Working Waterfront

Children’s guide book offers fresh vision of Acadia

Ten Days in Acadia: A Kids’ Hiking Guide to Mount Desert Island By Hope Rowan/Art by Jada Fitch Published by Islandport Press, 2017 Twelve-year-old Hattie and her family take a 10-day vacation to Acadia National Park, where they enjoy hiking the trails, eating lunch on the mountaintops, swimming in the… SEE MORE

The upper tidal reaches of the Medomak River have been cleaned.

Working Waterfront

Estuary Beat: Cleaning the Medomak, a beach conference, and fish passage in the Bagaduce

Beaches Conference to address access, erosion The 2017 Beaches Conference takes place July 14 at Wells High School. In addition to a new location, the biennial event has expanded to include coastal New Hampshire. The program for the day is packed full of presentations, workshops, field trips, demonstrations, and exhibits,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Harpswell facility critical to saving seal pups, other marine mammals

Ever since she was a young girl, Lynda Doughty has wanted to work with stranded marine mammals. Today, Doughty is executive director of Marine Mammals of Maine, a federally authorized marine mammal response organization that responds when seals, dolphins, porpoises, and whales are stranded or injured on the coast from Rockland south to… SEE MORE

Yellow ribbons mark trees that would be removed from a stretch of U.S. Route 1 north of Camden village slated for work by the Department of Transportation

Working Waterfront

DOT’s planned Route 1 upgrade raises aesthetic, safety conflicts

It is a familiar dilemma across the country—making roadways safer vs. protecting an area’s aesthetics, which residents are particularly vigilant about in scenic, coastal Maine. The Department of Transportation is planning a $7.5 million rebuild and widening of 1.5 miles of Route 1 from Camden Hills State Park north to… SEE MORE

An especially high tide in Wells a few years back shows the Maine coast's vulnerability to rising sea levels.

Working Waterfront

Climate decisions reflect who we are as nation

Our government’s decisions project a story to the world about who we are as people. When we step off a plane in another country, we encounter these stories, as the people we meet repeat them back to us. We find that we are asked to personally represent and explain the United States,… SEE MORE

A lobster boat in an early 20th century image.

Working Waterfront

Just the stats—Lobster by the numbers

The American lobster is the single most valuable species of fish landed in the United States. Over 80 percent of the catch comes from Maine (source: NOAA fisheries reports from 2014 and 2015). Thirty percent of all commercial fishing trips on the East Coast are taken by Maine fishermen—469,000… SEE MORE

A turn-of-the-20th-century photograph of a lobster boat.

Working Waterfront

Lobster worries: Record harvests, but fewer juveniles

Despite an abundance of egg-bearing adult lobsters and record-breaking harvests, the number of young lobsters continues to fall in the Gulf of Maine. That’s the 2016 update from the American Lobster Settlement Index, an international monitoring program founded in 1989 by University of Maine marine scientist Rick Wahle. The settlement… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Islands of the South Atlantic tell stories of people, nature

By Dwight Gertz Strung between Antarctica and the Equator, a thin chain of islands in the South Atlantic Ocean lies almost abandoned by commerce. Once valued for whaling or as stopping points on the way to the capes at the tip of Africa and South America, these islands exist mostly… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The fall and rise of the Great Lakes is a cautionary tale

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan; W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2017; 280 pages, hardcover, $27.95. The federal budget that President Trump proposed to Congress in March of this year reduces funding for practically everything in it except the military. And among federal departments,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Signs of spring in our rivers and bays

By Susie Arnold, Ph. D. and Heather Deese, Ph. D. As the warmth finally starts seeping into our bones, the grass greens up and flowers bloom, other signs of spring emerge in our harbors and rivers: the migratory and river-run fish. As anglers dig out rods, reels, lures, and flies—or… SEE MORE