain in Camden Harbor and thus there will be some kind of Potemkin village waterfront which restaurant visitors will undoubtedly appreciate, Wayfarer’s high quality yacht repair facilities and hence its workforce will likely be forced to move elsewhere in order to compete for the increasing number of large yachts that require both a highly skilled workforce and state-of-the-art facilities. And both Rockland and Belfast will undoubtedly come calling. q
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.