Swan's Island students on the deck of the State of Maine with their boat

Working Waterfront

Swan’s Island students drift from Maine to Europe

The advantages of attending a small, island school are many. But often, educators must work to combat the insularity and isolation of those schools. For the Swan’s Island School, a ticket off the island to the larger world came through Educational Passages, a long-established program that helps students learn about… 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

Working Waterfront

Memoir is a rumination on doing good work

A Winter Apprentice, by John Holt Willey; Polar Bear & Co., Solon, Maine, 2016; 280 pages, trade paperback, $14.95. In the summer of 1977 John Willey returned home to Maine with his wife, Barbara, who had never been that far east. His last permanent address had been San Francisco, where… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Below decks with a schooner chef

You can hear the laughter before you board the schooner, and the mouth-watering scents of bacon sizzling in butter and right-from-the-oven blueberry muffins nearly make you dizzy as you descend into chef Anna Miller’s domain—the galley of the schooner Ladona (pronounced la-doe-na). The five-foot-tall Miller is all action: stirring butter… 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

The Schooner Adventure in a photo taken in 1926.

Working Waterfront

Portland kicks off first Schoonerfest

The group Tall Ships Portland has scheduled a sailing regatta for traditional craft for June 24-26. Portland SchoonerFest and Regatta will feature five, large traditional schooners racing and parading under sail together in Portland Harbor with passengers participating onboard and spectators ashore. Organized by Tall Ships Portland to benefit its… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Hawaiians find work and new life in Stonington

When Ryan Woolsey and Kealii Mano moved from the year-round tropical warmth of Hawaii to Stonington, where they’d experience their first cold winter and snow, they had no regrets. They did have to shop for heavier clothes. “I had to figure out what this thing called ‘long johns’ was,” Woolsey… SEE MORE