Sampling with our New Hand-held Digital Salinity Probe

Jayden, on the “big rock”, at the toe of the marsh

At the eastern edge of the dam, inside the marsh

April 25th, 2019. Jayden stepped forward to be the first to sample salinity at the marsh with our new hand-held digital salinity probe! It was a good reason to go outside and take advantage of our one sunny day this week and also check on water levels in the marsh. Jayden carefully used the probe and sampled in three locations; at the eastern side of the dam just before the water spilled out of the marsh, from the big rock along the shore at the back of the parking lot area, and then immediately to the right of the path to the water from the parking area.

When Jayden saw the reading of 0.27 ppt at the dam, he said,  “I thought all the salt would run down through the creek and we might see a 0.10 reading.  I was just surprised.”  When we moved over, “I thought it would be less salinity because it’s farther away from the opening. I liked that.  It was pretty much what I thought, around 0.04 or 0.05.” Jayden said he likes using technology, it was easy to use and he loves nature so it blends two things he likes.  And, “We’re helping the alewives.”

Back in March, we sampled the ocean water in Ripley Creek near the culvert and found only 1-3 ppt with all the less dense rainwater pooling on the surface, and 0 ppt in the marsh itself.  With all the rain we’ve had this week, we were expected a reading today of 0 ppt.  As Jayden moved east from the dam along the shore of the marsh, the other two readings were both 0.06 ppt.  These two samples are also from shoreline where cattails grow.  Both of these details help us understand that this “corner” of the marsh doesn’t have much of a water current.  Having the digital salinity probe is like having another set of eyes to see things you normally can’t sense.  We also measured the water temperature, and at ~54 degrees Fahrenheit, the water is warming to the temperatures associated with alewife spawning!  This is the month the big runs in the surrounding areas begin!

Immediately to the right of the path coming from the back of the parking area

“Scouts”! (When Alewives Return)

“The term “Scouts” comes from our forefather’s observations on the nature of the alewife spawning migration. A school of prime alewives, males I’m told, are the first to ascend the river and somehow they communicate back to those in the estuary that the river is passable. How these fish communicate back is not known.  Some say individual fish return with the information, others suggest a scent is given off that communicates the condition.

The first Alewives, the Scouts, went up the river April 16th, (2018) according to my fish watchers. That was when the ospreys and cormorants were observed fishing early in the morning, for a number of days. The schools of alewives were in the lower river where there were flocks of cormorants observed by me and others in the area of Spears Mill Brook, behind the Prison farm.

Personal communication to Alison England from Ed Courtenay, May 6th, 2018

(Mr. Courtenay is the town of Warren’s “Alewife Warden”)

Fast forward to the morning of April 24th, 2019, with 3.61″ of rain to date in April and waters running high, and the following scene upstream of the bridge on the St. George River at the Thomaston and Warren town line.  It sure looks like the “scouts” have arrived!

The Salinity Sensor is READY!

Bryson and Paul brought the finished salinity and temperature probe apparatus to class and updated classmates on the last construction details that were solved and explained the probe’s likely orientation in the water.

We used the nice weather this past Thursday to check on the location factors we’ve been thinking about in class in order to decide where to place the sensors; where is/are the likely spawning areas, what is the substrate like, how deep are different areas?  We ventured around the edges in our hip boots and waded into areas that had a more solid bottom to gather this information about our site.  Next we’ll finish writing our “Partner Proposals” and decide together on a specific location and depth to place the probes.  We’re excited to start collecting data!

Observing With Our Senses

“Mrs. England, can we go down to the marsh?”  “Mrs. England, you said we could go down to the marsh.”  “Mrs. England, are we going outside today?”  The reply: “Yes!”

On this beautiful Friday morning and afternoon, clipboards in hand, we spent some brief, but quiet moments by ourselves simply observing…gathering the sights and sounds our this habitat; whatever our senses took in that we noticed.  When we came back to the classroom, we took one observation and expanded it with four, more detailed sentences.

 

Here are some of our writings.

I like the loud crunching of the leaves on the ground.  I like the water splashing on the land’s sides, the birds chirping peacefully, the rocks hitting off each other.

You could see and hear the water flowing, it was like I was dreaming.  It was so peaceful and relaxing.  It reminded me of camping, next to a river, where you could hear the soothing sound of the water, racing down the river.

It is low tide and the water is rushing over the rocks and the wind is blowing in my hair.  The water is rushing over the dam. The water is passing through the culvert into the ocean going from freshwater to salt water, the sun making the water shine like diamonds.

The brown, murky water reminded me of being on a lobster boat offshore.  It was a rich brown color with some greenish, bluish tint.  It had a muddy bottom that reminded me of a swamp.

I heard the water flowing.  I could hear the water splashing up against the rocks.  The sound of the water was peaceful.

I see a dam.  I hear water.  I feel sun.  I see bubbles.

It is as quiet as a ghost town in the marsh area.  It is a good spot for a picnic. I could easily fall asleep while relaxing on the hill overlooking the marsh.

I see the trees blowing with the wind and with the waves.  The waves are not too big, not too small.  They were crashing over the dam and into the culvert.

I see rushing rapids flowing violently into the white-capped ocean.  You can see it, you can hear it, you can almost feel it.  It is amazing.

The culvert was so soothing it made a calming noise.  It sounded like a waterfall.  It was moving fast enough to knock me off my feet.  The soft noise was nice enough that I could have fallen asleep.

It is low tide and it’s cold out.  The soothing sound of the water rolling over the rocks.  The birds are chirping.

One of my observations was all the leaves at the bottom of the marsh.  It caught my attention because if you just look into the water, you automatically see just a bunch of leaves sitting there.  Those leaves eventually turn into mush that stays at the bottom of the marsh.  The thing I liked about the leaves is that they were calm and not moving around, which then led to the calmness of the water.

The water was very clear and quite cold.  There were small falls and foamy areas.  There were smallish pools under the culvert.  The elver nets were next to a bubbly water path that led to a new world.

Three days later, we have several inches of snow on the ground!  Every time we visit the stream and the marsh is special and unique!

A Glimpse Back in History with Randy Elwell

Thank you Randy Elwell for visiting our classroom and talking to us about your experiences and memories about alewives and the fishing industry in our community when you were younger.

Randy told us about his school days and how you’d have to walk down to Mr. Philbrook’s shop class and… “Behind the Grace Institute, down where Phoebe Bly owns now…I can remember going down there in the water with a scale basket.  You know what a scale basket is…they have holes in them to let the water out…they would go down there in the crick and they would dip alewives on the tide, the high tide.  Everybody in town you’d see down there getting alewives…We used to do it and actually Mr. Philbrook used to let some of the students that were fishermen go out during class and catch alewives. That would have been in the late ’70’s. I went into 6th grade in ’81. …I don’t know if you guys have been to Damariscotta, but the amount of fish that come up, that seemed to be what the crick was like, the fish would come into the crick and go up into the marsh.  You just went out into the water, waded out into the water, and dipped and did whatever you could to catch fish. And I’ve heard of guys back in the day, some of the older guys in town, used to run seine twine across the cove and wait for the tide to get high and run it across when the tide went, the fish would go against the (twine) and they’d go bail them out, which is highly illegal now.”

“The mentality was that the alewives weren’t going to go away; just like anything in the fishing industry or anything it’s going to be there forever, and the crick, especially. But it did, it went away and got less and less and less.”

“My family’s been in the fishing business for generations so I grew up around it…When I was a kid…going with my father in the bait truck, the big bait truck, to the alewives trap in Warren, filling the truck and going and delivering it and then coming back and getting more…Now…you have to go and get in line or sign up to get a tray of alewives, whereas then, it was, you just went and get as much as you wanted and then took it home.”

We asked about elvers…”Elvers really, back in the day, weren’t what it is (now)…American eels were big back then, catching them out of the quarries and selling them…for bait….people ate them…We used to go catch American eels and sell them for striper bait to make a little money to buy stuff.”

We asked Randy if he ever ate alewives. He said, “Oh yeah (making a face). My father-in-law smoked ’em for years.  He had a smoke house.  He’d go over to Warren and he had a friend… ’cause as a resident of Warren you could get so many…have so many free; he would get his alewives and he would smoke ’em and people would come from, I ain’t kidding ya’, all the way from like Presque I’sle, just to get ’em.  He did it for years and years…Dried fish, salt fish, peel it off and eat it. Do the same thing with the smoked alewives. The older people really liked them.  They would heat them up or some people would peel them off and eat them.”

“The older people I knew, are pretty much gone now…I grew up around the older people on the wharves.  The old “Off-Island store now, but it used to be the “Island Store”…there was a pot-bellied stove and I used to go in there with my father and grandfather and the old guys would sit around and tell stories… Arthur Carter use to tell about back in the day…cod now, cod…it’s expensive…back then people wouldn’t eat it. It was trash. They wouldn’t even buy it.  He would go out and what they call longline, right just out here in the harbor and he’d have a wheel barrow and go door to door and sell fish.  And the cod, people couldn’t get rid of a cod.”

He talked a little about lobstering and how guys used to fish several thousand traps. Regulations were different back then.  As far as lobster bait, pogies and redfish were big back then and pogies held up well in the traps.  It was the oily bait that worked best.  Redfish were big, hake-heads were big. Today, hake isn’t as plentiful as it used to be and hake and haddock have all been cut back.  Now it’s limited as to what you can catch.  The herring quota is down too.  Talk turned to growing kelp and how the Island Institute is helping some fishermen look at other ways to have a product.  Scallops can be grown on ropes too.

Other topics we learned about were the fish factories of Port Clyde, the sardine plant and the clam factory.  He told us how women and girls weren’t out on lobster boats. “They would have been in the sardine factory…Women and girls worked the factories.  There was men in there too, but the women and girls cut fish. What they did was they stood in the line along the conveyer with a pair of scissors and as fish went by they’d cut heads.  They’d do this all day long…When there was fish, the horn blew.  So, if you was living in Port Clyde, you’d hear the horn blow on the plant…There was a phone chain. So, you would call…it went up the line and you knew there was fish coming and you went to get ready to cut fish…My great Aunt, my grandmother’s sister, Jeanette Polky…used to live ‘side me where the cows are now…she had an old school bus. When she got the phone call, the horn blew, she drove that old school bus and picked the women up around town and she went and cut fish and she took them home….My cousin Tim Polky…him and his brothers used to tell me when they were young, young…if their mother was sick, they would drive the bus…You know, it was different back then…The trucks would come in, or the boats would come in and the men would start unloading the boats and the women would cut.  They might cut for two days straight…It was extremely hard work but the women took pride in it. They took a lot of pride in it.”

“It was big business…Rockland had three (plants), a dogfish plant, they had two packing plants.  The packing plant in Port Clyde…the older houses (in Port Clyde)…a lot of them houses around there were built by the factory for the workers. You guys know where here 10 Cold Storage is, where the public landing is in Port Clyde? There used to be a clam processing plant there, back in the day, way back.  They would can clams.  There was actually one where Lyman and Morse is now, Lyman and Morse’s varnish shop is the old Thompson clam factory that burned; same thing, they would process clams…The factory at Port Clyde burned.  That was devastation for the town. It was town income that went away…Hupper’s store was on the corner where Monhegan Boat’s office is…People didn’t go anywhere. You’d work the factory and if you needed to buy milk, you’d go into the store, so the money went away.”

When the factory burned, “The barrels were blowing up.  There was oil for the canning process…they were going so far in the air they that you couldn’t see them, they were just a speck. And there was a plane, I don’t know who was in the plane, it might have been Sonny Lehtinen, (he) said they were coming up by him, and the cans were like snow.”

As we closed out our time together, our last question was to ask Randy if he missed being on the water. Here’s what he said, “I do.  I wholeheartedly do.  If it weren’t for the insurance here, I’d probably still be fishing.  There’s nothing like 3:30 in the morning, going out on the water and that smell, and it’s just, the salt smell, there’s nothing like it.  Being off the Banks, you know, in a big boat, and that sun breaks the horizon …it gets in your blood.”

What was the memorable and important overall message about alewives that we heard from Randy?

Everyone thought the alewives would never disappear, they would always be there. Yesterday’s visit with Randy made me think more what will the fishing industry will be like in the future. Ella C.

Alewives didn’t stay even through people thought they would be there forever. Colby H.

“Sometimes you think things will be around forever but they won’t.”  Natalie V. (quoting Randy)

Randy told us about when he was younger and how plentiful the alewives were and how people thought that they would never go away, that the alewives would always be plentiful. Evie T.

You could literally take a net, put it in the creek, and catch alewives.  There was a time when there were a lot of alewives everywhere.  A lot of things have changed between then and now.  Hayzel P.

What stories will this generation tell their children and grandchildren?

Thank you again, Randy Elwell (April 3, 2019)

 

 

Rainy N’or Easter and a Big Tide Water Sampling! March 22, 2019

Neither wind nor rain stops us!  We are intrepid and love going outdoors.  This hearty crew volunteered to sample water during the storm and big tide that conveniently occurred during the middle of the day on March 22, 2019.  Here we are sampling at 11:15 AM, with the high tide still coming at 12:44 PM delivering an 11.4 foot tide (without the onshore winds).  The Rockland weather data archive records 1.06 inches of rain that day, and winds from around 12-25 mph, and temperatures in the high 30’s.  

Our question was, “Did the Nor’Easter and big tide bring salt water into the marsh?”

Evie collecting a sample directly from the marsh, from the spot we’re identifying as “the rock”.

Colby collects a sample on the ocean side of the culvert. (There’s seven feet of water directly in front of him!)

 

“Even though I got soaked from all the rain, it was fun to do this and see how much salinity was in the water at high tide.” Hayzel

Colby and Evie using the refractometers

Back in class, after our measurements, we discussed our results and developed this group effort to write our claim.

CLAIM:  Our testing shows there was no salt water on the surface of the marsh.

EVIDENCE and REASONING:   We sampled the surface water on the ocean side and on the marsh side.  From the rock in the marsh, we tested the salinity with refractometers and found out of 6 tests, each test measured 0 ppt.  Our sample from the ocean was measured 8 times, and the salinity ranged from 1-3 ppt.

Both of our samples were taken from the surface of the water.  This is important to know because salt water is more dense than freshwater and would be in a layer below any freshwater.  With all the rain it was a very low salinity in the samples because all the rain water is floating on top of the ocean water and the salt water is under the rain water. If we could do the sampling over, we would sample as deep as we could reach because the deepest water should be the greatest amount of salt.  As a class, even though our measurements show no salinity in the marsh, we think with what we know about the density of salt water, there could have been salt water that came in on the tide, and would have been below the surface.  However, at least at the surface, there was no measurement of salt.

Colby, Evie, Brooke, Hayzel, Natalie, Dylan, Jayden, Leah
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