Year: 2025

Island Journal

Ask an Aquaculturist: Growing shellfish was a ‘trial by fire’

Stonington native Abby Barrows owns and operates the Deer Isle Oyster Company, a small-scale aquaculture farm where she raises oysters, sugar kelp, and—experimentally for now—dulse and scallops. While she was born and raised on Deer Isle, Barrows' journey—fueled by a restless, wandering spirit—has been anything but short, straight, and narrow.… SEE MORE

Island Journal

This War-Torn Headland is now a College Town

PHOTOS BY JACK SULLIVAN As Hitler’s troops stormed west across Europe and east into the Soviet Union, men gathered in a coastal Maine village to plan a part of the U.S. response to this growing world war. That meeting, on Oct. 9, 1941 in the Pentagöet Inn, took place in… SEE MORE

Island Journal

When Foreign Fishing Vessels Harvested the Gulf of Maine

When Cape Porpoise gillnetters returned to the sea to haul their gear up during the week of August 11, 1974, all they found were a few shreds of their nets and some end-markers. They were fishing on Jefferies Ledge, 30 miles off southern Maine and New Hampshire. That week, 42… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Nurturing Native Knowledge

Like most kids growing up on the Penobscot Reservation at Indian Island, just north of Bangor, Donna Loring traveled across the river to Old Town to attend high school. She didn’t like it. In those days, the Old Town High School mascot was an Indian. “I would be made fun of and discriminated against,” recalls Loring, now a Penobscot Elder.  She eventually secured a scholarship to the now-closed Glen Cove Christian Academy in Rockport. In neither school did her education include one word about the Wabanaki—the People of the Dawn—who have lived for more than 12,000 years in what is today called Maine.   SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Strange World of Jellyfish

Around dusk one summer evening more than 60 years ago, I was looking over the stern of an anchored lobster boat into flat calm water off Old Orchard Beach. I could just make out the sandy bottom, where I was hoping to spot crabs. There was barely a swell, I remember. I was waiting on the boat for my father to return in his seaplane, which he used to spot herring for the sardine seiners. He often left me on boats for hours at a time while he flew off peering into Casco Bay island coves, and I was left to the boyhood devices of my imagination to pass the time. I don’t know what we were doing as far south as York County that evening. But just below the surface, translucent white moons about a foot in diameter began to appear. First one, then two, then I saw there was a whole smack of them floating at different depths. SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Last Fish House on Otter Creek

On a warm July afternoon, Steve Smith sat outside a fish house in Otter Creek on Mount Desert Island, telling stories. There was the time it was “Blowin’ like a bastard from the north,” and his skiff capsized. A pair of park visitors heard Smith calling for help, hopped in a nearby rowboat and rescued him. While Smith regaled me with this tale, a large gull landed gracelessly on a nearby piling, evidence that there was once a functioning dock here, now buried by debris from the 2024 winter storms. SEE MORE