ESTESBOG

PREPARING FOR TAKEOFF

I was among the first wave of “boomers,” born in Lewiston, Maine in 1948 to Ted and Charlotte Walker of Poland Spring, Maine. Dad was a WW II Army Air Force vet and a plumber who later owned and ran a mechanical contracting (HVAC) business. Mother is a Bates College graduate (math major) and helped Dad in the family business until its close in 1992.

Both parents are still alive and live in an assisted living home in Farmington, Maine. Poland Spring is the south part of the township of Poland, Maine at the southern tip of Androscoggin County. Folks there call it “Central Maine” but on a map it is definitely way down in the southwestern part of the state. Poland Spring is about 25 miles north (inland) of the City of Portland.

Poland is about 30 square miles of rural countryside in the rolling hills on the east side of the Appalachian Mountains. Nearly 10% of the town is water – a scattering of lakes, ponds and bogs. Most of the extended Walker family dwellings were on or near the base of White Oak Hill. The family homestead, occupied by my paternal grandparents, Elmer and Gladys Walker, is a large, sprawling farm house with attached shed-turned-living quarters and barn on the Schellinger Road (east slope of the hill). Across the road is a huge Victorian 2-story with attached barn and nearby multi-bay carriage house that was built by my great grandfather Forrest Walker. My grandfather grew up in that house across the road from his grandparents. Years later he would assume ownership of the Wilson homestead and make it the family seat. The Forrest Walker house had been sold by the time I was old enough to know about such things. 

My folks, with much physical assistance from my grandfather, built a classy frame Cape Cod at the end of the triangular field 300 yards west of the family homestead in 1947 just in time for my arrival. I was followed 3 years later by brother Tom, and 9 years later by brother David.

My dad’s older brother Bob and wife Glenys and three cousins lived in the village of Poland Corner at the north base of White Oak Hill some 3 miles away and my Uncle Gerry and Aunt Claire and their five kids lived on the northwest slope of the same hill about 2 miles up the road.

The region that is now Maine was repeatedly bulldozed by glaciers during our planet’s ice ages. The last great ice sheet scoured the state from northeast to southwest creating gouges that are now lakes and making hills of moraine that are euphemistically called “mountains.” Thus Poland Spring has a chain of three beautiful lakes that flow south to north called the Range Ponds. Range in this case is pronounced “rang.” It was the surname of an early settler family. My house looked down on Middle Range Pond or, as we called it, the “Middle Lake.” Middle Range is about 380 surface acres and about 60 feet deep in the center. To the south is Upper Range, about 100 acres smaller, and to the north is the “Lower Lake,” a shallower lake of some 275 surface acres. Those lakes were my playground.

The forest in the Maine coastal plain, which extends 60-75 miles inland, is the northern edge of the Eastern Mixed Deciduous Forest. It is a complex of many broadleaf species mixed with conifers such as white and red pine and hemlock. Grampa Walker’s woodlot had more than 20 species of trees including basswood, several red oaks, white oak, yellow and paper birch, 2 or 3 ash species and many others.  Part of the woodlot had reverted from Great Great Grandfather Wilson’s grain fields and, by the time I came along, had matured into huge red oaks. Other parts were in various stages of reversion from farming days long past.

With the exception of a few lingering dairy operations, farming in that part of Maine pretty much disappeared during World War II. Fields in that cool, damp climate quickly revert to a succession of shrubs, then trees if uncared for. Most of the fields of my youth are now forest. But fields in Maine hold a wonderful variety of flora and fauna. I grew up with bobolinks, eastern meadowlarks, and savannah sparrows out front and whip-poor-wills, wood thrushes, and redstarts in the woods out back.

My grandparents had a “camp” (read second home) on the Middle Lake about a half mile away. I spent a great deal of time there pestering the sunfish and yellow perch under the dock. Later I branched out to other locales along the shore such as Schellinger’s Beach.

Another favorite activity was tending my menagerie. Dad had built a small barn that we always called the Henhouse. In addition to laying hens, I populated the Henhouse at one time or another with several varieties of pigeons, pheasants, bantams, domestic geese, rabbits and ducks: muscovies, mallards, white Pekins, Rouens, blue Swedes, and khaki Campbells. Oh, and don’t forget the indoor pets such as hamsters, white mice, and flying squirrels (yep, six of them!). Top that off with beef cattle and my brother Tom’s 4H lambs plus a neurotic hunting dog or two and it’s a wonder my long-suffering mother ever survived my upbringing!

I missed attending a one-room school by a year. I attended Poland Community School through the 8th grade. My Class of 1962 was the first to go all the way through the new consolidated school built after the war and opened in the fall of 1954. After grade school students from Poland had a choice of several high schools in adjacent communities. Six or 8 of us went to Edward Little High in Auburn. Others went to Gray-New Gloucester, Oxford Hills, or Casco.

For the most part I found school boring and unchallenging. Unfortunately I was smart enough to figure out how much I could slough off before it got me in trouble and school became a dull, but necessary game for me. In grade school there were a couple of teachers that sparked my imagination. My fifth grade teacher, Georgia McKnight, was enthusiastic about geography and history, and she had a sense of humor. I’ve loved those subjects ever since.

But it was my seventh grade teacher, Alice Briggs Mitchell, who had the most influence on me of any teacher I ever had. “Old Lady” Mitchell, as we called her, was sour-faced and serious. She and her notorious skinflint husband Clifton lived next to the school in a simple, unimproved farmhouse with no television. Yet Mrs. Mitchell was as intellectual as any native daughter of Poland, Maine ever could have been. She was strict and demanding and we hated her for it at the time. But hardly a day has passed in my entire life that I haven’t recalled some lesson of factoid that she gave us during my time in the upper three grades at Poland School. Her interests ranged from English literature (she used to stand in front of the class after lunch and read novels to us for 45 minutes every day), to local history, civics, and even the various breeds of dairy and beef cattle!

My main interests during my formative years involved living things both zoological and botanical. I had few playmates because of my geographical isolation and not one scintilla of athletic ability. Nada. My one sports love in grade school was baseball, for which I lacked skill. It didn’t matter anyway. There was only sandlot baseball available; organized teams and Little League were years in the future for the little Town of Poland. But oh how I idolized Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox.

A BIRDER (AND A FISH-HEAD) FROM HATCH

I roamed the fields and woods on White Oak Hill and the tributary brooks and shores of the Range Pond chain. I studied dragonflies and looked at copepods under my microscope. I caught crayfish and hellgrammites and got soaking wet in the early spring alder thickets trying to get the right angle to silhouette a courting male woodcock against the brightest part of the evening sky.

My most important life goals involved predation. I wanted to catch large trout and learn to shoot waterfowl. My dad and my uncles were hunters and fishermen. I wanted to join their ranks.

I have a good memory. When I was perhaps four I remember my Grandmother Walker, whom we called “Mimi Walker” putting her hand on my shoulder and sitting by her kitchen window next to some of her bird feeders. She pointed out the field marks on a black-capped chickadee and a white-breasted nuthatch and a song sparrow. I was hooked immediately and have been a bird watcher ever since.

I learned water birds on the marshes of Middle and Lower Range and Estes Bog. I learned to tell the difference between a tree swallow and a barn swallow and became familiar with the habits and songs of bobolinks and eastern meadowlarks. When Dad came home from a successful duck hunt I studied the plumage of the birds he brought home.

I remember in particular my first warbler. I think I was around six years old. Out of curiosity I wandered beyond the boundaries that my mother tried to set for me. I wandered through a reverting field down the hill then into the woods in a southerly direction anticipating that I would cut Grampa’s camp road eventually. In the fall of 1954 (and again in 1955) a hurricane came ashore on the coast of Maine and blew over many white pine trees in southern Maine. I walked up to the turned up root mass of one of the great trees and spotted movement. A tiny black-striped bird was investigating every nook and cranny on the exposed underside of the root mass. I recognized it from our family bird book as a black-and-white warbler. I was delighted, but torn about running home and announcing my sighting for fear of revealing just how deep in the woods I’d gone.

When I was maybe in the fifth or sixth grade my teachers nominated me, along with 7 other students, to serve as an “audience” to three biologists on a television show. We were taken to the studio of WMTW TV and introduced to a fishery manager from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, a game manager, and a wildlife researcher. Each was to make a twenty minute educational presentation while the peanut gallery of eight kids, supposedly Poland’s best and brightest, sat cross-legged in the foreground and asked rehearsed questions on cue. The researcher talked about wood duck biology (the species was still recovering at that time) and the proper construction and placement of nesting boxes. The wildlife manager talked about whitetail deer biology and the fishery manager about fish sampling techniques. The fishery biologist was a man named Bob Foye. For some reason I found what Mr. Foye did for a living absolutely fascinating. To my classmates, the TV show was a fun experience. To me it was life changing. From that moment on I wanted to be a fishery biologist.

A few years later a fishery researcher moved into our town and soon hired my dad to straighten out the plumbing in the old farmhouse he bought. That was how I met Don Mairs. To me, at that point in time, he was something of a god.

Junior high school was okay academically, but the beginning of four years of general hell for me socially. None of my interests and pastimes held any prestige in a big city high school where your dad’s profession and your athletic ability were all that counted. Auburn was the residence city for the professionals and managers that worked in the larger industrial city (shoe and fabric manufacture) of Lewiston across the river. If the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids were A-list, this plumber’s kid from the sticks was D-list at best. I never went back to a HS reunion. Never intend to.

Bright spots in high school? Plane geometry, biology, advanced biology, and a couple of history courses. I had a young biology teacher named Jim Booker who, over the course of three years, gave me a super background that resulted in a 711 score in an SAT and made freshman zoology in college nothing more than a refresher course.

I also played trumpet in the Edward Little HS Band, a sure kiss of death socially at that point in time. Nevertheless, my fellow musicians were some of my closest friends. We nerds hung together.

During the 1963-64 Christmas break, when I was a sophomore, Don Mairs hired me (I would have certainly done it for free or even paid him!) to assist in a laboratory experiment at Dry Mills State Fish Hatchery about ten miles to the south. Don was evaluating the affects of a veterinary medication called Dylox in treating brook trout for a crustacean gill parasite called Salmincola edwardsi. Ten days of careful observation revealed that it was considerably easier to kill the trout with Dylox than to even annoy the parasites with it. The compound was a failure in that application. Nevertheless, at the tender age of 15 I had made my first sojourn into fishery biology – and fish pathology at that. The following spring I did very well in the Science Fair with my trout parasite project which included a large aquarium full of brook trout supplied by Dry Mills Hatchery.

By the time I graduated from high school I had shot a few ducks and a grouse or two, mastered tying flies, and broken the three pound mark on landlocked Atlantic salmon. I was on my way as a predator.

STAND AND DRINK TO DEAR OLD MAINE

College was a given. My dad went from high school directly into military service in 1942, then came home, married, and got on with life without going to college. (Unusual for their era, both of my Walker grandparents had undergraduate degrees. Neither of my other two grandparents finished high school.) My folks imprinted on the three of us that we would go to college. Period. And we did.

I think I applied for admission to two universities elsewhere in New England, but I never seriously contemplated going anywhere but the University of Maine. For one thing, as far as I knew, there was no quality of life beyond the New Hampshire border. Secondly, the University of Maine Orono Campus is where nearly all of the fishery biologists in the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Game (later changed to Wildlife) attended college. UMO accepted me and in the fall of 1966, about a year after the Vietnam War really heated up, I found myself a freshman in a dormitory 150 miles from Poland Spring. (That’s about three light years, isn’t it?)

I was not ready. In times past kids like me often dropped out to either work for a while or join the military. From 1966 to 1970, exercising that option got you an immediate order from Uncle Sam to report to the nearest induction center and pick up your tickets to Saigon and beyond. So, I embarked half-heartedly on a course of study that would eventually give me a most undistinguished B.A. in Zoology. I aced first semester Zo, then scudded through the chop for a couple of years, working just enough to survive academically, but never exerting myself whatsoever. I worked a little harder in fisheries classes, but not too hard. My attitude was terrible.

The University Forest which borders the UMO campus on two sides – or at least it did when I went there 40 years ago – gave me a chance to sharpen my birding skills. It was full of woodland thrushes such as wood thrush, hermit thrush, and veery. The spring warbler migration through that part of Maine is unparalleled. I added many species to my life list while in college. I ran into an occasional birder, but not often. The only one that I met who really shared my love of birding was a student from Massachusetts, David Gallinat. Dave and I spent many hours in the University Forest with binoculars. During the extreme winter of 1967-68 we set up a feeding station on the edge of the Great Bangor Bog. The birds mobbed it and soon became hand tame – chickadees, tree sparrows, nuthatches, and even woodpeckers.

Something unexpected happened in the summer after my freshman year. I met a girl that was kind of interesting. She was a couple of years younger and still in high school. Her grandparents bought a house lot up the road from my folks and began building a new house. We became an “item.”

Gradually….ever so slowly….I began to climb out of my academic doldrums and begin to face the realities of life. Short of going back and starting all over again, it was too late to resurrect my dismal grades. But I gradually did better and scored 3.0 both senior semesters. And, hey, I did graduate!

Nancy J. Hathorne married me on August 30, 1969. She was 18; I was 20. She got us through my final year of college by working in the UMO Admissions Office and taking classes part time.  During that year I finally began to face reality. Although I had a few minor connections in Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, my two summers as a fishery tech were not enough to overcome an ugly set of academic transcripts. A job as a fisheries biologist wasn’t going to land in my lap. I’d have to figure out another way to make a living.

THERE AIN’T NO TIME TO WONDER WHY….

Meanwhile Uncle Sam came knocking. I was drafted even before the graduation ceremony. By 1970 the war was winding down and the military was becoming a bit pickier than before. A torn knee cartilage was enough for them to reject me for one year. The following year they tried again. Since my knee hadn’t magically healed itself – this was in the days before arthroscopic surgery – Selective Service decided I wasn’t worth wasting any more time over and permanently rejected me.

AND THEY’RE OFF….

The morning after graduation day I set out from our Bangor apartment to find something to do. My first stop was the Pepsi Cola bottling plant and distribution warehouse across the Penobscot River in Brewer, Maine. I never went any further. They had me report to the vending machine repair crew and I went to work learning how the machines worked and learning to troubleshoot them. It paid $1.10 an hour. Compared to our year of living on a shoestring, Nancy and I were in financial Hog Heaven!

By the fall of 1970 my continued employment at Pepsi – it was supposed to be a temporary summer job – was in increasing doubt. I interviewed here and there and finally was hired as a basic education instructor at Manpower Development and Training Authority (MDTA) in Lewiston, Maine. My students would be “hardcore unemployed” individuals referred by Social Services for training in everything from basic social skills to GED skills. They ran the gamut from mentally challenged to brilliant scammers. We (the staff included my Aunt Glenys and Cousin John Walker) taught a few students at a time in unstructured classrooms. Often the job was as much counseling as actual teaching. I’d like to think I passed something on to most of them. They certainly taught me a lot.

About a year after moving back to southwestern Maine Nancy gave birth to our first child, Corey. He was a long-faced, long-legged blond baby with huge blue eyes – a neat little critter and a relatively trouble-free baby.

The Manpower position ran on a regular work week instead of the public school year, 5 days a week throughout the year. I taught there for about two years, ever hopeful for a break into fishery work with IF&W. Just to remind them I was out there, I made an occasional trip to Augusta to say hello to Fishery Chief Lyndon Bond. Each time I also paid my respects to Hatchery Chief Stan Linscott and Fish Pathologist Dave Locke in the Hatchery Division office.

FISHY, FISHY IN THE BROOK….

One day in early June, 1972, the call actually came! It wasn’t quite the one I hoped for, but circumstances would later prove it was the one I needed. Stan Linscott telephoned to ask me if I’d consider a fish culturist position at Wade State Fish Hatchery in Casco. Would I? Pay cut or not, Casco here we come!

So in July, 1972 I found myself in an olive drab uniform feeding tens of thousands of fingerling landlocked Atlantic salmon every other hour and learning all the various skills required to rear and stock out a crop of coldwater fish. Wade Hatchery sits in a brook valley down in the woods west of Casco Village, the next town to the southwest of my hometown of Poland, Maine. It was fascinating work. There are so many nuances to keeping salmon healthy and growing. I especially liked working in the hatche house tending eggs and larval fish. It requires careful, very precise movements to keep from rupturing the membranes in the developing eggs or breaking the yolk sacs in newly hatched fry. The manager, Eddie Nadeau, was a wealth of experience and knowledge and a patient teacher.

Transporting and stocking fish gives fish culturists a break from the usual routine around the station. At Casco we stocked most of our salmon as spring yearlings. In the fall we were frequently dispatched to other hatcheries to assist in brown trout and brook trout stocking. It gave me a chance to see many parts of the State of Maine that I had never been to as well as to meet game wardens and biologists across the state.

Until the Boomer Generation, Maine fish culture and wildlife law enforcement had always been careers for high school graduates. I was among the first college graduates to be hired on in my position and the resentment from some coworkers and even managers was tough at times. On the other hand, most of the men I worked with were great guys.

NORTH WOODS ADVENTURE

My best adventure in the Maine Hatchery Division came in the fall of 1973 and again in 1974 when I was chosen to be on a crew of six men (3 fishery biologists and 3 fish culturists) to make a trek into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine in late October to trap togue (the Abnaki Indian word for lake trout) and collect a year’s supply of eggs for the hatchery system. We gathered at the IF&W seaplane base on Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine. A large and homely floatplane called a de Havilland Beaver was tied to the dock. We helped the ground crew remove the rear seats, then stow an enormous cargo of groceries, gear, and outboard gasoline. Finally a fellow hatchery tech crawled in back on top of the load and I buckled into the right front seat. With the Warden Pilot in the left seat the rear half of the floats were awash.

The lines were cast off and the pilot turned the big radial engine over until it sputtered then roared. As soon as we cleared the mouth of the cove into the chop from the main part of the lake, the pilot turned the big plane into the wind and pulled out the throttle. Incredibly the floats lifted up on step as we gained speed, then we popped off the water and continued north. The Beaver is like a flying two-ton truck. Less than an hour later we dropped down on Allagash Lake and taxied up to the one and only cabin on the entire waterway. The dark, 2-room structure was to be our home for almost 2 weeks. Two more trips with the float plane and we all were able to settle in. Three 16-foot heavy duty V-hulled boats had been brought in earlier, two by dragging overland from the nearest logging road many hundreds of yards from the waterway and the third lashed between the floats of the Beaver and flown in. Each boat was propelled by a 20hp outboard.

The first day we boated to the far end of the lake to prepare our work station. A large raft built the previous year and christened the “S.S. Bippy” was winched from its camouflage beneath a dense grove of fir and spruce on a little island and anchored securely in a sheltered cove some ten feet deep. On three sides of the Bippy large pound nets – square boxes of netting open at the top – were erected between long poles driven into the bottom. The large togue spawned at night on shallow, windswept reefs on the windward side if a narrow, rocky channel that connected the cove to the main body of the lake. We carefully marked the channel with Styrofoam buoys circled by orange reflective tape.

That night the work began in earnest with three, two-man teams in boats each setting fairly small mesh gill nets along the reefs, then pulling them just minutes later to remove the big fish with as little damage and stress as possible. As I recall, the majority of the togue we caught were in the 8-15 pound class. Larger ones for the most part tore free of the nets before we could get them in the boat. The fish were held in the boat in large tubs. As soon as we finished pulling our net, we’d re-set it and hustle in to the Bippy to offload our precious cargo. Ripe males were segregated in one pound net and ripe females in another.

The fish ran up on the shoals every night from shortly after full darkness until the wee hours of the morning. Often they ran the best in foul weather, especially wind. We’d return to camp dog tired and flop into our sleeping bags for several hours. During the day we hunted ruffed grouse or explored the surrounding countryside. Finally, when expedition leader Dave Locke calculated that we had enough fish to produce our egg quota, we radioed the base in Greenville and made arrangements for egg-taking. If the plane did not arrive to ferry the eggs downstate to several hatcheries, our efforts would be in vain and the eggs lost.

Egg stripping took place in daylight. With the plane on the way we began by knocking out the big fish a few at a time in a tub with water laced with anesthetic. Each female was capable of laying 2,000 or more orange eggs into plastic basins. Then the milt of several males was mixed in and the eggs set aside in buckets of water where they rapidly soaked up water over the next hour or so and greatly increased in volume. In a matter of a few hours the floatplane was loaded with insulated Igloo beverage containers full of precious togue eggs. By late morning the fruit of ten days and nights of labor was on its way far to the south to be measured and trayed up in three different hatcheries. We spent the rest of the day ferrying spent fish back to the open lake, then packed away boats and gear the following day and struck camp. The plane returned the next day to begin transporting us back to civilization.

MORE FISH TAILS…

There were ten hatcheries in the Maine system at that time with less than thirty full-time fish culturists to man them. Stan Linscott was continuously juggling personnel to keep positions filled. Barely two years into my tenure at Casco Stan showed up one day and pulled me aside. Would I consider a transfer to Enfield to fill a vacancy there with the opportunity to compete for a promotion at that station later in the fall? I think I accepted without consulting Nancy.

My first visit to Roland Cobb State Fish Hatchery, the most northerly station in the system, was the day I drove up with a truck full of our furniture, Nancy following along behind with Corey in his car seat. She was 5 months pregnant. The state house was cute, but we were surrounded by clouds of black flies the instant we stepped out of our vehicles.

Enfield Village lies at the end of a long road through the woods running east off I-95 some 50 miles north of Bangor, Maine in Penobscot County. The little village had perhaps 50 year round residents, a tiny post office and a little store. Major shopping required a trip to Lincoln to the north or Old Town some 30 miles to the south. The second night we were there we drove down to Old Town for groceries. On the way back to our new home it became foggy. Out of the dark mist loomed a black bear sitting on the side of the road watching us go by. Oh Toto, I don’t think we’re in Casco anymore!

The work at Enfield was more complex. The station served as the agency’s experimental hatchery. There were as many as two dozen different fish production lots ranging from brook trout selectively bred for longevity to salmon, togue, and Arctic charr. The station was supplied by two large pipes, one set in very deep water and one set in relatively shallow water in a large lake. Like Casco, the Enfield unit lay along the outlet stream well below the lake and discharged back into Cold Stream. The other three crewmen including the manager, Norman Philbrick, were among the finest I’ve ever worked with.

Nancy’s due date for our second child was around New Year’s Day. She understandably wanted to keep her doctor and have the baby in familiar surroundings. So, around Thanksgiving she moved back downstate to live with my folks in Poland Spring to await the event. Having endureded Month #9 before Corey was born; I heartily recommend this arrangement for those of you young fellows who are contemplating a family.

Someone always has to be present on a fish hatchery 24-7. On a 4-man station you work a weekend, get two 3-day weekends and a 2-day weekend before repeating the process. Of course the baby came during my weekend on duty. I got the call at 0300 a.m. and managed to dial a wrong number, twice!, before waking up my boss and notifying him that I’d have to leave, I reached the hospital in Lewiston at 0600 and our daughter Emily was born just 2 hours later. Nancy says Emily was not as cute as Corey at that stage. I thought she was beautiful just the same.

            The winter of 1974-75 in Enfield in northern Maine was a fairly brutal one. It wasn’t so much the snow – and there was plenty of that – as the extreme cold. We had an 8-day cold spell where the temperature dropped at night to 30 degrees below or colder. On the coldest night (-38^o, I believe), the power line running into the village from Howland contracted so much it snapped between two poles. The baby was only two weeks old. As the house began to creak and pop we hurried her downstairs along with little Corey and I attempted to light an auxiliary kerosene stove supplied from an above-ground tank on the back of the house. The kerosene must have been nearly gelled, but it lit and soon the kitchen, if not warm, was at least tolerable.

            The outside raceways during that same period froze over from about the third tier down. I remember walking right up the middle of the raceway with big brook trout scurrying beneath the ice under my boots.

            As spring approached the folks in the head office in Augusta announced that there would be three fishery biologist openings – one in Enfield, one in Ashland (even further north), and one in Augusta. Along with many others I took the civil service exam and came out on top. So in May, 1975, just 8 months after moving to Enfield, we found ourselves back downstate. I became the Assistant Regional Fishery Biologist for the Belgrade Lakes Region based on Federal Street in Augusta.

            I was assistant to Roger Marin, a smart and capable fellow about 5 years older whose head was anywhere but in his work. Roger was fun to be around, but far more interested in social climbing, sailboat building, playing tennis, and selling real estate on the side than managing fisheries in 620 lakes in 120 townships. But as careless as he was about his own career, Roger did me a great deal of good several times by bluntly, but honestly, pointing out my shortcomings. He was right and I took his criticisms, if not the example he personally set, to heart. Those course corrections served me well in my own career.

            For three summer seasons I lived the life I’d dreamed of, boating almost daily, sampling fish populations, measuring water chemistry parameters, conducting creel census. In winter I spent 6 days a week on a snowmobile interviewing ice fishermen and checking their catch.

Early on I was given a special assignment to try to improve our stocking procedures and equipment. One of those tasks was to figure out what was going on in our aircraft stocking tanks and see if they could be made to perform better.

At the time the Maine Warden Service operated a mixed fleet of Piper Super Cubs, Cessna 185s, and the big,  radial-engined deHavilland Beaver. All three models of high-winged floatplanes carried external tanks mounted on top of their pontoons in such a way that they would tip outward when a switch was tripped in the cockpit to spill their wriggling contents off the outsides of the floats.

The Warden Pilots absolutely forbid tapping holes in the fuselage, so carrying internal tanks to pipe oxygen into the fish tanks was out of the question. Both pilots and hatchery crews operated under the assumption that the slipstream forced enough air through the openings in the tops of the tanks to keep the fish going for the 15-30 minute flights to their destinations.

I remember my first few trials, using a primitive Hach Water Chemistry Kit to scoop out water samples as a tank full of trout writhed in the tank of a plane moored on the beach. The oxygen disappeared even before the last net full of fish was added.

Next I rode in the right seat of a Cessna 185 destined to stock a remote lake big enough to land on and hopped out onto the float as we came to a stop and grabbed a water sample before turning the tank over to release its contents. It, too, was devoid of oxygen. The sad truth was that for years they had been making trout hold their breath for as much as 30 minutes before releasing them. We had to do better.

That night I had a 3-way conversation between Chief Pilot Dana Toothaker and Chief Aircraft Mechanic Howard Lambertson. My idea was to make use of slipstream air. I figured if we mounted pieces of sheet metal on about a 45-degree angle, the upper edges would catch air and force it down into the water to bubble up the back side.

One of the other regions had by that time loaned me a battery-powered oxygen meter with a probe on a long cable. I was able to lower it into the right tank and monitor the fish through the open window throughout the flight. As expected, the oxygen was used up immediately while still at the landing. But even as we sped up for takeoff the level came back up and stayed up beautifully throughout the flight.

We landed and dropped off the fish feeling quite smug about our simple little innovation. Two or three more times we flew fish that day with good results. Then we decided to take an air drop run to a pond too small or irregularly shaped to land on.

It had been proven years before that trout survive drops from fairly high altitudes (200-500 feet) without difficulty. However, if dropped too low they hit the water before losing the momentum from the forward speed of the airplane and can be injured in the process. In general, trout bombing is relatively easy as long as there are no obstacles like mountains and the cross winds are not strong.

Rigged with the new tank baffles, Dana lined up on our target pond and tripped the tanks as we passed the near edge. I was able to observe by unbuckling my seatbelt and getting up on the seat on my knees to look downward and back. Instead of all rolling off the sloped outside edge of the float, a number of the fish were bounced by the baffle back into the taut wires between the floats and twanged off them like hailstones in a storm. A fatal flaw.

Our last run of the day was back to a larger lake. On the way Dana climbed for as much altitude as he could get, then pushed the nose over into a shallow dive. He wanted to see how the baffles behaved with high airspeed. At around 140 knots the baffles in the tanks on both sides of the plane blew out almost simultaneously, apparently without injuring any fish. We delivered them just a couple of minutes later and went back to the drawing board in the Greenville hangar.          

Plan B. Why not aim a short length of garden hose into the slipstream and use the other end as an air stone down inside the tank? Howard constructed the contraption to order, pinching off the distal end with a nut and bolt and drilling the submerged part of the hose with many little holes. To force more air into the hose, a small kitchen funnel was jammed into the forward end of the hose so that it resembled a little trumpet on top of each fish tank. 

It worked, sort of. In flight an enormous rush of air was driven down the garden hose. The water in the tanks churned violently and a steady cloud of spray streamed out of the opening until, ten minutes or so into the flight, the tank was virtually pumped dry! At least the trout were still wet when they reached their destination.

Back at the base we extracted the funnels from the openings of the hoses and tried yet again. Lo and behold that was all we needed to do! Enough air was rammed through the ¾” opening of the cut garden hose to fully aerate a tank jammed full of brook trout. Now it became simply a game of loading the trout from a hatchery truck onto a plane as quickly as possible. After a couple of minutes of inconvenience the oxygen level came right back up as the airplane sped down the lake and into the air.

ADVENTURES IN THE SKIES OVER MAINE….

  To be continued….