[0:00:00]

 

Tiegan Paulson: And we are recording. Do you want to tell me what you had for breakfast today while I get my levels set here?

 

Mike Cronin: Yes. Well I haven’t really, I’ve had a cup of coffee, I was just about ready to dig in. I’m going to bring it out, that way if I get hungry I can [inaudible] a little bit. I’ll be right back. So where were we?

 

TP: Breakfast.

 

MC: [laughs] I eat – I have my own mix. It’s got about thirty different things in it. Everything from quinoa, rice, lentils. It keeps me pretty well going. Okay.

 

TP: Okay. I have this set, so I’m good to go. Can you tell me a little bit about your background in the bay, in the area?

 

MC: I came up here in 1980, started out digging clams. I pretty much lived on the bay and around the bay, boats, everything, until now. That’s eight – about forty years. Thereabouts, maybe a little more. [clattering] I’ve been a clam digger, I’ve been an urchin diver, I’ve been a clam diver, an elver fisherman. Do you know what elvers are? Yes, I was an elver fisherman.

 

[0:02:06]

 

When you do all that kind of stuff you end up breaking stuff, or injuring [yourself]. I had soft-tissue damage from the diving. I ended up getting some surgeries fixed. When you put a mask on every day and you’re going in the – not real deep water, but medium deep, like 40 feet or so, you end up really messing with the eyes and the ears and stuff. I’ve got tinnitus in my right ear, my hearing isn’t the best. I went to the V-A [Veterans Affairs] and they said I had macular degeneration in my left eye, but I’ve got it arrested at the moment. I managed to get it settled down. So no diving to say the least, and I have to be careful about how much clam digging I do on account of – you get a lot of wind and sand blowing. When you’re digging and you’re in a tidal area you get a lot of sand in your face, so that’s hard on the eyes. Also, clam digging is not the cleanest job in the world. You might as well call it a dirty job because mud is full of everything, and you don’t know what you’re going to be catching. I mean, people flush their toilets out into the bay. They try at any rate. They got it cleaned up a lot more than it used to be, but there was a time when they had a lot of direct release right into the bay. I don’t know – there’s a lot more plastic now than there used to be, so I’m not sure how safe clams are to eat.

 

[0:03:58]

 

I wouldn’t recommend them to anybody personally, simply because plastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces. With rain and sunlight they deteriorate right down to a molecular structure. The clams are – they’re filter feeders. I don’t know how much – or even how – I don’t know if it becomes part of them. Or how much you eat, when you eat a clam, how much plastics you consume. Being that plastics are not the most safe food – thing to eat – you wouldn’t even call it food. [laughs] I wouldn’t suggest it for a pregnant woman, say. I don’t know where some of the problems with some of the young kids come from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the plastics that we consume were a part of it. They say it’s your inoculations, but I’m hesitant to go there. I’d say it’s more the chemicals in the environment that create autism and stuff like that. Other than that, as far as the bay goes – I’ve seen – there used to be a lot more herring gulls out there. Herring gulls are the really big gulls – are you familiar with the different – okay, the herring gulls, they say that the rookeries have reduced by about forty percent. I don’t know – forty percent since when? I think it’s a lot more than that. I don’t think – they tell me that the rookeries are healthy and that the females manage to feed their young, but I don’t think that’s where they’re all dying. I think either people have poisoned them or companies have poisoned them. There used to be a real problem with herring gulls eating up all the blueberries and stuff.

 

Janeeka Anderson: That’s what they did to Canadian Geese.

 

[0:05:54]

 

MC: Huh?

 

JA: They poisoned them just like they did the Canadian geese here.

 

MC: Oh yes, they did it to the geese too. When you lose an apex predator like that – or a scavenger, whatever you want to call it – it unbalances everything. We have a green crab problem, and I think that used to be a major part of the gull diet, the little ones. But now they [have] had a big die-off of mussels in the last ten years. There used to be a lot of mussels out there, I mean they dragged them. They decimated it with draggers. When you attack something like that, like mussel beds and stuff, again and again and again, they get diseases. They die. so they had some kind of bloom or some kind of disease [that] wiped out the rest of them. You can’t find a mussel hardly anywhere if you go out there. So that’s something I’ve seen, the destruction of that.

 

TP: What kind of mussel?

 

MC: The blue mussel. The ones that you see, every time you go out there. The big mounds with the mussels on them. Well, the mussels aren’t there anymore, it’s just busted shells. They’re pretty much gone. When I first came to Maine you had to move them, big old clumps of them just to dig clams. They would get so thick that the clams wouldn’t grow underneath them. Now you can’t find them. They’re gone. They either had a – well one, they got dragged, and two, I don’t know if the green crabs got them too. Green crabs have gotten to be a really bad problem. They’ve gone from being on the shore where the gulls can get them – they’re in the middle tide zone going down to about forty feet of water. Being an urchin diver I’ve seen the culp forests.

 

[0:07:59]

 

They used to be pretty miniscule. There weren’t that many, the urchins would attack them and take them out. After we got diving for urchins they bloomed. They were everywhere. Now there’s huge kelp forests out there that weren’t there before. As a result, the lobster industry got good. When we got rid of all the urchins the baby lobsters had a place to bed down and grow up without being gobbled up by this or that predator. When the green crab started invading that all went – now it’s a habitat for green crabs.

 

TP: Can you tell me more about urchin diving?

 

MC: What do you want to know?

 

TP: What that  was like, where you were doing it.

 

MC: Urchining into deeper water you might as well forget. Downeast, [Lubec] and places like that, the tides are bigger and the urchins grow into deeper water. They get bigger. Down here the tides are smaller in terms of going up and down. [You] see my point. From the low water plus another twenty feet – or ten feet deeper – is when you start getting into urchins. You’ll get good urchins. You’ll get urchins all the way out to forty, fifty feet or even deeper, but the only ones that are any good – that they’d want to eat in Japan and places – are about… the best of it is twenty feet to forty feet. You can dive there all day. You can strap tank after tank, you’re only one atmosphere deep. You can do six, seven hours without getting bent. [If] you’re going into deep water after scallops or something, say, it’s seventy or eighty feet. You don’t go to one hundred, you’ve only got a few minutes at one hundred feet. It’s ridiculous to even go to one hundred feet with what we’ve got.

 

[0:10:04]

 

If you’re using nitrox or something, which I have never done, then you can go deeper, but there’s nothing there that I want. There’s no sense in going through all the expense to get the nitrox equipment. With regular scuba even eighty feet is too deep. The real comfort zones are thirty, forty, fifty feet, and that’s where all the urchins are. You can scoop all day, and in their day – even now they’re still worth a lot of money, but I can’t do it anymore. Like I said, there’s a limit to what you can take of that.

 

TP: Did you have any close calls diving for urchins?

 

MC: Oh God. I got lost at sea, lucky they found me. Two or three times.

 

JA: Run over by a boat.

 

MC: I got run over by a boat. That scar right there? A prop got me. Not with a big boat, they got me with an outboard. No, no, wait a minute, they did get me with the big boat. That’s right, because he backed it up after – well no, I came up. I couldn’t see the sun. See I used to come up when I got finished filling up my bags, and usually I came up my line, but it had a lot of tug in the water. In other words, I had to let go of the line at about twenty feet deep and surface because we were in a river area and the current was just ripping out of there. When I hit the surface I came up behind the boat. The guy in the boat was backing up to make a circle so he could be over my buoy. He smacked in the back – luckily, when I hit the surface, the boat hit the tanks and he popped it into neutral.

 

[0:12:07]

 

The wheel didn’t stop spinning until I was locked right in there. I was almost fish bait. It was close, that was one close call I had. Another time…

 

JA: He lost track of where he was.

 

MC: Yes he didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where he was because the sun was – it was an overcast day, so I didn’t see the boat shadow so I didn’t know where I was surfacing. He didn’t know where I was because I let go of the buoy. I had to, I couldn’t swim the buoy up, [inaudible] dragged it – when I got to the buoy it was twenty feet deep. I came up the line and my body pulled the line right on over, burned me out. That’s one of those things that shit happens. Another close call – let me think.

 

JA: You got lost at sea.

 

MC: Oh I got lost at sea. [laughs] I was ready to drop my gear and swim to shore. I knew what direction it was, but it was overcast once again, it was foggy, and the boat died. It drifted away off into the fog. [laughs] Another boat had to come pick him up, and then they went looking for me. Meanwhile I was treading water, ran out of air. I was over – my floatation was, I had too much floatation. I mean not enough floatation, I couldn’t stay on the surface. Because that’s – when you’re diving for urchins you’ve got to tweak it a little bit. So you can stay on the bottom, you’re overweight. You use too much weight so it pulls you down, you stay down, because otherwise you’re drifting up trying to put them in the bag. [laughs] You know what I mean?

 

[0:14:06]

 

A wave goes by and all of a sudden you get more buoyant, so you want to be overweighted. So here I am on the surface trying to tread water and then try to swim to shore. I was just ready to unstrap my weight belt and let her go and they came out of nowhere and rescued me. [laughs] That was one time. And then I was scallop diving another time, and that was in deeper water. That was kind of a long way from shore. They lost me for – oh, God – three quarters of an hour. They were ready to call the Coast Guard. The captain was a young-ish kid, he was absolutely in tears [laughs] when they finally caught up with me. That’s what shit happens. He just lost my buoy. He had two divers in the water, is what the problem was, so he couldn’t stay on one buoy. When the other guy came up he was far enough away so that they couldn’t find my buoy. It was on the surface and everything but they just couldn’t find me. They were puddling around here and there and everywhere running up the shoreline. It’s a wonder they didn’t run me over. And other things…

 

JA: Did the current take you?

 

MC: Huh?

 

JA: Did the current take you out?

 

MC: Yes, somewhat, but I was looking for them too.

 

JA: Did you feel like you were being sucked out into deeper water?

 

MC: Yes, you’re always moving toward the outside. Scalloping is in – usually the best scallops are in fast-running water, like in river systems. The Skilling’s river’s got a lot of them in it.

 

[0:15:56]

 

The point comes like that and the other point like this and the river goes out into Frenchman Bay. They would’ve been all – and the sun, it was late afternoon when they found me. Who wants to tread water until the next day, I mean how the hell are they going to find you in the dark? I was lucky when they found me.

 

JA: He’s had his close calls clamming too. His outboards stalled out on him.

 

MC: I’ve had that happen. Yes, this time was really bad. I had a –

 

JA: It was so scary, he went all the way to Frenchman Bay almost all the way to Sullivan.

 

MC: Yes.

 

JA: He was headed for open water.

 

MC: I got on Calf [Island] or something like that.

 

JA: You have to go so far now to put our boats in.

 

MC: Yes I was off of South Gouldsboro.

 

JA: We can’t find a place to put our boats, they won’t allow us. You have to pay for Sullivan, and the spot to put your boats is very, very dangerous for the diggers.

 

MC: Yes.

 

JA: We just lost one of our diggers from a canoe accident because of it. [Shaboo?] It was –

 

MC: I don’t even know how [Shaboo?] –

 

JA: They had to go around that point at [Shepland?].

 

MC: Yes right, that same place where mine quit.

 

JA: [inaudible] access the shore, so you have to go around – at Sullivan you have to go around the whole great-big-huge point at [St. Wharf?].

 

MC: And if it does, you do run into problems, you get blown off. When I lost my – when my motor quit on me it was choppy and the wind was blowing hard. I would row and it still kept going off. I couldn’t row fast enough to get me to shore, so I just stuck with the boat and figured I’d finally get to some place on the other side and take it from there.

 

[0:17:55]

 

JA: The other thing [inaudible] made it. They lost the canoe and all their gear and stuff. It’s scary.

 

MC: Yes there’s been a lot of people that have drowned.

 

JA: [Inaudible] Most of them can’t even make it to – what’s that island called? They finally closed it because it was dangerous to get there. It’s in Frenchman Bay.

 

MC: It’s in Frenchman Bay?

 

JA: Yes, the Bar.

 

MC: Oh Treasure Island?

 

JA: No, the Bar.

 

MC: Oh the Bar, that would be –

 

JA: Most of the diggers don’t even want to take a boat there anymore, it’s so dangerous. They’re really starting –

 

MC: Stave Island.

 

JA: – Stave Island. They’re really starting to get scared to take boats to go clamming.

 

MC: We lost an access where we could get to – see, the bar – let me get a chart. I’ll get…

 

JA: It’s just been really, really hard for us. They don’t want us to go clamming anywhere. They’ll come out and scream at you, tell you to move your vehicle. It’s been awful. They don’t want to give you any shore access. It’s mostly out-of-staters saying, “We own the shore here.” They don’t even want you digging on the shore around their properties. We’ve dug in [handling noise] Maine anywhere for years, so it’s really not fair. They come in here and they don’t understand [that] this is our year-round living. We have to survive somehow, and if that’s all we know how to do that’s the only way we can make money. We should have – it should be grandfathered in. Really, seriously – I can see they don’t want us walking right through their property, but there is a lot of places where they could, off to the side of their property, allow us access just to help keep our diggers safe. We’ve been working with that with our clam committee. We actually have – is it [Bryanne?]?

 

MC: I’m not sure.

 

[0:19:53]

 

JA: I can’t remember his last name, but if you went to our meetings you’d probably end up meeting him. He’s been working on shore access to get permanent permission in the [leagues?].

 

MC: Yes, because people sell their property, people die – get old and die. You never know when you’re going to lose your access. If it changes hands [they might] say, “Oh I don’t want no people crossing my property.” So if it’s not in the deed you’re kind of screwed. There’s very few accesses to any parts of the shore anymore.

 

JA: And that just makes it more dangerous because they have to take their boats to get there.

 

MC: Like the only real permanent one we have for this bay over here, West Bay, that would be – this is West Bay right here. We’re right about in here somewhere. Anyway, these islands that we were talking about – this is South Gouldsboro over here, this is Stave Island – when I lost my motor I was coming from the landing over here where I tend the house that’s over here.

 

TP: In Jones Cove?

 

MC: What’s that?

 

TP: In Jones Cove?

 

MC: In Jones Cove. I came up out of Jones, I turned this point at Taft. I was coming along this edge here because I wanted to go clamming down through here somewhere, and my motor quit right here. The wind was blowing this way and I ended up on this island over here.

 

TP: Wow.

 

MC: And if I hadn’t hit that island I’d have been in Bar Harbor. I was lucky.

 

JA: Do you [inaudible].

 

MC: What I did is I pretty much rowed to make sure I hit the island.

 

JA: I was following him on shore in a vehicle. I was on the phone with Mike Pinkam and the warden and a friend of mine with a trailer. I didn’t have his truck at the time so I called one of my friends to come over and bring the trailer because we didn’t think we were going to be able to catch him. I called the wardens and we didn’t think that it was possible, a great-big-huge boat towing a canoe.

 

MC: Yes. [laughs]

 

JA: And get on to the island first of all. I don’t know how he got that.

 

[0:21:54]

 

MC: I went back a couple days later and got it. I put it on anchor. I mean it was a solid boat and everything, I wasn’t really worried about it. I knew I would get to the island, but it was still a struggle.

 

JA: So it’s just that much more dangerous with not having shore access and losing all of our places to go clamming. We still try to get to them no matter what because that’s where the clams are. If that’s where the clams are, clams don’t grow where clams don’t grow. You’re only going to find them where they are.

 

TP: Could I ask – is there another, maybe I can give you my chair – just because the mic goes in a direction.

 

JA: Nope, nope. I can get another chair.

 

MC: This here, as far as urchins goes, anywhere on the outside. Anywhere on these islands. Sometimes the westward side isn’t very good because the wind blows predominantly on this side and the rough seas aren’t good for urchining. The urchins just don’t like it. But on the sheltered sides are really the best spots. This shelters this whole shoreline so the urchins are good there. All good along through here, most of this – you can’t get them up in here, it’s mud flat. That kind of stuff.

 

JA: Mostly West Bay is where you’ve been getting them right now, right?

 

MC: Clamming.

 

JA: We’re shut off actually, from Winter Harbor.

 

TP: We also have – I brought some charts that we can actually draw on later.

 

JA: Oh okay.

 

TP: Not just yet, we’ll do that in a moment.

 

JA: Right now Frenchman Bay all the way from Schoodic Point to the New Hampshire border is closed from fresh-water run-off flood closure.

 

MC: For clamming. Everything else is alright.

 

JA: That happens to us a lot. Sometimes it shuts us down [for] one, two months. They don’t like to reopen it. They’ll keep running their tests. They do a good job with that, but it still makes it really hard for the diggers, so we’re forced [Mike] to go places where it’s even worse to get to, or harder to get to.

 

[0:23:56]

 

MC: In the summer time they have other problems like – what is it, what do they call it? Red tide?

 

JA: Red tide, yes.

 

MC: They get red tide, which is a bacterial problem.

 

JA: Algae problem

 

MC: And then they have –

 

JA: Algae bloom, it’s an algae bloom.

 

MC: – Another disease that’s fairly recent.

 

JA: Biotoxins?

 

MC: It’s a different strain of bacteria, it’s not the same thing.

 

JA: Biotoxins?

 

MC: Biotoxins, yes. And the biotoxins are pretty much the same. Red tide is a biotoxin too, but this is a different variety. What they do is the test it every two days. They’ll let you dig for two days, they’ll test it for biotoxins, then they’ll let you clam for two days – check it for biotoxin. It gets to be a real pain, but you have to be aware of it all the time because you’ll get a ticket if you don’t check first.

 

JA: And also once you go digging and you’ve got your clams you can’t go sell them because the shops are shut down. If they close, they [the shops] close. It’s hard, you can go clamming in the middle of the tide –

 

MC: They’ll close it.

 

JA: So you have no place to – even though you spent the whole tide getting your clams you don’t have any place to get rid of them. You can’t sell them to the public even at home because – he sells his clams here –

 

MC: Not that you want to poison somebody anyway.

 

JA: Right exactly, you can’t. When you’re getting food for the public–You’ve got to be careful.

 

MC: They use – and the government goes above and beyond in other words. If they feel that there might be a spot that’s got enough biotoxin to get somebody sick they close it. Or if they think it might get there pretty soon. There’s a fudge factor. When they let you go, and then they close it, their fudge factor is getting squeezed. Ten-to-one the clams you’ve got are good, you can eat them, but it gets –

 

[0:25:54]

 

JA: One of us was actually wondering if pollution and biotoxins and red tides aren’t going to actually eliminate clamming. It keeps getting closer and closer. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of our maps from offshore. Last summer it was all the way across the Maine border, all the way from New Hampshire to Canada. Right offshore.

 

MC: That’s not the only problem. You have rising sea levels that are making a lot of clamming areas a thing of the past. In other words the water is getting so deep that the clams don’t grow there anymore. Then [there are] places where it was really, really shallow and they’ve got deeper water there – the clams are prolific.

 

JA: I want the paperwork.

 

MC: But there’s not too many places that are replacing the old places. In other words some of the old places are getting real – you can’t clam there anymore because it goes up the ledge, and you can’t dig the ledge. A lot of the clamming now – a lot of this area used to be – you could clam all the mud. They used to do what was called pulling. You put gloves on and run your hands in the mud and pull your hands right out, which is a lot harder than it might sound. You can break the clam. Pushing your hand through the mud makes your fingers hurt, cut your hands on the clams, run it right through the glove, whatever. But it was faster and you could get two or three bushels when the clamming was good. There’s nothing in the mud anymore. The only places you’re going to find clams now generally are right along the edges of the islands, right along the high water line. That tells me that the species is ready to shit the bed anyway – excuse my English.

 

TP: You’d mentioned a canoe in getting around the bay, but what other ways do you use to get around and move places?

 

[0:27:54]

 

MC: You see those little boats when you were coming in? I use those with outboards. I have an outboard – you must have passed it on the way in, I have a big one over there on the other side here – but I don’t use it as much as I used to on account of I’m seventy-two years old. Getting it ready and taking it out and going, and all that happy [horse?]. Why bother? I have enough money that I can pick and choose my tides. And I like going in a canoe, it gets me good exercise. But on windy, windy days and on rainy days I’m not in a rush to go out and hurt myself. [laughs] You know what I mean? It’s a long day when you go out. Unless you’re just driving up somewhere and going off the shore it’s a hard day.

 

JA: Which, if he goes down here across the road, they won’t let us park down there so I have to –

 

MC: Yes, even my neighbors across the way, as soon as they moved in down there everybody got cut off. It was awful, and that was where everyone got on to West Bay. The only access to West Bay now is all the way up at the head at Route 1 where the stream comes down, and that stream – the low water starts to go out four hours or five hours before low water. If you don’t get out of there when it’s leaving then you’re stranded you have to pull it through the mud for half a mile to get it to water. You have to leave when the tide’s leaving and then you’re standing out on the shore wondering what to do until the tide’s low enough to get some clams. Then you have to wait afterward for the tide to come so you can come back up inside. So that’s why we’re so good across the street over here because you could get in a canoe right around two hours before – right around the time you’re about to start digging, go somewhere – or you can get out there half an hour before you’re going to start digging and row somewhere, or get a motor and go somewhere.

 

[0:30:08]

 

You didn’t have to wait around wondering what to do with yourself. You’d finish a tide and you’d ride back in, but they ruined that for the clam diggers. Now the clam digger has to –

 

JA: You either get dropped off and walk in quietly –

 

MC: Or pay somebody to use their property access, and most of them are rich out-of-staters. You don’t even know how to get a hold of them. It’s pretty much –

 

JA: Up here you can offer them some clams, and if they like them they’ll let you go usually.

 

MC: Yes, some of them are alright but the majority don’t even want to talk to you.

 

TP: Could I ask, yes – just the – [laughing]

 

JA: Microphone will pick it up.

 

MC: Yes I didn’t think of that.

 

JA: But most of them don’t even really want – they don’t care if we get clams or have access to shore.

 

MC: This was –

 

JA: They just want people to stay off their property and out of their yards.

 

MC: When I moved here every road going to the shore, all on that side, there was practically nobody there. All they had was summer tourists. Sometimes they came by, sometimes they didn’t. Most of them didn’t care because they didn’t want you to burn them out in the summertime. I mean in the winter.

 

JA: Or rob them.

 

MC: Or rob them. They liked to try and get along with the diggers. Now they’ve got cameras and everything.

 

JA: We actually keep an eye on them.

 

MC: You don’t know where they’re sticking their cameras, nobody does. The thing of it is, there’s more law enforcement than there ever was. That place down here got burned out about five years before I moved in. That was the regular clamming road. The people came in, bought the property, and then cut everybody off. Back then clamming was a big industry. About twenty people a day [went] down there and every one of them would come out of there with two or three bushels.

 

[0:32:00]

 

That’s a lot of clams. You didn’t get paid much for it. You made the same amount of money now that you get for going down there and busting your ass all day and getting one bushel if you’re lucky. Or maybe sometimes a bushel and a half. I don’t see anybody coming out of there with more than a bushel and a half anymore, and that’s a rare thing. You’ve got to really stay there [for a] four-to-six hour tide in order to get that kind of action. Before, back when I first moved up here, you could go out there and [in] two or three hours go out in the mud and pull – I’ve seen guys walk out of there with seven bushels. Somebody that was really good at it and really fast at it.

 

JA: We worked really hard to – the clam committee got a grant for re-seeding and trying to replenish our flats. We opened up a clam lab here in Gouldsboro. We were going to winter them over, but they’re at Mount Desert Island [MDI]. Are they still at MDI right now? We haven’t quite gotten to the point that we can keep them all winter and keep them from freezing because it’s going to cost that much more. MDI offered to help us because the clam committee doesn’t have much money. It’s hard. That grant ran out and Mike is trying to get us another – Mike Pinkam – is trying to get us another grant. They’ll be ready soon to bring us back our baby clams. I was so bummed out when they went to MDI. I know they take good care of them, but still, once you take care of them all summer and you wash them and take them back out – we took them this spring off the flats because we – was that our own? We were catching spat with those boxes.

 

MC: The boxes were spat boxes.

 

JA: There were spat boxes that we had in the cove. What was the name of that cove in Birch Harbor that we keep them in?

 

MC: Oh, I can’t –

 

JA: At the old lobster pound?

 

[0:33:58]

 

MC: I don’t even think it’s got a name.

 

JA: It’s got a name. Anyway, we’ve got them in Birch Harbor, the clam lab is in Birch Harbor. We put out spat boxes. The baby clams were only maybe – not even half an inch, tiny-tiny –

 

MC: Tiny.

 

JA: Not even half an inch long. Some of them you could barely see. You’ve got to pick out all the baby crabs or anything that doesn’t belong in with them.

 

MC: Yes, you’ve got to pick them out with the [cod?].

 

JA: Once we opened up our boxes you’ve got to unscrew all the boxes and open up the screens. Then they dump them down to one side and get them in a pile before they put them up on the table. Then they’ll open them up. We’ll pick them out –

 

MC: They’re so small that you use a credit card or something to shovel them.

 

JA: We’ll pick out everything that doesn’t belong in with them and we’ll put the stuff that doesn’t belong in with them and take a count of that to see what we had. Green crab or whatever invasive species.

 

MC: It’s a scientific program, you’re never going to replenish the flats with what you’re growing in the lab. You’ve got to industrialize it to a large extent –

 

JA: – We’re trying to –

 

MC: – make it so that you’re growing a whole lot more spat. You can catch spat. You go down there, if you knew exactly when they were spawning – the tide comes in, they spawn, the water comes up. It’s filled with spawn at that point. If you gathered the water and the spawn at that time and you put it in an exactor or some kind of container, you could have a lot of spat all in one place. Because when the tide turns they either mated or they didn’t, fertilized or not, then it all washes out to sea. That was okay back in the day when there were so many clams that people were coming off the bay with seven or eight bushels a piece.

 

[0:36:00]

 

You see my point? In other words, when they spawned there were so many clams spawning that there were just godzillion billion clams filtering out, so the predators had tons of stuff to eat. But now there are so few clams and the spawning critical mass is so low that the predators gobble it all up. We get less and less. The only places that you’re going to find clams are the first ten feet where the tide goes up, if that. It’s a very small area that ends up getting clams in it, and that’s because when the clams come in they spawn [and] that’s the area the predators can’t congregate to gobble the whole tide. See my point?

 

TP: What kind of predators are we –

 

MC: The green crabs are the ones I’m talking about.

 

JA: Green crabs. In our trays we found bigger – the ones that had the bigger green crabs that got in there when they were bigger – we’re still not sure how they’re getting in there. Some of them are growing in there. We noticed that the ones that have three or four bigger green crabs, they [have] either no clams or very few in our boxes – in our trays. It’s devastating when you bring them up and all you find is dead baby clam shells.

 

MC: The really small ones eat the really small stuff. As they get bigger they eat the bigger ones.

 

JA: You know they were there and you know they grew and you know we caught the spat, but then we’re fighting against the green crabs after we did all that work to catch the spat, grow them. Then they get totally demolished in the [drain?] by the green crabs.

 

MC: It doesn’t take a lot of green crabs to screw it all up on you.

 

JA: When you open it up it’s like, “Aw, poor baby clams.” They’re all just dead shells.

 

MC: And that’s what you’re getting across the whole flat. And the green crabs are not any more prolific than they were ten years ago. The gulls died off – or they killed the herring gulls – or they ate too many green crabs. There’s not a lot of food in green crabs and there’s a whole lot of shell.

 

[0:38:04]

 

I don’t know how much a shell a gull can tolerate. Their regular diets were reduced on account of – they dragged  all the mussels out. When you drag all the mussels out, that was herring gull food, and now the herring gulls have nothing to eat. They’re eating whatever they can get, and that would be plastic and green crabs. That’s not a really good diet for anything.

 

JA: We do have green crab traps that we put out in Gouldsboro. Mike will issue them to any digger who wants them. I usually try to take one, but now there’s so many green crabs – there’s thousands of them – and if you take a flashlight and shine it out on the flats at night – I think Alan said what, he saw two thousand of them in one flat. He couldn’t even count them all, they’re literally taking over.

 

MC: And that’s the ones that were big enough to see.

 

JA: They said at night you can really see the mass destruction shining the lights on them because you can see their eyeballs.

 

MC: They eat everything from seaweed, seagrass –

 

JA: With our conservation they have us do what we call green crab picking, but it just doesn’t seem to be making any difference. But even if we don’t try something it’s just going to get worse.

 

MC: I suggested a few things. I said, “Sterilize the females, sterilize the males; whatever you’ve got to do, and dump them back in the bay so that they breed – sterile breed.” You get less that way. But they don’t know how to sterilize them. You can use radiation on things and stuff, but we haven’t got the facilities to do shit like that.

 

JA: They have – the biologists haven’t gotten that far into it either.

 

MC: You don’t really want to find a disease that works on them because it might spread to lobsters or something else. It’s pretty much – we’re dead in the water as to what we can do about – but just raising baby clams isn’t really going to work.

 

[0:40:03]

 

Like I said, there were so many clams before that when they’d spawn it was a free-for-all for everything that wanted to take a bite of it, and there was still enough to settle in. Now you’ve barely got enough to settle in a little area at the head of the tide. I’d see – and that’s everything. Urchins are the same way, scallops, all these things are dwindling. Part of it’s because the green crabs don’t have to stay in the shallows. They move out, they eat baby lobsters, they eat everything that they can catch. There’s so many of them that they can overwhelm stuff.

 

JA: They eat each other.

 

MC: Yes they even eat each other. They don’t even see it coming. A lobster [is] fighting here and. Then that’s it.

 

JA: I think that’s probably our biggest predator.

 

MC: It’s going to affect all of them. You have cod that comes in, you have herring that comes in. They all lay their eggs, they’re all around the rocks and stuff, and you’ve got these crabs to gobble them all up. It’s going to screw up just about everything that moves out there. Then you’ll probably have a die-off of crabs because they won’t have anything to eat, but by then it’s going to be too late for a whole lot of species out there.

 

JA: I don’t think so, I think they’re going to adapt to living on land. [laughs] I really do.

 

MC: Yes, probably. They’re pretty resilient.

 

JA: It remains to be seen, but I think that they’re going to adapt because they can live in freshwater.

 

TP: You mentioned that the people owning shorefront property are changing a little bit. Can you tell me more about how the communities have changed?

 

[0:41:58]

 

MC: The community – along the shoreline, nobody that’s a clam digger – some lobstermen can afford to live on the shore, but most of the shore properties are owned by out-of-staters.

 

JA: The taxes are really high.

 

MC: They don’t really have an impact on what goes on in the coastal community. In other words, they come in, they enjoy the scenery –

 

JA: – vacation land. –

 

MC: – they put those “No Trespassing” signs up, and then they go home. Maybe their relatives come up and stay. They don’t generally rent unless they absolutely – unless they hit a hard spot in the city.

 

JA: During the Corona Virus they wanted to get out of the cities, get away from that.

 

MC: Yes, they came up here.

 

JA: So more and more kept coming here and buying up all the houses that the town would take for people losing their taxes. People couldn’t afford to live on the shores. They’d leave houses empty. They [out-of-staters] bought all the old empty houses, whether they were liveable or not – better than being around a lot of people and dying of a virus. I get their point, they want to get out of the city and away from people, but they don’t realize that we didn’t have it that bad here until – and we half expected for them to not allow that. I’m actually surprised that they didn’t say, “Stay where you [are],” but you can’t tell people that – they own a home here, they buy a home here, you can’t tell people not to come here. Even [Barkley’s]. Our friends Beverly and Jimmy, they live in Massachusetts. They were really scared too, they came down with it, really sick. She’s seventy-seven. She wanted to come up here to get away from it, they felt so confined and trapped. It’s open here, lots of safety basically. But then –

 

MC: Then they go to the store and everybody says, “Oh an out-of-stater, holy shit [inaudible].” [laughs]

 

JA: Or when every car in the parking lot was an out-of-stater because –

 

[0:43:58]

 

MC: The locals were scared to go into the store. [laughter]

 

JA: Oh it really threw –

 

MC: It was a riot really. Either you catch it or you don’t, jesus. Wear your mask if you’re that worried about it. But a lot of people did fall over from it.

 

JA: That was the worst flood of it that I’d seen for quite a while. I said, “Mike, yup, here come the flatlanders. I can see it coming.” That’s what I call them. But I knew it, and then that gets all that much more worse because you’re blending in with people that have already been around.

 

MC: They were terrified, they were running out of the city. I don’t mind them being around. They don’t throw beer bottles out there. I mean there was a time when the locals owned the shoreline, they’d go everywhere, “Ah, go clamming now!”

 

JA: But what bothered me was, they left the city to come here to get away from the Coronavirus, but then they didn’t quarantine for the fourteen days and they just walked right into the stores and didn’t care about our rules. They do that same thing to us with our clamming. They don’t care about the rules. They don’t care if we have the right to clam from the high-water mark down. That’s our – those flats are public. That’s our right, and some of them will come right out screaming at you.

 

MC: They do, they think that they own the flats. “What are you doing in front of my house at six-o’clock in the morning or five-o’clock in the summer time?”

 

JA: On the flats to the low-water mark, they think they own it. They think – yes. They think they own to the low-water mark.

 

MC: You got there by boat and they’ve got no reason to come out of their house and [holler] at you.

 

JA: And a lot of them the wardens can control by saying they have the right – “You don’t own to the low-water mark, the state owns to the high-water mark,” so the wardens will try to protect us on that one, but it’s still an ongoing feud.

 

MC: And it’s actually not written in stone.

 

JA: It really isn’t. Well, yes, because the state owns from the high-water mark down.

 

MC: That’s what they say, in other words that’s what they’re saying right now. [talking over each other] It has been disputed both now and before.

 

JA: But a lot of their [heat?] say, the low-water mark –

 

[0:46:03]

 

MC: The state basically won, but I don’t think it’s a dead issue by any means, and money talks. Clam diggers don’t have – and other people that work on the water – they don’t have the money and the resources that a lot of these out-of-staters have when they come up here. You’ve got to try to keep friends. No more breaking beer bottles on rocks, for one thing, and two –

 

JA: Part of the way around –

 

MC: Everybody’s changed. The clam diggers have, and some of the out-of-staters have localized a little bit. When somebody owns a piece of property for fifty years, say, or forty years, they begin to become part of the community in some ways. They have the kid that isn’t doing well and comes up here to kick back and get his – recuperate. Whether it be psychologically or behind in school or something, or he just needs a break. City life is a tough racket. I’ve been there, I know it, I’ve been in the military. It’s not easy to live in a high-density community. This is not a high-density community, it’s low population for the moment. It’s getting more crowded all the time though. When I first moved up here I didn’t have a neighbor. All my neighbors, most of them, are new. It’s turning into what I left behind in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

 

JA: And half of it is because there is – like I said, it’s a beautiful place, who wouldn’t want to be here? I haven’t left the state, so I don’t really know, but I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t want to go to the city. All I have to do is go to Bangor. A lot of people – you see a lot of people want peace, but [they move?] back here…

 

MC: If you have nothing it’s an easy way to make a living up here.

 

JA: …where are we going to be in our industry?

 

MC: When there’s water there a lot of people can make it.

 

[0:48:00]

 

You’ve got to go work for the local mill or something in Massachusetts or Connecticut, and who wants to sit in a mill all day and make twine, or knitting threads? Jesus.

 

JA: When I – I moved here seven years ago, and when I first moved here – this is how drastics it’s gotten. We had over seventy diggers. Right, Mike?

 

MC: Oh yes, there were a lot of diggers.

 

JA: Our meetings were loaded with people. Now we have eight.

 

MC: Yes, because it doesn’t support it anymore. The clams are gone. Part of that is over digging and predators.

 

JA: We can’t keep enough people to keep our committee –

 

MC: Like green crabs. You’ve got to farm stuff. If you plant a garden every year you’ve got to use some kind of fertilizer. You’ve got to replenish the soil. I have chickens, more so I have something from my garden than for the eggs. I love the eggs, the eggs are good. I’m a vegetarian, but I do eat eggs. That’s the only – they’re unfertilized, I don’t keep a rooster, I don’t have to kill anything to eat an egg. So I eat eggs and I have my chickens. I like my chickens. I don’t buy eggs at the store because I don’t like the way they treat chickens. I’m a clam digger and I’m a vegetarian. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does to me.

 

JA: We’re trying to replenish the flats by that lab but I don’t know where we’re going to get with it.

 

JA: A lot of people are interested in what we’re doing, but that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to replenish our flats from all the predators that have eaten the clams all up.

 

MC: But you’ve got to re-do the dirt too.

 

JA: People, if they find clams, they’ll dig it until they’re gone, and that’s a big part of the problem.

 

MC: They’ll dig it until it’s gone or they’ll dig it until the mud doesn’t support life anymore. You can overdo it. It’s like a warzone. When you go through there and turn it and turn it and turn it. You killed so much stuff that it’s scary just eating the clams.

 

JA: You can’t even put baby clams back there because the baby clams won’t grow on it because it’s already dead.

 

[0:50:08]

 

MC: Dead matter creates pathogens. Clams are sucking down pathogens. If you eat a clam and you say, “Oh, I got sick off those clams. Somebody must’ve not taken care of them.”

 

JA: We’re trying, you know.

 

MC: It was next to a dead one for the last two weeks.

 

JA: We shut down at different areas at different times of the season and say, “Leave this for winter digging, it’s easier to get to. This is for summer digging because it’s harder to get to.” Not just that, it makes it so we’re moving around, not constantly digging the same flats. But I don’t think it’s quite enough, I think it should be rotated more.

 

TP: So I’m going to – I think at this point this might be a good time to grab our charts and draw some of these places. I’m interested in where they are.

 

JA: Yes.

 

MC: Oh the clamming areas you mean?

 

TP: Yes, Clamming areas.

 

JA: I wish I could find that paper on – oh it’s right here, our opens and closures are right here.

 

MC: Yes you can – I can get another one of these if you are interested. Have you seen one of those?

 

JA: It’s our ordinance, it tells you what’s open and closed. Actually I have another one right in there that you can have.

 

TP: That’d be great.

 

MC: It has openings and closures.

 

JA: [inaudible]

 

MC: It has the map of what’s open and when it’s open. See this here? Quick reference for when – it closes in April and opens in November. We have different time periods for all our different flats. On this map here, this is Gouldsboro. It’s all numbered and labeled as to what they are. This is Stave Island Bar.

 

[0:51:58]

 

JA: Show him the openings and closures.

 

MC: I’m looking for the Stave Island Bar. Right here, this is it.

 

JA: Oh okay.

 

MC: You see what I mean? All you have to do is go from here to here and you know the opening and closing. This tells you all – where there’s clamming in Gouldsboro this is it. I don’t have to put that on your map. I can give you this and this’ll tell you where the clam flats are.

 

JA: Yes.

 

MC: And when they’re open.

 

JA: Right here, yes.

 

MC: And this will tell you –

 

JA: What’s open and closed.

 

MC: – what’s open and closed. Everywhere else in Gouldsboro doesn’t apply except – well, you see this one here? Gouldsboro Bay, Point Francis, that’s open and closed. This one here, West Bay, that’s all clamming area. See how it’s marked West Bay? That’s open all year around, that’s why it doesn’t have this barrier stuff on it. You can go clamming in here all the time. This is Winter Harbor. Gouldsboro doesn’t control Winter Harbor.  You can go there all year around except that a lot of it’s closed to pollution by the state. You can have this.

 

JA: I gave him one.

 

MC: That basically takes care of –

 

JA: You don’t have to mark your map, you can take your time.

 

MC: You don’t have to mark your map or you can take your time to do it.

 

TP: Alright.

 

JA: And that also gives you a lot of other great information on other stuff too, these ordinances do.

 

MC: Sorry I had to fill your ears with what’s wrong with Gouldsboro. [laughing]

 

TP: That’s alright.

 

JA: The clam committee’s been working very hard on our lab. We’ve been trying so hard to grow those baby clams and keep them clean. We keep them in buckets and tanks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Mike Pinkham’s shore page there on Facebook.

 

[0:54:01]

 

We’ve been trying to keep them nice and clean, keep them healthy so that when they get to the – what was it? DMR?

 

MC: DMR. Department of Marine Resources.

 

JA: In the winter they’re already cleaned and ready to be put in the tank and all they have to do is just feed them and keep them clean for the winter. When we take them back we recount them, see how many made it over the winter, put them back in their buckets, and put them back in the tank.

 

MC: But like I said, I could get that many clams in one flip twenty years ago.

 

JA: Yes but they’re baby clams.

 

MC: Thirty years ago. Baby clams. I’m talking about tiny ones, I could take a flip and see a thousand of them.

 

JA: They were trying  – one of them we had four thousand of them. Then the next one we had fifty because the green crabs got into one and they were all eaten.

 

MC: I literally could take one flip and get two hundred clams. Three hundred little tiny baby clams just like that. They’d go down this far, the biggest ones on the bottom would be just like that. That’s all gone. The bottom line is –

 

JA: But we’re trying. We’re trying things. And that way the clam committee doesn’t have to worry about how we’re going to get money, because with our re-seeding –

 

TP: Hold on a second. If I could get one of you at a time.

 

JA: Sorry.

 

MC: Okay sure.

 

JA: I was trying to tell him about re-seeding.

 

MC: Yes, well, I’m saying that you can’t replenish with re-seeding. I don’t give a shit how much it –

 

JA: Well I don’t care if you don’t think it works, I like the project and I think it’s worth something.

 

MC: I don’t have anything against the project other than if the main objective is to replenish the flats it’s never going to happen.

 

JA: It also saves the clam committee money that we don’t have to buy baby clams either. We’re at least getting to that point where we can grow our own.

 

MC: I didn’t say I didn’t like the lab. The more you know about clams the better. I’d like to know the exact day they breed. You have a litmus test, you put it in the water. If it comes up orange it says, “Oh, they just bred an hour ago. Grab some spawn.” But they don’t do that, they don’t know when clams spawn.

 

[0:55:59]

 

They say, I think it’s somewhere in June. You call yourself a biologist but you can’t – you don’t know what day they spawn on, you don’t know what the time is, you don’t know the hours.

 

JA: Like Heidi said though…

 

MC: They’re not spending enough time on the flats apparently. If you knew what time they spawn, you could work with it.

 

JA: She said it all depends on the weather though. If it’s cold…

 

MC: Yes, I know, I realize that. They might spawn two or three times. They might spawn over a period of days. But you can get it down to a science, especially if you can take a magnifying glass out there and say, “Ah.”

 

JA: I wouldn’t want to have that project out there in the flats for days waiting for them to spawn though. Where does the spat go?

 

MC: Yes I know, nobody wants to stand around and wait for them to spawn.

 

JA: It doesn’t usually stay in the cove when they release the spat.

 

MC: That’s what college students are for. [laughter]

 

TP: That’s our job. The unpaid intern. No yes, I’ve got you.

 

JA: We don’t know where our spat’s going. Some of our spat –

 

MC: I’m only kidding, but you see my point.

 

JA: – Some of our spat gets taken out to deep water and it could end up in Bar Harbor. Our spat doesn’t stay in our coves where it’s laid. We don’t know where it’s going to go, it all depends on where the wind’s blowing.

 

MC: It blows right out to sea, and it’s no good if it settles out in a hundred feet of water.

 

MC: You can’t get clams out of a hundred feet of water, they’re just not there.

 

JA: We don’t know where our spat’s going to go, so we put out boxes to catch spat and do our best.

 

MC: And I say why bother doing that when you can collect it when it’s just spawned and raise it in exactors with bubblers and stuff like that. Then they can filter out into boxes that you put in the exactor or you can scrape them off the bottom of the exactor. You can get a lot more than you’re going to get out of a little box that you stick out on the shore for six months.

 

JA: But if you get one big green crab in there it’ll devastate the – kill a whole exactor.

 

MC: At least you’ve got control.

 

TP: So – sorry.

 

MC: At least you’ve got control of it if it’s in a lab environment.

 

TP: Katie’s got a list of place names and such.

 

MC: What is it?

 

[0:58:00]

 

TP: Place names, places that you’ve mentioned. We’re interested in knowing where exactly they are, because oftentimes –

 

MC: That’s why it’s on that list

 

TP: But I’m thinking of places – like you’ve talked about experiences diving, and such.

 

MC: Okay, well – the diving –

 

JA: Tap where –

 

MC: – that I did –

 

JA: Where he goes clamming?

 

MC: No –

 

TP: Like he mentioned –

 

MC: Urchin diving.

 

TP: – getting lost at sea diving and such. I’m interested in where that kind of thing is, where scallop diving was.

 

MC: Urchin diving is basically off the islands, on the inside sheltered areas of the islands along all the shorelines. Some of it – no, some of it is just too sheltered and the urchins don’t like it. There’s an area where – basically this. In other words, if I wanted to go urchin diving I’d pick the day. It would be on the outside, in here somewhere or along those edges there. Where you’ve got a lot of wind coming in you’re not going to find urchins. A lot of sea coming in, they’re not going to be there. Up in a cove like this, up inside, you’ll find urchins up inside but you won’t find them out here and you won’t find them along there. They’d be inside the cove up there.

 

TP: Up in that cove…

 

MC: That’s deep water, I just happen to know that.

 

TP: Okay. Urchin diving…

 

JA: So you don’t go out –

 

MC: No, no. That’s hundreds of feet of water.

 

JA: I didn’t know you stayed that close to shore.

 

MC: Oh yes, we just hugged the shoreline, you’re in thirty feet of water. You get anywhere off of it – I mean some places you can. Oh god…

 

[1:00:00]

 

No, most of it’s just scallop ground. Anything that goes deep is either scallop ground or dragger country.

 

JA: That’s scallop ground, this right here is scallop ground?

 

MC: Yes I think so. What’s that say, right here?

 

TP: This is – I can’t read that.

 

JA: I can’t either.

 

TP: It’s the end of the Union River.

 

MC: End of the Union River? Yes.

 

TP: So these were urchin spots –

 

MC: Yes, those were urchin spots.

 

TP: – and then this is scallop – kind of things?

 

MC: Well it would be in the deeper water. Can you read – tell me how deep the water is there?

 

JA: In the channel. I think the channel there.

 

TP: Sixty-three, on-ten, sixty-eight, seventy five.

 

MC: Yes, that’s scallop country. Along the shoreline there might be urchins but you can’t take clams there on account of –

 

TP: Is there scalloping up over in here as well, anywhere?

 

MC: A lot of this is scalloping.

 

TP: Scalloping right here in the middle of the bay.

 

MC: All the way into the shallow water. See where it turns blue? That’s shallow water. When it gets out just along the edge of these islands –

 

JA: So more like –

 

MC: – that’s diving scallops, this is dragging scallops.

 

TP: Okay. Two is dragging, three for diving. Then up here –

 

MC: This is either mud flat or – if it’s mudflat it’s clamming, if it’s got deeper water in it, some of it’s urchining.

 

JA: Do you go that far in for clamming? What is that? Is that – Tauntan bay.

 

MC: Tauntan bay is alright clamming. It’s all pulling.

 

JA: Frenchman bay. Skillings river, that’s good clamming.

 

[1:02:00]

 

MC: The blue areas are shallow. If you’re getting into Ellsworth – this would be clamming but it’s polluted, so there’s probably no clamming allowed.

 

JA: But Frenchman Bay is open, and that’s good clamming. That’s where we get most of our clams. Tap Point, Jones’s Cove –

 

KC: Tap Point?

 

JA: Yes, Tap Point.

 

TP: Where’s that?

 

MC & JA: That’s right here.

 

KC: And the name of the cove?

 

MC: That’s Jones’s cove.

 

JA: He goes around – there’s a lobster pound down there so he goes down around the lobster pound. That’s where he mostly goes in the summer. It’s easy access and our friend lives there so he has access to the shore.

 

MC: I also go down around Schoodic Point. There’s places –

 

JA: Show him. Show him where you go.

 

MC: There are places around there. Anywhere around there. Not all of it, but a good part of it. You have to look for the places that are open water with big rocks that have mudflats. If it has mudflats there’s usually clams there.

 

TP: You mentioned access points. Where were your access points?

 

JA: Our access point is right – see that little – that’s our little river that comes out. Our access point is right on the end of it.

 

MC: Right on the end of it. I can keep a boat there. It’s sheltered enough that it’s not going to sink in the rain storm.

 

JA: That’s because our friend lives there and she lets us go there. That’s where he puts his canoe off, or his boat, and that’s where we get most of our clams.

 

MC: But I can’t put it in the water there.

 

JA: Dr. [Loroco?]’s is – I need a bigger map, hold on.

 

MC: I use the town landings for launching a boat, then I go to my spots. I showed you where Jones’s cove was, right?

 

TP: Right.

 

[1:03:59]

 

MC: The landing for launching boats, I have to come all the way from over in here.

 

TP: Over in here?

 

MC: Over in here. See this is – which island is that there? This should be South Gouldsboro. That’s probably South Gouldsboro right there and there’s a landing there. That’s the closest landing to this spot here without going up over this over here.

 

TP: Okay. That’s nine.

 

MC: It’s a real pain in the ass when you’re trying to put a boat in the water. You’ve got to take it a long way and then you’ve got to put it on a hook. You’ve got to have a canoe and a place to land your canoe to bring in your – in other words you have to drop your hook for your big boat, take your clams into where you have an access point to take your clams out of the canoe and anchor off your canoe. It’s a lot of work.

 

JA: Tap Point – if you look at it, he’s got – that’s Tap Point, and that’s where it goes into Jones’s cove right there. This is Hog Island, they dig Hog Island. You dig Hog Island, Right?

 

MC: Once in a while.

 

JA: Yes once in a while. That’s good clamming. It’s getting there, people like to dig it. It’s harder to get to because like I said, you’ve got to take a boat.

 

MC: It’s closed at certain times.

 

JA: Right on the other side of that, right here and here, is a lobster pound.

 

MC: Jones’s is open in part of the summer from  the first of July to around Christmas.

 

JA: He launches his canoe right there and we’ll go to some of the little islands right around in there. What’s that one?

 

TP: That’s Hall Point.

 

JA: I don’t think that’s us.

 

TP: Ash Island?

 

JA: Do you go to Nash Island?

 

MC: What’s that?

 

JA: Ash Island, are you allowed to dig Ash Island? Or is that Sullivan?

 

MC: It’s Sullivan.

 

JA: Treasure Island, that’s all Sullivan. That’s good digging, Treasure Island.

 

MC: Oh that’s beautiful digging, I used to be able to dig all that but now it’s part of the three-town – the five-town –

 

JA: But now it’s part of the Seven-Town now.

 

[1:05:58]

 

I’ve dug everywhere. Lamoine, that’s all good digging. What is the name of that… The Jordan River?

 

MC: Jordan River.

 

JA: Jordan River is awesome. I would still love to go there but I can’t afford to get the license.

 

MC: Can’t go there anymore unless you get it somehow.

 

JA: I can’t afford to get it.

 

MC: In fact I only go in Gouldsboro these days.

 

JA: Definitely West Bay. Did you get West Bay too?

 

TP: West Bay…

 

JA: That’s where he’s been going mostly. Then we have what we call Deep Cove.

 

MC: That’s across the street [inaudible].

 

JA: Deep Cove is right – that’s not a cove –

 

TP: Sand Cove… Newman Cove…

 

JA: It should be right in there. Sand Cove.

 

MC: No, you’ve passed it.

 

JA: Can you show him?

 

TP: Is it a different name, maybe?

 

MC: Deep Cove would be – I need the glasses.

 

JA: It’s easier – a little easier to see there.

 

TP: Is it over here, or is it over here?

 

JA: It’s on the other side of West Bay – below West Bay.

 

MC: Probably right there.

 

JA: Yes, that’s Deep Cove.

 

TP: That’s here.

 

JA: Are you guys getting anything out of [Joey C’s?] right now or are you out of there?

 

MC: It’s pretty much out of there at the end of this month.

 

JA: Okay so we have to be out of [Joey?] bay by the end of this month.

 

MC: That’s all in the chart there. It’ll tell you everything.

 

JA: Are you guys going to be going to Small Cove?

 

MC: It might be, I have to look at it.

 

JA: At what’s going to be open.

 

[1:07:58]

 

TP: Where was the lobster pound?

 

JA: The lobster pound would be – let’s see, Frenchman Bay – right where our access point was. It’s still right near our access point. It’s right around the cove. If you go to Jones’s Cove you’ll know how it is. It’s a big round cove and it has an island right in the middle of it. They’ll either leave from Tap Point or that lobster pound or Barkley Landing – that’s where we like to leave from. If you leave from there and head around the cove it’s right up a little bit around the corner – the lobster pound is just around the corner from the brook – from Jones’s pond brook. Actually it would be – so here’s Jones’s cove – see this little thing? This is what we call the boat house. It’s right in between the boat house and where we have our access point where the brook is.

 

TP: Is this my copy of it?

 

JA: She’s got it. We have several.

 

TP: Right between – this little point is the boat house?

 

JA: Yes, that’s called the boat house. We dig there too, that’s good digging. That’s – [Joe?] before he passed in December – he likes to go from there in the boat house because the guy allows us to walk down across his field and I’ll drop him off. That’s where he was putting his canoe, then he can go quite a few places from there. Then Tap Point, a woman, a friend of ours, [Lilly?], owns it. Her father died, and they always allowed us access down there clamming. She’s really, really good. She opened up to trails and everything and has a place for the public to park. She allows us to go right down past her dad’s old house.

 

[1:10:00]

 

TP: And that was –

 

JA: Tap Point, right here. She’s a really good friend of ours, we’ve become really close with her. And right in between where we launch, [from] either place, this is called Dr. Larocco’s, this right here.

 

MC: We almost got –

 

JA: This right here is called Dr. Larocco’s.

 

MC: She almost said no diggers down there because the ex warden was ripping her off down there and she thought it was clam diggers.

 

JA: And they live down there all summer, Mike and [Jo?] both. Guys love Dr. Larocco’s, that’s where they go clamming. It’s really – considering what it is, we’ve been backed into a corner of where we can go.

 

MC: And the accesses. It’s impossible, to a large extent – you can’t put in just anywhere anymore. It’s basically – there were always more accesses than there are now. I could get in anywhere on West Bay and anywhere in on Frenchman Bay back twenty years ago. Now it’s like pulling teeth to be able to get in the water.

 

JA: And Gouldsboro Bay – are you guys doing anything in Gouldsboro Bay?

 

MC: Gouldsboro Bay is not good for clamming.

 

JA: It’s always closed, I see.

 

TP: Where was it you had mentioned that people were coming out with bags – bushels and bushels and bushels?

 

MC: That was right across the street, West Bay.

 

TP: That’s right up in here?

 

JA: Where are we…

 

MC: Right across the street, yes.

 

JA: That’s us.

 

MC: That was really prolific back in the day. It ain’t anymore. The mud died, and clams up higher and such in hard clay that they’re hard to dig. You really can’t find much anyway.

 

JA: Right here. It would be right here.

 

[1:11:58]

 

Literally. We park at the end of that road, I drop him off, he walks right down to the shore and I come home. This is it, Alexander Drive right there.

 

MC: But it isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. I’ve got a few spots down there that come back and after they’re gone for the season I leave it alone.

 

JA: They don’t want it – that’s one of the places where we’re trying to re-seed and put our baby clams, so we don’t want to dig it out too much.

 

MC: There are other places that they’ve been re-seeding.

 

JA: Before we started growing them we’d plant our baby clams and then we’d close down that area. That’s why we moved. Then we’d move to a different spot and close that down and let the baby clams grow. We were having to go out and physically dig our baby clams to go re-seed and put another spot. We’d have to close it down for six months because we’d take them from a polluted area and put them somewhere they would grow and wasn’t polluted. Then we have to wait the six months, so we’ll shut it down when we do so and move on to someplace else for digging. That’s what we’ve been doing down to Birch Harbor – and down to Prospect Harbor too, we’ve been seeding down to Prospect Harbor and taking them out of a polluted cove and moving them around to the next cove. Then we shut it down for six months. I do believe that that’s still closed. They gave us a trial run for ten days, the state did, and I don’t –

 

MC: It’s still closed, they never really opened it.

 

JA: It’s still iffy on when they want to open it because they still have some places that have septic systems that are making it so the coliform count is borderline. It did open for a few days, so they let us go for ten days. They are planning on still working on it to try and get us in there. Prospect Harbor is a really big area for us. We’ve been working so hard trying to re-seed with baby clams that we still haven’t yet gotten there to dig them.

 

[1:13:59]

 

We’re really – behind the library down at Prospect Harbor, behind the library – that’s where we’re putting some of the baby clams. I was excited to watch them grow and let them do good, then hopefully replenish the area so we could have another place to go clamming. We haven’t gotten to that point yet.

 

TP: You mentioned a clam lab – or a lab where the babies were –

 

JA: That’s in Birch Harbor.

 

TP: That’s in Birch Harbor?

 

JA: Let me go find my phone, I can tell you the exact name of the cove and find it for you.

 

MC: She’s right into the lab. Like I said, I don’t think it’s ever going to do much, but it’s nice to have a lab to learn something about clams. Years ago there were so many clams that it overwhelmed, and you can’t do that out of a lab that I can see.

 

JA: Well we’re trying, it’s something. It’s better than not doing anything and watching them die off, and just keep taking and taking and taking – killed off and killed off and not doing anything.

 

MC: I’d like to see a moratorium.

 

JA: If you don’t experiment you’re not going to get anywhere.

 

MC: I’d like to see a moratorium on clams, that’s the only thing that’s really going to save them, if they close the flats for five to ten years and let them replenish. You can’t go digging every year when there’s just not enough there to do it. Then they’ll finally kill them off so you can’t get anything to make a living off of.

 

JA: Let’s see – this is us right here. It’s through Bill – what’s Bill’s last name?

 

MC: Bill – ah, I don’t know.

 

JA: Isn’t he a biologist?

 

MC: He’s a schoolteacher.

 

JA: A schoolteacher, okay. Gouldsboro shore – this is our Gouldsboro shore project right here. This is all about our lab and what’s going on with our area. I could actually send this to you and – I’ll go on our Facebook page.

 

TP: Yes, that would be great.

 

[1:16:02]

 

Where is the lab? Is it in Bar Harbor?

 

JA: It’s in Birch Harbor. That’s what I’m trying to find. Hold on, let me get on Facebook.

 

MC: Talk to Mike Pinkham, he’s the head of the business. He’s got the key I think.

 

JA: I got it. Gouldsboro Shore Project.

 

JA: [inaudible] get to email because I can’t remember the name of the –

 

MC: I talk kind of loud sometimes because my hearing is – I’ve got to talk louder in order to hear myself talk. It can be kind of a pain, but I can’t – If I wear hearing aids it makes my ears itch. Who wants to have itchy ears constantly?

 

JA: See this is us picking them over, that’s my arm and that’s Mike’s arm right there, see our baby clams. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that cool? Look at all the baby clams that we grew from spat. If we could get the green crabs to stop eating them – but we have videos too.

 

[1:18:02]

 

Mike’s done interviews and stuff. Let’s see if we can find the name of the cove here. This is all about our clam lab right here. I’m seeing it. Well…

 

TP: Dang.

 

JA: I’ve still got more here.

 

TP: Did we get – are there places that we missed on your sheet?

 

MC: They just opened a place in Sullivan a couple years ago. It was closed for thirty years, maybe more – at least that. They call it the Gunk. It’s the river system that comes out of – it’s in Sullivan. Originally it was so shallow because the tides didn’t come in far enough that the clams never got bigger than that [shows two inches with his fingers]. Now that the tides are bigger – in other words there’s more water in the ocean and the tides come in further – the clams have proliferated. It’s unbelievable, they were bringing bushels out like they used to around here. Seven bushels was nothing, and that’s just recently within the last few years. That’s how [big] the difference is in clamming.

 

[1:19:57]

 

In other words, with the changing tides, you get different areas that become good. In the old places the water’s so high that the clams don’t grow there anymore except way up high. Things have changed so much just from global warming. If the tides keep getting higher and higher we’re going to lose all our clam flats. It’s going to be up in the tree line. In a hundred years this place where we are right now might be underwater if they don’t do something about it. That’s going to leave a lot of the infrastructure underwater, tons of pollution underwater, and whoever’s living there – your children and anybody who comes along after us – is going to be really in a bad spot. Global warming is probably the biggest issue that Downeast Maine is going to be suffering [from].

 

JA: This is a video of when we were working at the lab and they recorded it for NPB news. This probably will tell us the name of the cove. I hope you want to watch it real quick. This tells all about our project.

 

No items found.

 

This is our cove, that’s our lab. Mike Pinkham talking. Yep, we do that [re-seeding] too. That’s us, all eight of us. That’s Bill, he’s a school teacher – a biologist.

 

[1:22:00]

 

Sara. She teaches from there.

 

TP: Okay actually, sorry – is this something you could send to me and I could take a look at it another time?

 

JA: Sure. I was trying to get the name of the cove, because I’m sure they probably say it in there, but it’s in Birch Harbor.

 

TP: Right, yes. I can look through it and if I can find it I’ll be able to use it. I want to check, you mentioned a spot in Sorrento – Sullivan. Is that a specific spot or is that just right in town.

 

MC: That place is – where’s the Gunk exactly? Can you pull that on a map? Janeeka, could you pull the Gunk on the little chart –

 

JA: What’s that?

 

MC: Could you pull the Gunk – you know, where they’re digging all the clams? Over in Sullivan.

 

JA: Actually we can show him on here, [it will be] easier. The Gunk is way up at the head of the bay, it’s way in deep. Franklin?

 

MC: Yes.

 

JA: Franklin. So we’re in Franklin.

 

TP: Like here?

 

MC: That’s where all the clams have been coming out lately.

 

JA: Let me see the glasses. The glasses, Mike.

 

MC: What’s that?

 

JA: The glasses. The Gunk is where they’ve been taking –

 

TP: Gonk?

 

JA: Yes, I believe. Is that the Gonk?

 

MC: It goes from Sullivan up through –

 

JA: Franklin. Yes. No, this is –

 

MC: It used to be so shallow that the clams didn’t grow over there.

 

[1:24:01]

 

JA: Oh, actually – I think it might be in –

 

TP: Up in here? Dang. [laughter]

 

JA: No wonder I can’t find it.

 

MC: Did you find it?

 

JA: It’s under another chart.

 

TP: It’s under another chart – there-ish.

 

JA: I’ll find my right map here. [inaudible] It’ll take me a minute because I’ve got to look up the number at the top of the page. [inaudible] …is that right?

 

MC: Let me see.

 

JA: Skillings river okay.

 

MC: …all that.

 

TP: Sorry?

 

KC: Do we have Stave Island Bar?

 

MC: That’s what – the global warming made that good.

 

JA: Hog Bay.

 

MC: Global warming made that good.

 

JA: Right here, Hog Bay. That’s also called – Hog Bay is also the Gunk, right?

 

MC: That’s part of it, yes.

 

JA: That’s part of it.

 

TP: Okay.

 

JA: Right here, this whole – the Skillings River.

 

TP: There’s Franklin – gotcha.

 

MC: All this, all that, and all up in here. It all became really, really good when global warming made the tides higher. In fact that’s where the best clamming is now. If you have access to that you’re making money.

 

TP: Gotcha. And is this here the bar? You mentioned a bar.

 

[1:26:03]

 

JA: Yes, the bar. Stave Island, that’s the bar, that’s exactly the bar. We’ve now shut it down because we want to try and grow some baby clams there. It’s almost dead, they dug it right to nothing.

 

MC: Twenty years ago it was beautiful, now it’s nothing.

 

JA: So we closed it and we’re going to try and put some baby clams there.

 

MC: They dug it to death, “Oh, can’t kill Stave Island, can’t kill the bar.” That’s what you’d hear at every meeting. They left it open and they killed it. I don’t even like being on committee anymore down there. I’m on it, I go down there, but I never get what I want. There’s no such thing as real conservation, it’s all, “What can we do to make it look good for the state?” sometimes. I get discouraged when it comes to real conservation. But there are no clam diggers anymore, so the conservation has taken hold now anyway.

 

JA: You’re a big asset to our – you help an awful lot. Without you we wouldn’t be able to do it. He helps set nets, he helps do everything. Anything I ask him to do that Mike Pinkham needs us to do, whether it’s go down and fix a net or help down at the lab Mike’s [Cronin] always right with us. He’s a really big help, and without him – it’s only eight of us, and I’m little. I can’t get up [in] that deep mud, and they have to go out deep. We try to put them out in deeper mud because the purpose of the nets – we put our bigger clams under them to protect our baby clams. He takes me to – where do we go, Deep Cove? Across from John’s, what’s that name of that cove across from John’s?

 

MC: Across from John’s –

 

JA: Yes, where we have our nets right now.

 

MC: John’s over in South Gouldsboro?

 

JA: John down the road in [Carry?].

 

MC: Oh, that’s the [Mash? – Maa-sh?].

 

JA: The [Mash? – Maa-sh] – so we have

 

MC: The [Mash? – Mah-sh]. Depends on how we come.

 

[1:28:02]

 

MC: It’s a [Maa-sh] around here, the [Mah-sh] in Massachusetts.

 

JA: We have our sleds –

 

JA: – and we put our nets and our stakes in there. We have a couple of bags of baby clams and we’ll go along the shore and take them out to where Mike [Pinkham] thinks that he wants them to grow. He’ll scatter them out and then we start working on putting the net over them and stake them in, and hope to heck that they make it and don’t get eaten by the green crabs.

 

MC: I don’t doubt that we do have success growing a small amount in a certain area, and hopefully people stay out of it so it will repopulate the area, but clam diggers being what they are, if they see clams they’ll go in there and dig it up. It feels like it’s a waste of time sometimes. You’ve got to have a lot of clams in one spot to have a successful spawn, and then you’ve got to make sure that they don’t all wash out to sea. We have a big problem in front of us if we want to get our flats back without just closing the flats for the next ten to twenty years. And if you have to do that, it isn’t always successful. They’ve closed places for ten to twenty years and stuff, but they haven’t closed the right spots. They never want to close the spots where they’re making money. They want to close spots that you could dig some out of there but there’s no spawn there. It’s a rocky shoreline and it took them a hundred years to get there to begin with, and once you dig them out they’re gone. A real flat that replenishes every year – they haven’t done any real –

 

JA: It used to be that we could move from spot to spot and our clams would grow. We can’t do that anymore. We dig a spot and go back and that spot’s even still dead.

 

[1:29:58]

 

MC: I know, because there’s not enough spat around to replenish a spot anymore. Like I said, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, there was so much spat – there were so many clams breeding that they always replenished, but there aren’t enough clams around now to get a successful spawn to replenish the whole area.

 

TP: Where were they closing spots?

 

MC: Where did they close spots –

 

JA: It’s right on the first page of the ordinance there.

 

MC: Yes, they close – well, this is what they call closing. [paper rustles] If you look at it, they close it for six months out of the year and then they open it.

 

TP: Ah, okay.

 

MC: They have had times when they closed a spot for two or three years. I don’t know if they have any permanently closed ones anymore.

 

JA: These spots right here are closed-closed, we’re no longer allowed to dig them. That’s what we’re trying to re-seed.

 

TP: Gotcha.

 

MC: What are you talking about?

 

JA: These ones here are closed-closed.

 

MC: No, they’re closed in order – look on the other side here, they tell you when they open and shut.

 

JA: I didn’t know that. I thought these were closed-closed when I just read them.

 

MC: [inaudible] …flats that we have.

 

JA: So you’ve got to read –

 

MC: Right, when they open and when they shut.

 

JA: But you do have some that are closed-closed, we’re just not even allowed to touch, because the bar –

 

MC: But not for conservation though.

 

JA: They’re either dead or polluted. They want us to stay right out of there. A lot of – some people try to get in there and sneak in there, but that’s not a good idea because you don’t know if you’re taking polluted clams or not. Right now we’ve got –

 

MC: That’s what happened to that place I was telling you about in Sullivan. They closed for twenty years because It was so polluted that no one could go up there and dig, legally.

 

[1:31:58]

 

The clams when they finally did open it – they told people they had to fix their septic systems, they got it all fixed up. It took five years more just to get it clear and clean enough to dig it and open it, and now they’re – it’s going like it used to be – seven or eight bushels a tide. But that isn’t going to last forever, they’re going to dig it out and that’s going to be that.

 

TP: Huh – alright.

 

MC: That’s one of the few places that was resupplying Gouldsboro, like around Stave Island and stuff. That was where our spat was coming from. Now that they’re digging the piss out of it I don’t even see Stave Island coming back anymore. That was doing pretty much all of Frenchman Bay, that was a really good spawning [spot].

 

JA: According to that paper he had Stave Island open a certain time of the year, but then he completely closed the bar. Or we completely closed the bar.

 

MC: Yes, because there’s nothing there anyway.

 

JA: But you can still dig Stave Island at a certain time of year.

 

MC: Yes, I know that. There’s nothing. They just finished digging out Stave Island. Stave Island isn’t worth rowing out there anymore. It was great –

 

JA: It’s dangerous and no one wants to take the risk for just a very few clams.

 

MC: For a few clams, yes. And there’s less and less clam diggers all the time, [laughs] because who can make a living doing that.

 

JA: It’s hard to get a license here. We have to have five hours of flats time – no, seven hours of flats time, conservation – and five hours of meeting time.

 

MC: We only have five meetings a year.

 

JA: Yes, so you have to go to literally every meeting.

 

MC: You have to go to every meeting and you have to do every conservation, otherwise you aren’t getting a license. Which makes it hard – if you’re an out-of-towner and you want to come here and get a license, you have to know all that in advance and do it in advance in order to get a license.

 

[1:33:56]

 

JA: You can get a peck license, but that’s not commercial.

 

MC: And most clam diggers say, “I ain’t going through all that.” It actually – it makes conservation [inaudible].

 

JA: They put their money into the Seven-Town, because they can go up there and pay more for the license, yes, but they have more spots to dig and they can make more money to compensate [for] paying the [license]. I think it’s, what? $1,600? No, what was it? $1,600, yes.

 

MC: It’s quite high.

 

JA: They could make that in just a few tides. Once they save that money they can dig anywhere in the Seven-Town which is Franklin –

 

MC: I suggested that Gouldsboro join the Seven-Town, but they said no.

 

JA:  – Franklin, Sorrento, Trenton, Ellsworth – where are they all, Mike? You know them better than I do.

 

MC: Sorrento –

 

JA: Lamoine.

 

MC: Lamoine, yes. Sullivan.

 

JA: Sullivan is part of the Seven-Town. I almost think that we’re going to end up becoming part of the Seven-Town, which is going to really hurt me. I’d be done. There’s no way I could go from a $150 dollar license to a $1,600 dollar license, I’d be out. My days might be numbered as far as clamming goes. Mike can get a discount. He’s a veteran and he’s over the age that they let him have it for three-hundred something, so he can go dig the Seven-Town, which is probably what’s going to end up happening.

 

MC: Clams are getting so scarce in Gouldsboro.

 

JA: If we become part of the Seven-Town it would be awesome for him in a way because he’d still have Gouldsboro and his local area  to dig if he wanted to, during the winter he wouldn’t have to go quite so far, but yet he’d still have the option of digging at the Seven-Towns where he could go lots of different places. Lamoine is loaded in clams and that’s one of the best clamming pots in Downeast.

 

MC: I used to dig all that area years ago before they went to –

 

JA: We did too, it wasn’t all ordinanced.

 

MC: – before they got all these ordinances.

 

JA: None, none. It was open to the state.

 

[1:35:56]

 

JA: There weren’t any ordinances there at all, so as long as you had your state license for 133 dollars you could go everywhere in Lamoine. The majority of my income – that’s when I almost got completely done clamming because they backed me into little towns. I couldn’t go to Jordan River anymore, which is where I lived. When it comes to that, what do you do? I’ve almost given up, but I still try to hold on to my license in case I have to have it. If you’ve got to survive you’ve got to survive, but most of the time it’s just him clamming now. I’ll go get a [packing?] and we’ll sell them at home – make a little bit of extra money more than what we’d sell at the shop.

 

MC: And you can’t cheat the system anymore. There was a time when you could go dig anywhere you want and if the warden caught you, well you got a ticket. Nowadays everybody’s got a cell phone, says, “Oh, so-and-so is digging about a hundred feet from where I am, and he’s not got a license,” blah-blah-blah. [laughs]

 

JA: And if you can’t pay your fine, and it’s a big one, then – or if you get caught again – sometimes they can even take your driver’s license over it if you can’t pay your fines. So you’re jeopardizing – and you can’t even get a license if you owe child support, [a license] of any kind here in Maine. It’s really hard to even maintain our licenses, let alone find a spot to get them. I don’t know what’s going to become of Gouldsboro. I kind of hope they stay separately because it would make it so I can still go clamming and not have to worry about the only place I have left to go. I dug in Milbridge for twenty-one years. I dug there and I saw the clamming just depreciating. It got worse and worse, like [Little’s?] island is almost completely dead now, whereas five years ago you could get three bushels out of there. Now I got pretty well set up, [I said,] “Can’t handle this anymore,” I really wanted a Gouldsboro license because they do have better clamming than Milbridge. I came here and I did everything I needed to do to get my license and now it’s getting harder and harder because we’re losing shore access. I kind of hope that they don’t because I would never be able to afford the license so that would really kick me out of it completely.

 

[1:38:06]

 

It’s really hard for the little guy to maintain the license here, or even get one.

 

TP: Yes.

 

JA: You have to live someplace for so many months before they’ll even give you one, for one. I was doing my conservation while I was waiting. I got my meeting time and my conservation while I was waiting for my residency. You have to wait three months even just for residency. For those three months I had to either go to Milbridge, which he can’t dig in, or just not dig at all.

 

MC: And if you don’t like that, try to get a lobster license. You’ll never – [laughter good luck with that.

 

JA: Or a [inaudible]. Bloodworm license is usually what the diggers switch to here, it’s only forty-three dollars.

 

MC: Bloodworms is probably the easiest license to get, and the easiest to go somewhere and find something because it’s so – [the] state’s wide open, where clamming is not.

 

JA: But now blood worming is getting so that it’s really going away too. You can’t find the good worms anymore that they want, that they’ll pay good money for. They don’t want [squigs?], so that’s a bracket all of its own. Then the spawning season of course, that’s a nightmare because they get [‘sopped’?] and don’t want them.

 

MC: You’ve got to go all year round. If you don’t go all year round it’s hard to get a buyer.

 

JA: If you don’t keep your buyer going you end up losing –

 

MC: He’s going to be picking other people to be buying off of.

 

TP: Okay – I’m going to – I think I need to turn this off, because we need to start heading back so I can start processing this. Are there any last notes either of you want to –

 

JA: Well, I didn’t really get to say a whole lot about the lab, but I’m hoping it works. We’ve worked really hard on it. We’ve had a lot of trials and errors – pumps failing on us, a lot of plugs, and mussels will grow in our pipes and stuff.

 

[1:40:08]

 

We’ve had a lot of challenges. We had to take it apart and clean it. We tried to eliminate that by putting in screens and stuff, but I really hope it works. I hope that we have something that we can work towards so we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to come up with money. Our licenses are only 150 dollars, and that’s not enough to support buying baby clams from the market. I’m really hoping that it works. When we only have eight diggers, that’s not enough to buy baby clams anymore. I hope that they grow and do good so that we have something to put back on our flats. It’s a really big issue, because if you just keep taking and taking and taking, you know as well as I do that there won’t be any more clams. They’ll be gone.

 

TP: Maybe – we might be able to have somebody come out again and do another at some point.

 

JA: I’ll definitely share that shore project with you too and you guys can look up a lot of information about it. We worked really hard on this project to re-seed our flats, and conservation is a big part of it. You don’;t want to put the work back into it and just take and take and take, it would be the end of it anyway. It’s pretty exciting to see that somebody is even – Mike Pinkham is amazing that way, because we never really had anybody to back us up on that part of it. The license may be harder to get, and that scared away a lot of the clam diggers, but at this point the flats need to be healed. They need to be left alone for a while. Less diggers – they’re growing. They’re out there growing. We’re putting in just as many as we can on top of that. Hopefully we’ll get our clams to come back, slowly but surely.

 

TP: Fingers crossed.

 

MC: I came up here in 1980. I bought fifty-six acres for 15,000 [dollars]. This is what I put on it for a home.

 

[1:41:58}

 

I didn’t want to subdivide it, I didn’t want neighbors. I like it that way, it’ll be that way until I die. The place next door is up for sale, they’re probably going to put a sub-division all the way through to the shore. I don’t have a real problem with that except I’m going to have a lot more neighbors than I ever wanted. I can’t afford to buy it, so it’s going to be like that. That’s how it is. As this place crowds up, it’s going to become a real zoo up here. They don’t have the water capability – in other words, we had a drought there a few years ago. My well went almost dry. I had to really ration my water. I couldn’t water my garden. It got to the point where I’m praying for rain, you know – [imitates rain dance song] – you know.

 

JA: They moved everything – at the bottom of the hill they moved in a [inaudible] park.

 

MC: This area can’t support a large population with water. We don’t have the water sources here, we don’t have the reservoirs, but they’re moving up and they’re building and they’re digging into the ground. The underwater reservoirs are going to go, and when they do –

 

JA: The bottom of the hill. They just put in an RV park. The first year they only had about fifty campers there.

 

MC: They put in a commercial water system. They all come up here and fill their tanks.

 

JA: That’s also causing more pollution, I still believe it. I’m worried about West Bay being closed down because of it. You can’t have people without having pollution.

 

MC: I’m worried about the water supply in the ground. There’s only so much of an aquifer under here. If you pull too much water out it’s going to go salt, and when it goes salt I don’t know what they’ll do. You can still bathe, but you can’t use it for cooking spaghetti. I don’t know what’s going to become of it. People come up, they’re going to come up, they’re going to buy, they’re going to make houses.

 

[1:43:57]

 

The more sections that they put up that are left alone the better off this place is going to be.

 

JA: There’s an example right there. They put the RV park there and Mike lost his only road where he could park. You could see it, West Bay – right at the bottom of the hill there – West Bay was called something like Rainbow’s End and now it’s called West Bay Campground. It just goes to show that’s how we lose it. They came in there, put a campground there. RV parks are allowed there but we’re not.

 

MC: They put in an industrial well, and it was really affecting the water supply around here until we started getting rainy weather.

 

JA: They locked us out of there.

 

MC: If we get another drought we’ll probably go dry, or I’ll have to put in an industrial well of my own.

 

JA: We have to get permission, and they leave in the winter. How are we going to get permission? They have a gate up. When you ride by you can see, the gate’s huge. You can’t go down in there. You can’t even ask for permission.

 

MC: My well already goes down 200 feet, and that’s as deep as you can probably go without going with an industrial well.

 

JA: They want us to let them know every time they go down there. How are we going to do that? It’s impossible, they’re not even here in the winter. Mike’s going to have to go down and ask them at six o’clock in the morning, “knock-knock-knock – can I go clamming?” She said with permission only.

 

MC: It’s either that or launch a boat.

 

JA: That’s why now I have to get up at four o’clock in the morning and take him and drop him off across the road.

 

MC: If I could walk across the property I can go, but she has to get up and drop me off at [oh-dark-thirty].

 

JA: He could just drive down there a couple years ago.

 

TP: Okay, I need to pause it so that we can –

 

[1:45:38]