One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, NO FISH!

The fisherman in Port Clyde, Maine, like most others who operate on the state’s rapidly shrinking working waterfront, do not own the docks they work on. Throughout Maine, fishermen, ferry operators, boat builders and parts suppliers worry that these waterfront workplaces could be sold to the highest bidder in a real estate market with a hot demand for waterfront property. “It’s a crisis in slow motion,” said Jim Connors of the state’s Working Waterfront Access Pilot Program, which awarded its first grants this year. “The access is not being lost all at once. It’s happening incrementally. If you look over the past 20 years at what used to be wharf, it’s now houses. You get a sense over time that it’s intensifying.” Only about 175 miles of Maine’s deceptively long coastline — 5,300 miles, due to the thousands of inlets, coves and islands — provide the shelter and deep water access that a working waterfront requires. Currently only about 20 of those miles are operational waterfront, down from 25 a decade ago.
During the War of 1812, fisherman in Maine and the Northeast were opposed to the war because of the bar on trade between the USA and Britain. By not being able to export their goods, regardless of losing a ship or two, they thought they would lose mass amounts of money and therefore, were opposed to the war.