Where Baitfish Don't Belong

At this writing the department doesn't have an official position on SAM's bill, but Boland doesn't like it. Two years ago, at the legislature's direction, the department convened a working group to determine what additional wild trout ponds needed protection from baitfish. "Right in the middle of this comes this bill from SAM," says Boland. "In a way I look at it as undermining the group's efforts." But the department waited 10 months to call a meeting and SAM got impatient.

Natural Resources Committee chair Rep. Theodore Koffman (D-Bar Harbor), who introduced SAM's legislation, offers this: "Mr. Boland probably won't come in with a better bill; that's troubling. The folks I've been working with — former department staff, anglers and guides — feel that the department has fallen way short and is hobbled by pressures. I can't confront it head on; so this is the way I'm trying to do it."

There's a small minority of ice anglers and bait dealers vindictive and/or selfish enough to intentionally disperse baitfish as well as alien game fish that they happen to favor, particularly pike. Draw maps of Maine's major baitfish dealerships, its major ice angling activity, its major rudd infestation, its major emerald shiner infestation, its major pike infestation, and you pretty much have a single map.

On February 6, 2007, a hearing was held on the DDAS bill in Monmouth. One of the participants, TU and DDAS member Jeff Levesque (who until recently served on both the state's brook trout working group and SAM's Fishing Initiative Committee) told me this: "As we were all leaving, one of the leaders of this whole [anti-bait-reg] crew came up to me and said: 'If you fly-fishermen keep pushing to ban these invasives, they're just going to get spread around.' That's the mentality of these guys. It doesn't surprise me that they're applauding the pike introductions."

Meanwhile, in Maine and across the nation, bait anglers and bait dealers continue to purposefully and accidentally festoon aquatic habitat with alien baitfish and whatever other aliens are mixed in with them. And education, enforcement and legislative reform move at the pace of continental drift.

Native fish, especially wild salmonids, don't have that kind of time.