Commercial alewife fishing may return to this Maine town

PENOBSCOT — Bailey Bowden, chair of Penobscot’s alewife committee, just received news he’s been hoping to hear for a decade.
On Oct. 23, the quasi-governmental Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) approved the management plan for shad and river herring, including alewives, submitted by the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). That state plan includes a proposal to reopen Penobscot’s commercial fishery at Wight’s Pond.
“It’s been over 10 years,” Bowden said of the permitting process. It’s been decades more — since 1974, to be exact — since Penobscot’s last commercial harvest of alewives, Bowden said.
In recent years, volunteers on the town’s alewife committee painstakingly counted alewives each spring as they entered the fresh waters of the pond via Winslow Stream from the salt water of Northern Bay.
“We submitted a 10-year data set,” Bowden noted. The volunteers established that the number of alewives entering Wight’s Pond exceeded 235 fish per surface acre of the pond. Furthermore, analysis of scale samples from the batches of 100 fish retrieved by the Alewife Committee during each annual run established that the pond’s alewife population had a healthy age range and sufficient sexual diversity. This data, provided to DMR and ASMFC, led to preliminary approval of a commercial fishery at the pond.
Next up: town vote
There is still a process under state law before commercial harvesting can occur during next year’s spring alewife migration and spawning.
“We have to get approval at the annual town meeting,” Bowden said. “The town must decide if it wants to exercise an exclusive right to harvest alewives from Jan. 1, 2025 to Dec. 31, 2025.”
Bowden added that Penobscot citizens must also determine if they want the alewife committee to oversee harvests. He said the town could also vote to postpone a harvest but retain its right to manage the fishery.
If town approval is granted, a harvest plan developed by the alewife committee will be submitted to the Maine DMR for approval. The plan will include details such as fishing methods and scheduled dates for harvest.
A contract to harvest alewives
Once a harvest plan is approved, Bowden explained that Penobscot will negotiate a contract for commercial fishing of alewives.
“I will be signing a contract to be the harvester,” he said, but the details of the contract have yet to be developed. Bowden ran a pilot program for Penobscot, begun in 2020, that limited a harvest to 15 percent of the running average of fish entering the pond, with all sales proceeds going to the town.
Bowden’s fishing technique is simple: he scoops up the small herring with a large dip net as they swim under the foot bridge that traverses Winslow Stream as it enters Wight’s Pond. He said alewife runs are sporadic and unpredictable.
“They may run for two weeks, or they may run six weeks. You may see a few dozen fish one day and 12,000 the next,” he said.
Bowden also explained that regulations will limit fish harvesting to just four days each week in order to help preserve the population density of 235 fish per acre of pond surface.
“I’d like to allow a certain number of alewives to enter the pond during the harvest period before starting to fish,” Bowden said. “I don’t want to go too heavy, too fast, and deplete the fishery.”
Bowden hopes to have a contract that calls for Penobscot to receive a percentage of the sale of each bushel of harvested alewives. He plans to sell the alewives as bait to lobstermen.
“The town should realize a few thousand dollars from the contract each year,” he said.
There are four other locations in Maine that have been deemed eligible to start river herring harvests: Sewall Pond in Arrowsic, Chemo Pond in Bradley, Pushaw Lake in Glenburn, and Pennamaquan Lake in Pembroke.
This story  appears through a media partnership with the Penobscot Bay Press.