Helpers clean up Maine Island Trail

For those of you who visit islands in the Maine Island Trail, take a minute to thank the many volunteers who have cleaned trash and blowdowns from these coastal jewels. Maine Island Trail Association members completed the annual spring cleanup in the western rivers, Stonington and Penobscot Bay sections of the trail as of last Sunday.

Other volunteers will be headed to Muscongus Bay on June 2-3, Muscle Ridge on June 9 and to Casco Bay on June 16-17 to finish the job. There are 90-plus islands in the trail, half of them open for public use, including overnight camping. MITA, in its role as steward for all these islands, has adopted use guidelines, a big part of which are included in Leave No Trace ethics, in an effort to lessen the impact of an ever-increasing number of visitors.

But even if no one visited an island, there is still the problem of flotsam and jetsam which blows up on shore and into the woods.

I’ve been on several of these cleanups and had the good fortune to have visited numerous coastal islands in my sordid past, and it never ceases to amaze me the amount of junk that washes up on shore. Things like oilcans, bleach bottles, rubber gloves, fish crates, cigarette butts, foam coffee cups, plastic soda bottles are items that someone consciously has to throw overboard!

Rachel Nixon, trail manager for MITA, told me volunteers cleaning up the western rivers area found a couch, a television set and part of a refrigerator. Tires are regular finds. On my trip to Stonington May 19-20, our boat carried off one wall of a walk-in refrigerator while another crew in the area found one of the corner posts of the same unit. We surmised the walk-in was a victim of the windstorm just before Christmas that blew 80-knot winds out of the southeast causing widespread blowdowns on the islands.

It’s amazing how much these volunteers are taking off the islands. Nixon said a cleanup on an island with open-ocean exposure will see more blow-up trash, perhaps four to five large trash bags full, while a heavily used island like Little Chebeague would fill around 15 bags. Then again, a smaller one might get a quarter of a bag or less.

The good news so far this spring, Nixon said, is that volunteers found very little evidence of camper-generated trash, mostly because the islands were cleaned last fall, but also because the Leave No Trace message is getting out to island visitors. Also, when the islands are clean, campers are less likely to leave behind their trash than if the place were a mess when they arrived.

The crew I signed on with was assigned to build a second tent platform on Hell’s Half Acre Island. Sid Quarrier, a volunteer skipper for MITA, had delivered the cedar building materials a day earlier. He and MITA staffer Leanne Dech, our trip leader, supervised four of us as we whipped up a masterpiece. If you visit the little island, which is not far from Stonington, check out our work. It wasn’t intended to be as close to the other platform built last summer, but that December storm blew a large tree into the site where the new platform was to be built.

The platforms are part of the effort by the state’s Bureau of Public Lands and MITA to reduce camping impact on the fragile island soils. Campers are asked to use the platform and not the ground.

On June 2-3, volunteers will be in the Muscongus Bay area cleaning up winter’s deposits and removing a privy on Strawberry Island. There once was a house or camp on the site, and all that remains is an outdated and useless outhouse that doesn’t meet code. Soils are too thin to replace it.

With chores such as this, you’d think it would be hard to get folks to help out. Not so, said Nixon. There is a waiting list for the roughly 75 slots.

I’ve been out on three such trips in the Stonington area and look forward to my fourth. The crews change each time so there are new friends to be made, and everyone has fun, even if it rains like it did on the start of our trip. By midday it had stopped, and Sunday dawned bright, clear, calm and sunny, the perfect Maine island day. We saw porpoise, seals and seal pups, gulls and ducks and a gorgeous pair of eagles. It couldn’t have been a more rewarding trip.

If you get out to visit any of the 20 islands on the Maine Island Trail in the Stonington area this summer, check out the MITA signs, read and follow the Leave No Trace message and enjoy your stay. Leave the island cleaner than when you arrived for others to enjoy. If you perchance encounter nesting seabirds in the next few weeks, look for another island. And if you see seals and their pups on a ledge, stay 100 yards or more away. You don’t want to cause a pup and its mother to be separated. The ledges in the Deer Island Thorofare were covered with seals during our weekend trip.

And if you run into any of these folks, thank them for cleaning up the Stonington area islands: Noreen Delorey, Lesley Devoe, Amy Donahoe, Jim Flahaven, Henri Gignoux, Kevin Lomangino, Becky Sheehan, Mollie Mahanna, Andrea Mietkiewicz (thanks for the ride, Andrea!), Walter Reed, Chris Tadema-Wielandt, Susannah Tesoriero, and Steve and Terri Titcomb.

For more information on MITA write to 41A Union Wharf, Portland 04101, or check out the Web site at www.mita.org.

To those of you who turned out for the Paddle Smart from the Start Kayak Safety Symposium on May 18 at the Bangor YMCA: a big thank-you for coming! The 130-plus folks who came to learn about safer boating and some basics on proper gear and boat selection as well as a little bit about navigation helped make the evening a success.

Brad Ryder of Cadillac Mountain Sports, Karen Francoeur of Castine Kayak Adventures, Lydia Morgan and Donna Cowan of the YMCA put their heads together for this successful effort. Al Johnson, who handles public education for the U.S. Coast Guard, gave the keynote speech. The Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department, MITA and the Maine Outdoor Adventure Club had folks on hand to answer questions about their organizations.

Jeff Strout’s column is published on Thursdays. He can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.