I spend a fair amount of my day doing math I never expected to be doing — how many pounds came in, what the tide's doing, how many gallons that boat needs before it heads back out. A while back I did a different kind of math, the kind that stops you mid-thought. Maine has something like 5,300 miles of coastline. Less than 20 of those miles are still what you'd call "working waterfront" — a place where a boat can actually tie up, a lobsterman can buy bait and fuel, and a catch can get sold. I checked that number twice, because it seemed like it had to be wrong. It isn't.
I think about that a lot standing on our dock on Bailey Island, watching crates get weighed and sorted, watching someone top off a fuel tank before heading back out past the ledges. It's not a scenic postcard kind of scene — it's loud, it smells like diesel and salt, and there's always something that needs fixing. But it's also, apparently, one of a shrinking handful of places left on this coast where that scene can still happen at all.
"Working waterfront" is a bureaucratic-sounding term for something straightforward: shorefront with enough depth, enough shelter from weather, and enough of the unglamorous infrastructure — docks, parking, fuel — to support people who make a living on the water. Most of the coast was never suited to this in the first place. The state's own researchers have found that only a narrow slice of Maine's shoreline has the right depth and shelter to begin with, and more than half of even that slice is already built out with things that enjoy a water view without needing water access — houses, mostly. What's left is thin. And it keeps getting thinner.
I don't think anyone's plotting against wharves, exactly. It's more that the math doesn't favor them. Waterfront land here is the most expensive land in the state, and a working dock sitting on valuable shorefront is often worth more to a buyer as a home site than as a place to land lobster boats. Every time one of those parcels sells for redevelopment, that access point is gone, permanently — you can't un-condo a wharf. Add in the storms of the last couple winters, which tore apart docks and bait sheds up and down the coast, plus fuel and insurance and repair costs that only move in one direction, and it's easy to see how a state loses miles of working coastline a little at a time without anyone ever deciding to.
This isn't really about nostalgia for a certain kind of postcard, though it's easy to frame it that way. Maine's commercial fisheries pulled in over $619 million last year — the fourteenth year running the industry's cleared half a billion — and lobster alone accounted for $461 million of that, on nearly 79 million pounds landed. None of that number exists without somewhere to bring the boat in. The dock isn't scenery. It's the infrastructure the whole number runs on.
This isn't some other town's problem for us, either — Harpswell has more lobstermen and more traps in the water than any town in Maine. We had our own peak in 2021, around 7.9 million pounds, and we've eased down since to about 6.4 million — a gentler pullback than the roughly 40% the state's seen from its 2016 high. Our fishery is holding up better than most. But "holding up" still depends entirely on there being a wharf left to hold onto, and I'd rather not find out what happens to a strong local fishery when the last local dock finally sells.
There's some good news here too — the state's actually been doing something about it lately, and not just talking. Governor Mills signed a law last summer creating an actual Working Waterfront Advisory Council with a standing seat in state government, instead of this only getting attention every time a storm tears something apart. There's a matching-grant program through Land for Maine's Future that helps wharves, co-ops, and towns buy or permanently protect key waterfront parcels, so they can't quietly become condos even after they change hands. After the storms, the state put $25 million specifically toward rebuilding damaged docks and piers. And just this spring, lawmakers locked in permanent, ongoing funding for that conservation program — instead of leaving it to bond votes every few years — which should start flowing this summer. None of it fixes the twenty miles overnight. But it's the first time in a while the trend line has had something pushing back against it.
A few things actually help, on the ground. Buy your lobster from somewhere that's still working waterfront — us or anyone else — instead of only from a case in a supermarket two states away from where the boat landed. Give some attention to the organizations doing the unglamorous mapping and lobbying work, the Island Institute and Maine Coast Heritage Trust chief among them. And know the number: twenty miles, sixteen of them for fishing. Most people I mention this to, including people who've lived on this coast their whole lives, haven't heard it before.
We're glad to still be one of those miles. Every crate that crosses our dock is a small, unglamorous vote for staying that way.