Salmon, Bass Return to Maine Waters

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) - To the delight of conservationists and fishermen, Atlantic salmon have returned to the waters above the site of a 162-year-old dam that was torn down earlier this year to allow fish to swim upstream.

Striped bass have come back too, in such numbers that fly fishermen have been having a field day on the upper Kennebec River. The stripers have been feeding on yet another species that swims upstream from the sea, alewives.

The removal of the 24-foot-high Edwards Dam has completed the rebirth of what was historically such a rich fishery that early colonial settlers grew weary of eating fish.

The first stage involved cleaning up the Kennebec, which along one stretch was so polluted it was practically an open sewer. After the cleanup, attention turned toward to the closest dam to the Atlantic, the Edwards.

The Edwards Dam was built in 1837 to supply power to mills that rose along the river’s banks. It was about 40 miles upstream from the Atlantic and stretched 917 feet across the Kennebec, blocking salmon, shad, herring and other fish from reaching their spawning grounds upstream.

In 1997, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decided the dam should be torn down for the good of the environment. The Edwards became the first hydroelectric dam in the country ordered removed by the U.S. government against its owners’ wishes.

Contractors completed the removal of the timber, stone and concrete structure Oct. 8, just over three months after the dam was breached.

With the dam gone, gazing at the Kennebec from its high banks in Augusta is like looking more than a century and a half back in time.

The flat, gravelly Cushnoc Island is again in view as it was when colonial fishermen filled barrels of salmon at a time from the river. And just as Benedict Arnold may have noticed when he passed through in the late 1700s, Coon’s Rock rises near the left bank of the river.

In Augusta and upstream, rapids ripple as they did until Henry David Thoreau’s time, while sturgeon, Atlantic salmon and stripers swim easily upstream.

"A lot of fish were caught, a lot were seen. It was easy fishing," said Mike Holt, a guide who owns a fly-fishing shop in Fairfield, about 20 miles north of Augusta.

Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without prior written authority of The Associated Press.

RWOL

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