[0:00:00]

Rustin Taylor: It’s hard work, but there’s a lot of different side benefits to working down there on the shore – seals growling out front the other day. I thought it was Ravens making noise and then I saw the seals out there and they made a lot of noise. It’s a fun spot, but I’ve had to sell my soul, a little bit of my time here, to — I’ve worked independently for a long time. Do you want to talk about fisheries stuff you’re still messing with your thing?

Tiegan Paulson: I think I’ve got it figured… I think we’re ready to go. Do you want to start just by introducing yourself?

RT: Yeah. My name’s Rustin Taylor. I’ve lived on Mount Desert Island for four decades now. And recreationally and commercially harvested shellfish and different migratory fish, smelts and things that in the spring, a lot of it for recreational stuff, because there’s not really that much diversity in commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Maine now. So a lot of the things are – my father when he was younger – he was born in 1952 – they would commercial smelt for catching sea run smelt out on the bays with actual hard side ice tanks like ice shelters that would stay permanently out on the ice. And that’s something that I never experienced. The sea ice was thick enough to support that, and they would leave little villages of many shacks out on the ice. And then on the ice would- the wind would come and shift the sea ice to maybe a different location all the way across the bay in a place. The people would call and say, Boys, your shacks are over here. So I thought that was always really interesting. And then when I was a kid, like, you know, like thirty years ago here, we could, you know, people would commonly drive cars on the little ponds and lake ice. But the sea ice thing was long gone.

[0:02:05]

The resource had kind of disappeared. I wasn’t really going to talk about this, but I think it’s a cool framing of how things have changed in a short amount of time, not driving on the sea ice ever. But even to be able to have a hard, actual permanent ice shelter on the ice wasn’t an option because the sea ice wasn’t thick enough to support it, and the resource wasn’t even there anymore. Then to pivot a little, like saying about the lakes – cars, we would commonly be able- the ice would be over two feet thick on the ponds, three feet thick. And it was very rare to hear anybody having trouble with a car going through the ice. It was very commonplace. And we’d have winter carnivals where there would be big tractors on the ice and stuff. And that was in my childhood. And I was just talking, telling my father this the other day,  how much it’s changed since he was [a kid]. I didn’t experience the sea ice thing and the shacks, but I did experience seeing cars on the ice and winter carnivals. And then the ice was questionable and people couldn’t drive on the ice anymore. And the winter carnivals actually started failing because the ice wasn’t available. And they had it on land like a land base, and it took all the fun out of it. I mean, it’s actually pretty crazy. Then this year, 2022 and 2023, are the longest. The ponds didn’t freeze over here ever. By way over a month, like Echo Lake would usually freeze over in the mid to third week of November and then sometimes hold its ice all the way until the end of March and into Aprill. This year, it didn’t freeze till [the] 20th of January, almost into February. It’s almost like it wasn’t even going to freeze because the sun angle had already changed. Things are changing for ice making conditions.

[0:04:01]

So this is the craziest least amount of ice ever seen. And I don’t recreate ice fishing anymore. And I used to have – I know I’m jumping around. I’m trying to frame all this. I used to have permanent ice [kant?], little shelters out on the different lakes. I’d have four or five of them out at different lakes. It was so fun because it’s there for the season of the good ice,and then when the ice deteriorates, you remove it. But it’s like having a little base camp and you would take it down in the most remote, mountainous places. And now even the hardside ice shacks on freshwater ponds here have become very difficult, almost not able to be done because the ice is so thin. I didn’t really mean to go on a tangent about that, but I just thought it was really neat because I’m forty plus years old and then add on a few more years onto that, and that is a lot of change pretty fast. Whether it’s permanent, you know, the permanence of it, I don’t know. But it’s happened in not even a generation.

TP: You mentioned shacks on bay ice.

RT: Yes.

TP: And that stopped before you- before you started.

[0:05:12]

RT: Yes. Yes. The anecdotes that my father would tell me that he was a young boy and his father would do it as a commercial fishery to catch them for income. And it was a very fast thing that would happen, the smelts would arrive on the incoming tide. My father was too young at the time to be out there with the men that were maybe not behaving all that well. There was an incident where he came home wet and half frozen and he was probably ten or twelve. And his mother said, “You’re not going with them any more.” Because when the tide comes in, the sea ice all starts to break up and they separate and float apart. [You’re] jumping from ice cake to ice cake and stuff. I have seen ice on the coast that was thicker than I expected. In 2014 [to] 2015, we had our record snowfall year and I did actually take up a modern pop up shelter out onto the cove in Somesville. I was afraid and I brought an ice chisel and then I couldn’t even- I was three feet thick in the ice and I hadn’t seen water. I was exhausted by the time I chipped through it. So there was an anomaly in that lint line up of – I was saying – in the way things have changed, but that was a weird, very cold year. The sea-run fishes were later, the elvers, everything that year, that record snow year, we had icebergs – or cakes – in the coves that were not floating anymore. When the tide would go out they were just lying on the beach. And they’re bigger than cars, thick-thick-thick. That year everything was really delayed. So yeah, that is an outlier, but it’s only one. And if you looked at the general trend that I described, the pattern that I described is true.

TP: And that was which year?

[0:07:00]

RT: The record snowfall year?

TP: Yes.

RT: [That] was 2014 [to] 2015. I know for sure that it was a record snowfall for Downeast Maine, Washington County, and I’m not 100% [but] I think we may have [had a record year] too, because I plowed snow commercially and there were just huge snow banks. Nothing melted, it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed, and then that had a fallout into our spring fishing and our runoff and everything else because it affects runoff flows. But conversely, we had – not last spring, the spring before, so it would’ve been 2021 – we had very little snowfall all winter, no snowpack, not much ice, no runoff in the spring. I’ve never seen this. We had no rain. I know, I like jumping all around different stuff. But it’s, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting. We had no rain, no runoff, and very few elvers. We struggled to get alewives up the brook because once the forest starts to green up… that’s one of the coolest things about the elver fishery that I participate in, because you get to see these little nuances with the way things work. Once the trees and stuff come out and leaf up, the brooks will really start to dry out. You see it really rapidly if there’s not much rainfall, and the temperatures are increasing, the humidity is decreasing, the evaporation rate is up. So if you don’t get consistent rainfall during that spring migration run for all those different fishes, it definitely has, I would say, a negative impact. And the elvers are crazy because they’re opportunistic. The alewives are- they have magnetite in their head, they’re born in the brook, they’re imprinted on the watershed. They have an extremely high sight fidelity rate, a return rate of the juveniles. The elvers, they’re born in the middle of the ocean. They don’t have anywhere imprinted – this is what I understand, I’m not a biologist or anything – but I hope that there wasn’t a terrible hatch of elvers that year. I think hopefully, since they seem to be a more opportunistic species – and this was in 2021 that we struggled to have very productive catch or find much volume run of elvers – I think, I hope that maybe they found water flow more favorable because they are spread across the entire Eastern Seaboard. Maybe they found water flow more favorable to the south, or maybe in Canada. It seems to make sense that the freshwater flow into the ocean would be a lure for them, a draw, because otherwise they don’t have a specific site imprinted, and they’re very opportunistic in where they’re going. So if we- I hope that if we didn’t see a very good number of them that they did show up maybe in denser numbers somewhere. We’re just on the periphery of the blob that moves up the East Coast.

TP: When you say when you say we, what do you mean by that? Where- where are you talking?

RT: Was I referring [to] we is in, “We hope, like elvers and…”

[0:10:02]

TP: “We haven’t seen as many of them.”

RT: In the general area and vicinity of this region, because it seems to be region wide when I bounce off from people in southern Maine and Downeast Maine, their experience is similar in the whole region. So I say ‘we,’ I am meaning the watersheds that are all around the Gulf of Maine. I don’t have people in Massachusetts that I can bounce off from. That’s what one of the important things of the fishery – the elver fishery, the American eel species is considered data poor, and some of the most data that’s been yielded is from landings reports from fisheries. And no, that’s not a one for one justification or a license to exploit the species just because it’s generating data, that’s not what I’m saying. But that when there’s not a fishery – and I’m not advocating for one to open up – if there’s not a commercial fishery or that data being generated, such as for elvers in Massachusetts, other places, people don’t really know. There’s not as much of a litmus, there’s much more limited resources to sample and see what’s going on. That’s one of my biggest things that I pivot around, is what I’ve [seen], it’s like the death knell of a fishery. Not saying keep commercial fishermen in there over exploiting, but once commercial fishermen that are being monetized for their time are removed from a harvest, it’s dependent on people behind desks. It gets really scary at that point. I mean, there may be something much better will come, but there’s not really the boots on the ground anymore. Then you start losing generational knowledge of how the species move. And there’s – each part; science people that are biologists and doing the science of stuff and regulating fisheries, and then the harvesters; each have important things to bring to the table that the others aren’t aware of or have time to do.

[0:12:06]

So it’s multifaceted. The elver fishery is really cool because it’s been a super learning curve for me personally as to how we’ve been so restricted so many times to protect the species that it’s a steep learning curve on conservation. The value is extremely high, the desire for it – exploitation is very difficult to ignore, but you have to be able to look beyond that and see – do you want to fish for a couple of years extremely lucratively, or would you like to fish for decades and have the resource be viable? The elver fishery is cool because there’s only 425 licensed fishermen in Maine. It’s smaller than a lot of the fisheries, so it can be modeled and experimented with – some of the regulatory practice, and that can then be – if they worked well, such as, we have a digital swipe card, like a credit card for the or fishery that’s allocated to each individual harvester, and we don’t have a same amount. Our quota limit that has been put on the fishery is individualized for each harvester. So we each have this digital card with digital data on it that records what we’re selling in real time. And that, I feel, is a good program and could and should be used for other fisheries. It’s so crazy, the lobster fishery – and like, [to] go on a bit of a rant for a second – the lobster fishery is the most lucrative in the history of the Gulf of Maine, and they only have 10% [reporting]. It’s gone to 100% reporting just this year for the first time ever. They’ve only had 10% randomly drawn reporting requirements for landings for harvest.

[00:14:05]

The elver fishery and other fisheries [have been] 100% reporting for decades, and the lobster fishery is the largest by hundreds of millions of dollars. And they’re able to- and if it’s there, there’s lobster shacks everywhere. So essentially the lobsters can be laundered off the books and no one would ever know because they could be taken to Bob’s Lobster Shack, and this person doesn’t even have the legal requirements of full reporting even though if they had the onus, the legal responsibility to do so, it doesn’t mean that they would have to [do] any tracking or reporting. Where, the elver fishery, most of it is going in international exportation to an international market that’s got to go through customs. Every ounce, every gram is accounted for. It’s this 100% reporting required with this bottleneck of there is not Bob’s Eel Shack that glass eels can be cooked and served off the books and no one knows. But I kind of take offense that the lobster fishery was left so wide open that there’s millions of these little independent places. Maybe they’re brought there and we don’t know, and then we don’t have the data if they’re caught or not. So now the federal requirement this year, first time ever, is being implemented for 100% reporting of the lobster fishery. I just, I don’t mean to go off on, you know – it’s just weird to handle different fisheries [with a] differently intensity of regulation. I don’t know. Why would we not want 100% reporting of the lobster fishery? I know I’m really bouncing around, but that’s how my brain works.

TP: Works, I guess. That’s right. Mine does that a lot as well. In terms of the elver fishery, how did you get into it?

[0:15:50]

RT: Well, it was not a very desirable thing to do. It wasn’t very high on – it was not a traditional fishery that I or anyone else that I know was aware of when I was younger. And it just came like a bolt of lightning. It did kind of come in – people were doing it. I don’t even know if the state hadn’t even developed a regulatory license for it yet. The market was very small. I had heard of it prior to participating in it. And then a friend of mine was doing it and I would just go over. I thought it was so interesting to go over and see after he had harvested what he had. I had never even seen the creatures because they’re only the size of a toothpick. Well, I had seen them maybe as a kid in the brooks at the beaches, but I didn’t really realize the connection. At that time it could be fairly lucrative. It was an unlimited – what they legally termed a derby – fishery, meaning you could catch as many as you could during the open season with no quota restriction and no swipe card existing at the time. But the interest level wasn’t very high. Then around the year 2000, I think there were 2200 licensed harvesters with up to five pieces of gear. The price was around $400 a pound for them, which was good, but nothing insane like what happened decades later. I remember driving by the Union River before I understood what was going on, driving by a watershed in Ellsworth. When I was in high school and saw there were so many nets in the river you couldn’t even see the substrate. It looked like Spider-Man had gone up the river and just shot webs of fuzz over everything. I wasn’t participating at that time, so I didn’t really know what was going on. Then once the next season, it came back and the fishery was there again. I was actually a junior in high school and I lived with my parents, and my parents were like, “Out all night? I don’t think you’re going to be doing that.”

[0:18:08]

So I didn’t get a license that year and the next year I was a senior, and I think I was eighteen, and my parents were like, “Wow.” I was like, “It’s- the market is there again. I’d like to do this.” And they’re like, “Yes, you can do what you want.” But that was right on the cusp of the state cutting it from 2200 down to 425 licenses and two pieces of gear, max, with only – basically one piece of gear – only sixty people or so out of the four hundred have two pieces of gear, because they’re grandfathered in from buying the license every single year when it was five pieces of gear, so they couldn’t be reduced. Then there were massive boom busts in the price of the fishery which kept washing it out, and it disappeared for almost a decade. It’s really strange. And if you look at international openings and closures of European eel being allowed to be exported and different things happening globally, that was what was affecting the price here. But more locally, people were all excited about it, and then and then the price went from hundreds of dollars to seventy dollars a pound, to thirty-five dollars a pound. And no one was participating in it because it wasn’t nowhere near worth it at that point because lots of times your catches – tenths of pounds it would be – it could be a normal catch in our small watersheds here on MDI. A half pound could be a good catch. So if you’re talking about seventy dollars, once it dropped, I remember my father and I were fishing together for around one hundred dollars a pound and then it dropped to seventy dollars, and he was so frustrated. I was like, “We’re not going to sell. We’re going to hold.”

[0:19:59]

And then the price turned and came back to one hundred dollars and we sold on that spread. It was like playing the eel stock market and getting that little bit of extra value. But then no one was doing it. And then “boom,” five or six years later – years later – the price came back. All of a sudden the price was like four hundred or five hundred dollars again. But around 2011, because of a bunch of things where European [exploration?] was outlawed, I didn’t know all the reasons. I did just read something to do with the Brexit thing that might have been brought in. Not Brexit, but the European Union thing – or something happened. For whatever reason they weren’t allowed to export outside Europe, which massively increased the price. Then there was that huge earthquake in Japan and Asia that might have affected some eel farms and stuff, and the fisheries over there were affected. That happened right during the spring run, that whole huge earthquake and all that stuff. So the price literally went from a couple hundred dollars a pound to almost 3,000 dollars a pound. So I saw this fishery go from thirty dollars a pound to 2,700 dollars and maybe as much as 3,000 dollars in a short time. The regulators freaked out because the effort went through the roof. A lot of the licensed people were established lobstermen and doing other things. And this is grueling, dangerous, walking around on the shore at night, very – not dirty, but dealing with a lot of seaflea bycatch stuff, like the little fleas you see on the beach – and sifting these things out is very time consuming. So people that were already financially well-off, that had a license, weren’t really participating. But once the price elevated I noticed people that weren’t fishing at all started. The effort was massively increased and the regulators got really nervous. And so we had the derby fishery…

[0:22:06]

There was no way to regulate what was possibly coming in for eels from out of state because it was potentially being laundered through Maine’s fishery, because Maine is only one of the two states – South Carolina being the only other – that has a glass eel fishery at all. So this was crushing to me because I was in my own little world – not to be short-sighted – but I was focusing on doing something that was an opportunity that I had never had, [and] extremely lucrative. And I was like, “Oh, I’m in the right place at the right time. I’m just going to do the best I can.” And then it was such a kick in the face for them to be like, “Oh, we’re so concerned. There were tons of eels being brought in from our state and laundered,” and I was like, “No! No one can behave.” It was super frustrating and [there was] a lot of anxiety about being shut down. And then we didn’t know the solution, but the solution was a three year averaging of our individual reported landings. Is there a difference between what people reported and what they caught? Maybe. People who are very honest with their landings were well-rewarded because there was a three year average taken of our past price. There was no warning of this. They didn’t know how to regulate. They were building the airplane as it was flying, and we still kind of are. So they did a three year average and then took away like well over fifty percent of that three year average. And that developed Maine’s hard tack total allowable catch from Atlantic States Marine Fisheries, which is a 9,000 and change pounds number, like 9,400 pounds or so. And then that’s allocated at different rates amongst all the harvesters in the state that is then recorded. So we each have an individual limit quota with a swipe card that keeps track of that.

[0:24:00]

So things have gone from a derby fishery to a regulated quota fishery. It’s really neat because the less that we’re able to catch the more the value is. The pie has been reduced, but the value has been supported, if not increased. That is really super important. That’s what I mean, why this fishery is really unique, [it] is a kind of model of how things could go for other fisheries. Maybe not all would work, but less is more. The pie is smaller but more valuable. And that’s really important with degraded habitat and all this stuff that’s going on. If we can get more for less and leave more in the brook. What we’ve been experiencing is pretty short. We have a twelve week season and most of us are getting our allocation in less than two weeks. And that wasn’t happening at first, so the regulations have become more and more strict and other states that aren’t harvesting have become more and more aware of passage for eels over dams. So it’s hard to quantify, but there has been an uptick in the awareness of the species. I’m hoping maybe we’re seeing the beginning of the tail whip of an improved volume of them type thing.

TP: Has volume been decreasing over time?

[0:25:29]

RT: It is so extremely variable. It really, like I was first saying, it depends on the weather that we have and the runoff that we have. I would love to sit here and say we’ve had – because we have, we’ve had the two biggest years in 2022 and 2023. It was the largest amount of elvers and [the] fastest that people filled their quotas ever, since – and I think the quota system started around… 2012 plus one? I don’t see that number maybe 2014 ish. 2012 to 2014 is when – I think 2012 was derby and by 2014 we were on quota. Coincidentally we had, in 2012 before we were on quota, I think the last year of derby, we had three days in March – because March 21st is typically the opening day — we had three days of eighty-five degree weather in say 2014 ish timeframe, and we had a massive run of elvers immediately. It was insane. So there does seem to be a correlation with temperature. Then I had described in 2021 when we had the extremely low runoff, low flow, we had very few elvers at all. The watersheds just struggled around here totally. So I’ve seen it range from catching our quota very rapidly to – I’ve always been able to get my limited quota, but sometimes it’s taken much of the season to do so. It has a huge variance. As I said, they seem to be opportunistic. I don’t think we always get the biomass right here in the Gulf of Maine. In a way I feel hopeful there’s a biomass that ends up somewhere else and it’s not a low spawn event, but they’re so data poor we don’t really know.

[0:27:34]

TP: I don’t know if this is something you are good with discussing, but do you mind sharing where you are fishing?

RT: That’s interesting, because before the quota system it was a derby fishery and when the value was increased really high it, psychologically, you want to go to where the most productive spot you can find [is]. The larger the watershed – the yield seems to be proportional to the size of the habitat that could support them. The larger the watershed – it would make sense the larger pulse of biomass would come into that watershed. The Union River in Ellsworth, if you look at the size of that watershed, it goes so many miles inland and has all these lakes, probably hundreds. That has to be the arteries for the eels to get to. Then the Union River has a large dam. When you have a large tidal step or a dam, that’s kind of an obstruction. [In] Southern Maine, the topography is flatter and a lot of the tidal influx doesn’t have a very steep tidal step. The elvers are able to kind of find their way from the marine environment into the brackish and fresh water at their own pace. But a lot of places here we seem to have a steeper — this is just the way I interpret it — a steeper tidal step with either waterfalls or damn dams, which pause the migration. And the elders can’t move past their lifecycle stage when they’re down in the bedrock marine environment. So [in] southern Maine, they’ll be able to trickle in these more softer topography areas. They could trickle in. But here we get these barriers or steep areas that hold them back. And then you get these large congregations of them that then, when the temperature increases or the water flow lessens, they can go. There’s elvers found in all of our local watersheds, but it’s proportional. And once the quota – I’m trying to get back to your question – once the quota thing came in, I slowly learned that I don’t need to go sift for the best spot, in the highest producing spot. I can fish more level headed and calmly in the brooks here and still achieve my quota limit, which is awesome.

[0:29:59]

It was a bitter pill to swallow to be limited, but it’s taken [out] so much of the craziness and risk and danger and all. It’s made it much more professional. Now I fish in some of our local streams right here on MDI. But in the years that it was very difficult to catch, like 2021, I would fish Penobscot River, Bangor… I don’t really go anywhere other places. It takes a long time to learn the current dynamic. I fish a fyke/ net, which is a fixed piece of gear which has thirty-foot wings with a cod holding end, and that trap holds them in there. And they are very smart. They follow the current. They will not go up a slack water or where there’s other obstructions. If the net is dirty they will not go in the net. I have seen so many more go around the net than I’ve ever caught. They are super super smart little guys, and just because you see them in the water doesn’t mean you even get any on the net. I mean sometimes it’s so disappointing, you see thousands and you have ten individuals on the net. So I like to fish locally here now. These are the benefits of the quota system. It is taking some of the craziness and risk [out], and especially as I have aged, I am fishing brooks now that I’ve been fishing since I was in my twenties. I will say it’s not as easy to move from this rock to that rock as it was when I was in my twenties, and it’s weird for me to be aging and see that. But yes, I like staying close to home. It’s hand harvesting; there’s no hydraulics; there’s no bait required. I don’t have to drive very far. I actually have a cove that is less than fifty yards from my house. I can fish right there at a millpond, the largest watershed on MDI, in Somesville, which I have fished in the past.

[0:31:54]

I can actually see my net from my house when I fish there. That’s like a super unique experience. But I like to do things the hard way. That’s really an easy spot for older gentlemen. I call it a gentleman’s club, so folks can walk down there and not have to use the place that I go. It’s so steep. I use ropes to walk the path down over to hold on to. But it weeds out the riff raff. It’s so crazy because I fish this watershed that is so – it’s not very big, I have very little to no competition, and I’m doing this extremely lucrative fishery. It’s a super unique experience and I get to be out there at night and see things that other people don’t get to see. I love driving at night with no traffic, and I’ve always said, I have to tell you, the fishermen take on the mannerisms of the species that they’re after. Like lobstermen, they’re all bright colors, they’re aggravated, they’re territorial, their arms are in the air. But elver fishermen are almost exactly opposite. The elvers, the glass eels, they’re migrating at night as they’re clear as glass. They’re doing this to avoid attention and predation. And the way that we participate in the fishery would be these little dead end roads with houses around where it’s like 3:00 in the morning and we’re closing our doors quietly and just trying to have respect because we don’t want the community people to be aggravated with us. We understand. But all these mannerisms tend to be just like the critters themselves. I’m sorry I keep off into space, but there’s a lot to it.

TP: If this is beyond what you want to share that’s fine, but where is this cliff place?

[0:33:50]

RT: Yeah, it’s – most of the brooks – there’s a lot of them that are steep around here, most of our brooks are. I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but I can bring you there. This area, we’re just so lucky. And then I’ve just pivoted knowledge of this into – I don’t have any monetization with the alewife fishery. I don’t earn any income from it, but I’ve been able to cross-pollinate a lot of what I’ve learned working in the watersheds with the elvers to try to support alewife fisheries. Overall water quality awareness is insane. I go from fishing the most crystal clear brooks, not in Acadia National Park but adjacent to where the most beautiful running – I’m sure there’s road salt and all kinds of awesome stuff, but visually and aesthetically it’s about as good as you’re going to find – and then I’ve gone, even in 2021, fishing Penobscot River. Fuel in the water, smells that are like, take-your-breath-away coming out of culverts. Not organic stink, chemical smells coming out of ice making facilities, fuel in the water. Basically borderline sewage, just insane. I don’t mean to get all excited, but it’s crazy for me to see the habitat quality – water quality – difference. My nets were getting so much sedimentation on them and the Penobscot River. Every tide I was having the pressure wash. Nothing like that down here. They’re pumping stuff from the former paper mill, the [leachate] from the Juniper Ridge landfill is being processed, which isn’t even meant for it. And then discharged into the river in an 18 inch discharge pipe, and it’s – the river – it’s insane how much contamination and difference [there is]. I mean, we’re just super lucky down here.

[0:36:01]

It blows my mind to have to see the difference and it really not be that far away. And a lot of people don’t think of it. And that’s why I think these fisheries are kind of like a litmus or a canary in the coal mine because I mean, we’re a liability to the true riverkeepers is the way I look at it. I don’t mean it’d be like, “Us and them,” but there’s been large corporate river keepers that have these dams and they profit heavily off of mills and facilities and they’re holding the river, basically, hostage. And then the fishermen, harvesters, suffer because we can’t harvest – the habitat, the biomass isn’t there to be able to harvest – we’re a liability. That’s what I was trying to say to the river keepers, because we tend – fishermen, harvesters, hunters – nature people, tend to notice when something isn’t right. Those little threads are the undoing of a lot of bad misdeeds, it seems to be, historically. So again, they just seem to be so convenient to remove individual harvesters that are not getting their jackets, insignias, from a certain company. If you’re totally independent, you’re not beholden to some company, maybe you speak up. But if you’re getting paid off in some way, maybe you’re not going to speak up. So I think there’s a lot of facets where people don’t respect commercial fisheries that [are] filling in and providing data and information that people aren’t taking into consideration.

TP: Can you give examples of when that happened?

RT: Specifically what?

TP: Like maybe friends of yours who have said brought things up, [or] instances in which outdoor folk…

[0:37:55]

RT: Of like negative situations with wildlife type things, is that what you’re saying? A super easy one was last spring at Somesville Dam, which is only about six feet vertically high and maybe like 50 feet wide – so in the dam world, very small – and it’s a relatively, I don’t know how many acreage watershed habitat, we had this huge run of elvers. They were all being held at the base of the dam – because I did the math, and I if you did the ratio, a two inch elver and a six foot person, a six foot dam, you end up with a six foot person climbing a ninety-six foot vertical face, only then [to] often get washed back down and not successfully [reach the top]. Once you get to the top, there’s a board that’s then blocking them. Animals that come in large numbers need to migrate en masse to make it through the predator gauntlet, right. Like that type of concept. And if there’s an obstruction such as a dam in their way, then they’re not able to burst in large numbers into the habitat to overwhelm the predator gantlet. And they’re also then left at the base of the dam drawing attention. So what I was getting at is that last year we had this huge run of elvers and everyone – all the harvesters’ quotas were done for over a month – and there we started having some die offs, like ten, twenty pound die offs of elvers, and there’s 2,200 individuals. And this is just at this little dam in Somesville. I’m working with a wildlife group that we’re counting alewives, and we counted two fish one day and there’s seven pounds of dead elvers behind us. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t get much response from the other people that were doing the alewife restoration, because you think an animal is an animal and something’s not right if we’re – and what was happening was there was just a small crack in the dam, like an eighteen inch crack which was luring the elvers out of the watershed to climb the side of the dam.

[0:39:57]

I’m trying to give you an example of where I’ve seen a negative that the fishermen – We had actual rangers from Acadia National Park come down to prepare for an educational program with school kids. There was now thirty pounds of dead elvers alongside the dam, 2,200 individuals on average in a pound. They’re scraping them off – not the Rangers, but other people scraping them off trying to hide them so other people don’t see them. And even some people were like, “Well, it’s all just part of it. And there’s so many of them this year.” I’m like, “This is not an acceptable answer. If the crack – if the dam wasn’t faulted and if it wasn’t here, they wouldn’t even be paused here.” If the dam then wasn’t cracked and faulted, they wouldn’t be being lured out of the actual watershed off to the side where they then would dry up in the sun or freeze or whatever. So I politely tried to – everyone would have come to the same conclusion because the elvers were physiologically ready, desperate to get into the pond. If they’re held up, they’re biological processes – they’re weakening at the base of the dam. They need to make that move while they’re doing their metamorphosis. And if they’re being held at the base of the dam, they’re getting weakened, they’re in the sun, there’s enhanced predation, and all this stuff. So the state did send people, the Department of Marine Resources, and I’m glad they did. And I [wasn’t] freaking out. I just told them what was going on. I actually reported it to a Department of Marine Resources officer who came down and took pictures and, you know, kind of forwarded it to the rest of the Department of Marine Resources. Then had the lead eel biologist reach out to me and be like, “What do you think is going on?” And they didn’t say they were going to send him up, but they did send him up from Augusta just to observe it. And other DMR people and everyone will come to the same conclusion, “Oh well, we should just bail them over the dam and that would probably be the best thing to do.”

[0:42:02]

And then everyone would say, well, there’s no legal mechanism to do that. So after me pounding the drum politely, trying not to alienate people or piss people off for like five days or a week, they were like, “Okay, we’re going to give you the green light. We think your idea is probably good.” Because we provide fish passage over barriers for alewives and other fish. But it’s never been done for American eels. So I’m like, “If you think fishermen or people are like wound up about seeing live eels at the base, think of the damage control in huge numbers, what if we have like 100 pound die off? People are going to freak out, rightly so.” So I think partly to keep that from happening, the DMR gave us permission and they sent an officer down. Then they weren’t even going to weigh them. And I was like, “I’m going to bring a scale and you guys are going to weigh them.” They gave us permission, because it’s not legal to be doing a harvesting activity at the dam. We dipped them out within Marine patrol officers, their lives into buckets and weighed them. And in less than an hour we built 229.15 pounds over the dam. After all the harvesters had done — and this is a six foot high, 50 foot wide dam — after all the harvesters had completed their quota. So to wrap up your question, I think that I am — not to toot my own horn, but harvesters being aware that there was a record run of elders that was basically struggling at the base of the dam with die offs — no one is really going down there at 10:00 at night and observing this. No one is aware this is happening. But the harvesters were and there was me and several other guys politely pushing the issue, and we were able to do something that’s never happened in Maine before. We were able to, with permission of the law enforcement officers there, put them into the pond. Right there. Out of the ocean. They wouldn’t even have been put in buckets if we didn’t want to weigh them and then poured right into the pond live.

[0:44:03]

I’ve never seen elvers behind my house, just like fifty yards up the watershed. And I saw them for weeks after that. So if you do the math, that’s half — that’s around 500,000 individual animals that we poured into the pond. Otherwise, they’re just trying to climb the in the face individuals at a time of the dam and then slip through the slat board at the top of the dam. And there’s hornpout catfish slurping them up like a vending machine on the other side. So you’re having a very slow trickle of biomass come into the watershed versus this burst. Does answer to your question about something that a fisherman could see that’s a negative and turn [it] into a positive?

TP: Yes.

RT: And there’s a lot – way more examples than that that are way more complicated to explain. Fortunately that’s – and I hope that’s not the only time that that happens. I think it’s a proof of concept thing because we also had to be concerned, like what if you did it when the physiology of the eels wasn’t prepared to make the transition from saltwater to fresh, you could negatively impact a huge biomass. But there’s data from a ten year study showing that it’s done at the right time of the eels migration and the temperature of everything that there is potentially positive data showing that numbers are increased above the watershed. So I think it was a good proof of concept. It was documented with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, and hopefully it could be referred to in the future as something that could be expanded on.

TP: Yeah, that’s a great example.

RT: Yes.

TP: Oh, can you tell me a little about — moving a little bit away from elvers specifically —

RT: Yes.

TP: Your perception of it actually pulled out before you didn’t give it back.

RT: Yes. Four o’clock.

[0:46:02]

TP: So. Okay, I’ll run this… I’ll run one more question and then I’ve got some charts over here. Katie’s been noting down place names and such, and we’d love to just let you verify what places exactly you mean. Look at those. That’s for a mapping project that some of us are doing, but we can get to that in a moment. Can you tell me a little bit about your perception of the bay and how it’s how it’s changed?

RT: And you say bay, you mean Frenchman Bay?

TP: Frenchman Bay, it’s watershed included.

RT: Yes. It’s changed a lot. There used to be, on any beach, whether it was open – or any shoreline that was open or not for soft shell clam harvesting, which I used to do before the elver fishery took off. But they have – they’re just not there. The soft shell clam population has totally disappeared. In front of Kings Creek in the Twinnies was a very lucrative area. My father was a harvester for clams for years and he said we had harvested it there. We would pull in the soft mud by hand and not use a rake. And he made the comment one time to me when I was in my twenties that, “Well it’s been twelve years since we were there, so they should be back. The clams.” So in his mind, as an experienced harvester, that must be about what he thinks would be – around a ten year time period for the area – if that’s not being pressured all the time to kind of regenerate to harvestable size. And he was right, they were.

[0:47:57]

The amount of clams had returned. So that was I think one of them was – they’re not coming back anymore. It’s changed totally. Whether it’s water quality or… but commercial mussel harvesters came in there with big drags, and all that soft mud that we pulled in by hand with a glove was dragged off by big metal drags and then rinsed in the water that was put down since the last glacial period. And that was soft, sticky mud. And you couldn’t even walk in it without it pulling your boots off, and it’s gone. You can almost walk across it in sneakers. They like to drag the drags across it for mussels and it took off all that living mud on the top right down to a hard pan that you can’t put your hand in. The clams don’t live in it. And that’s not the only reason. I’ve tried — I don’t know what the term is, like a ‘hexaffector.’ It’s a seven sided, six or seven sided — headed — beast that’s against clams. It’s everything. Like, you know, the pH of the water, I assume. I don’t know. But the soft shell clam commercial — used to be commercially harvestable twenty years ago, gone. They sell the licenses, I don’t even know. There’s like one guy that participates for commercial harvesting successfully. And it’s weird because in places that the hard shell clams like quahogs, and cherrystones are more tolerant. And we have the green crab infestation thing which has really exploded, for whatever reason there, you know, the winters are mild or whatever they want to say. The crabs are hybridized, whatever, I don’t know. But they are, you know, like if you go on the beach, if you lay down on the shore at night in the summer, I think you’d be eaten alive if you were passed out drunk, you’d probably be eaten alive. They’d carry you off like a cartoon.

[0:49:50]

The shores where they’re the right substrate for clams will be like all these bowl dig holes where the crabs are digging out the clams. And the only clams that are remaining are in the top of the waterline where it’s clay that the crabs can’t dig in, harvesters can’t — they can, But it’s like, pull your belly out trying to dig with a rake, trying to turn it and it’s all rocky. So the only place that there’s any claims of any size left is up in this – and I think there might be an issue too. And if they’re up high, they’re not getting zapped by the water for so long, you know, they’re not on there. But down lower in the tidal line, which Chris Peterson also agreed with, that there always used to be clams in that like mid to low region of the low tide line down to that mud. There’s not – there’s only a few in the high tide line. There’s a bunch of things. There is definitely a large amount of green crabs around. There’s been commercial mechanized harvesting that we didn’t have in some of the more lucrative areas. That has really, really changed a lot. I don’t know how else to describe it. And not in the better… I don’t think we’re going to see them come back though, like juvenile clams or seed sets of small clams. Chris has done clam boxes to protect from predation. You know, it’s just I don’t know. I don’t think we’re going to see soft shell clams come back as a viable harvestable resource around this part of Frenchman Bay, though it sounds all gloom and doom, but in other regions of Maine, there are good commercial, soft shell clams still, and even in Hog Bay in Franklin, which as the crow flies, is like maybe twenty miles, there’s still a good harvestable resource there. But for some reason, most of Bar Harbor and most of the western side of Frenchman Bay is bereft of a commercial clam resource anymore. In like two decades.

[0:52:00]

TP: You said you had been — are slash had been a clammer.

RT: Yeah used to. I don’t do it anymore because it’s not there.

TP: Now where would you harvest?

RT: I, mostly – I was a resident of the town of Bar Harbor and it’s town resident ordinances, the way the licenses were given out. So I would – fortunately, Kings Creek and the Twinnies, which is in Bar Harbor by Hadley Point – Hadley Point to the north was where I would generally go. And it was a great spot. It was a desirable spot that people from other towns would try to poach in because we had such a good resource. And in just two decades, it’s gone. Gone-gone, like unharvestable gone. Maybe good enough for dinner; a couple dozen clams. That’s a huge change. And then, not to throw shade, but the mussel growing aquaculture dragging all that, they [grade?] out the seed mussel and then they can’t use it commercially because it’s not big enough. And then they distribute it purposefully all over the substrate. Hadley point always used to be barnacle, or rocks and sand. And I was down there a couple of years ago, and maybe it’s different now because things in the ocean are in a constant state of change, but they have purposely — I don’t know if it’s legal or not, there’s probably nothing illegal about it — but they’re distributing this muscle seed through the water and it’s just blanketed – everything – was blue with mussels. If there was even a clam there, it’s being crowded out by this artificial seeding that’s only going to benefit the mussel harvesters. So there’s really a lot of dynamics going on that’s really hard, even as a person participating in these things it’s really hard to keep track of everything that goes on.

TP: Yes. Wild.

[0:54:03]

RT: Yes. Yes, it’s crazy once you actually start thinking about it.

TP: Do you have any last notes for us before we move now?

RT: No, I’ll spare you.

TP: Okay.

KC: I have a quick question. You mentioned a creek that used to be a calm spot when you first started talking about clamming, and I didn’t.

RT: Yeah, it’s Kings Creek, and it’s on Route 3, as you’re on your way into Bar Harbor. Chris Peterson will be very familiar with it. You’ll be able to see it if you look on the map, the Twinnies. It was a really good estuary type habitat. So that’s where that is.

KC: Thanks.

TP: Thank you. Okay. I’m going to turn this – oh, wait. Okay. I need to get about a minute of room tone.

RT: Hmm?

TP: Just for — if anybody ends up using this audio file, they can take that. And it helps with editing. So this will be probably the most awkward minute of our lives. Silence for a moment.

[Room tone]

TP: Beautiful. All right. I’m going to turn this off, and then we can do our last thing.

[0:56:02]