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This article is part of The $42 Million Question, a Harpswell Anchor special report.
Harpswell’s working waterfront is as vital to its lobstermen as their boats and traps. The working waterfront is where they access their boats, take on bait and fuel, sell their lobsters, and store their gear. Keeping these wharfs, floats, bait sheds and other structures in working order is an ongoing battle. For wharf owners, rising costs, a shrinking fleet and an uncertain future are making that battle even more difficult, and the stakes are high.
“If one or two of the main wharfs went down, there’s not enough room to take on all the people who would be displaced,” Harpswell Harbormaster Darcie Couture said.
Corrosive salt water, wind, waves, ice and extreme weather, like the back-to-back storms of January 2024, are obvious threats to wharfs. Other challenges are more subtle, according to Monique Coombs, an Orr’s Island resident and the director of community programs at the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.
Rising home prices make it harder for young fishermen to live in town. Coombs said not only can that make it harder for them to work in town, it could limit the fishing community’s political power: “If we don’t have fishing families living in the community, we don’t get to vote on the issues.”
Coombs said Harpswell’s working waterfront is fairly robust right now.
“Fisherman ingenuity is real,” she said. “If a wharf needs work, they can make it work.” But she predicted that the effects of these subtle challenges will become apparent in the coming years.
Owners of some of Harpswell’s two dozen or so commercial wharfs attested to the challenges. They also made it clear that maintaining the working waterfront is not just about their businesses, but about preserving an industry and a way of life.
Chris Hole, owner of Henry Allen’s Seafood on Lookout Point, said, “Wharfs like mine that are lost, you never get them back. My whole purpose is to keep it going so it doesn’t become another fancy house with a private wharf.”
Wharf builder Norman Wallace, who runs Redfish Marine, said wharfs have only gotten more expensive, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As one example, Wallace said that he built the dock at Erica’s Seafood on Basin Point for about $75,000 in the early 2000s. The same dock, he said, would cost about $250,000 today.
On Garrison Cove, Portland restaurateur Ethan Morgan bought the wharf next to Cook’s Lobster & Ale House in 2023. He said maintenance had been put off for so long that a 2017 engineering report recommended tearing down the wharf and buildings and starting from scratch.
But Morgan said the wharf is not buying and selling enough lobster to recoup the cost of replacement. Instead, he has been repairing it in pieces. He estimated that he has spent about $225,000 so far, mostly on pilings and floats, and he has yet to start on the buildings.
Smaller wharfs are expensive, too. Lynette Shepherd is in the process of rebuilding a wharf on Ash Point that her father built. She and her son lobstered from it until 2022, when it became too dilapidated to use. It was ultimately destroyed in the 2024 storms.
Shepherd estimated that she has spent about $150,000 so far, which has involved cleaning up the wreckage and building a new seawall. She spent $35,000 for engineers and lawyers to secure permits from the town, state and federal governments. Building a new dock will cost another $200,000, she thinks, and that’s before she rebuilds the bait shed.
Despite the expense, rebuilding is important to Shepherd. She wants to make sure she and her son have a place to fish. She formed a corporation — Capt’n Louie’s Lobsters, after her dad — to buy and sell lobsters in the future, since lobstering is getting harder as she ages. She hopes to have the wharf rebuilt in the next five years.
Aid comes with conditions
The state has several programs that aim to shore up the working waterfront. One is the Working Waterfront Access Protection Program. It ensures a property will be used for commercial fishing in perpetuity by placing it into a covenant. The state purchases the covenant from the owner, providing funds the owner can invest into the wharf.
Another state program reduces property taxes on working waterfront. And in the wake of the 2024 storms, the state set up the Working Waterfront Resiliency Grant Program to help wharf owners rebuild.
Like many waterfront structures in Harpswell, Henry Allen’s Seafood took heavy damage during the twin winter storms of 2024. Hole, who grew up fishing from the wharf, was one of six wharf owners in Harpswell to win a grant from the state to help with rebuilding costs.
But Hole declined the $400,000 award because it requires recipients to match the grant money. Hole said he would have had to take out a loan, and the future of lobstering and the wharf are too uncertain. He doesn’t want to saddle his heirs with debt if the wharf stops being profitable. Instead, he did the work to get the wharf running again himself.
Shepherd said she also did not want to take on debt to rebuild her wharf, and she did not apply for a grant.
Of the five Harpswell grant recipients in addition to Henry Allen’s, three have drawn money from the fund, one is in the process of planning repairs, and the last has not decided if they will take the money, according to Chris Mayo, director of ports and marine transportation for the Maine Department of Transportation.
The Bichrest family, in Cundy’s Harbor, was one of the grant recipients that did take the money, which was almost $100,000 in their case.
Patriarch Frankie Bichrest, some of his sons, and several other fishermen used a wharf at the end of Holbrook Street before it was destroyed in the storms. While they could have moved to other wharfs, Bryan and Dain Bichrest said there was no question they would rebuild, mostly for their father’s sake. They said they would have done so regardless of the grant.
The family paid for building materials, without loans, and did the work on their own, which saved money. The state then reimbursed half of the cost. The Bichrests did have to adjust the design to comply with the grant’s rules, elevating the wharf by a foot.
Monique Coombs said that Hole’s decision to decline the award for Henry Allen’s was not unusual among the state’s wharf owners because it is hard for them to find matching funds. She said that has led to money being concentrated in certain places. Wharfs in Portland ended up getting more of the grant money than all the wharfs Down East, Coombs said, because they had more access to capital.
Four Harpswell wharfs have joined the working waterfront covenant program: Holbrook’s Wharf in Cundy’s Harbor, Interstate Lobster on Ash Point, Jim Merryman’s wharf at Potts Point, and Whidden Lobster on Harpswell Sound.
Clayton Whidden, owner of Whidden Lobster, said he put the wharf into a covenant a couple of years ago to protect it from future development. The wharf serves a dozen or so fishermen.
“I want it to be here for my grandkids,” Whidden said. His grandfather built the wharf, and he is in the middle of a several-years-long process of rebuilding it. The money he got for the covenant helped him pay for the work.
But he has been disappointed with some of the state’s other efforts to protect the working waterfront. For instance, in 2024, the State Legislature expanded property tax reductions to apply to structures as well as land. A year later, it removed structures from the program because of concerns about constitutionality.
Whidden said property taxes make it expensive to keep his wharf going: “I pay almost 11 grand a year just so lobstermen can go to work,” he said.
Many wharf owners see an uncertain future. Shawn Baumgartner is planning a complete rebuild of Glen’s Lobsters on Mackerel Cove, which he owns. He’s doing it now because he fears lobstering won’t stay profitable enough for the next generation to rebuild it later.
Hole worries that any reduction in the volume of lobster caught could put Henry Allen’s out of business. That decline could come from environmental changes, demographic changes or regulatory changes, like reducing how many traps lobstermen can fish or the size of lobster they can keep.
“If the fleet loses a third of its catch, it wouldn’t be remotely worth running the wharf,” he said.
Until then, he has a wharf to maintain, one board at a time.
