Sunken logs in waterways inspire Maine entrepreneur

ENFIELD – For almost as long as he has been a diver, Bruce Loring has been fascinated by the amount of wood in Maine’s water bodies.

“You have to look, but you can find a fair amount of wood if you look for it,” Loring said Tuesday. “It’s remarkably well-preserved, even in the [Penobscot] River where it’s not that deep. It tends to be very well-preserved.”

It might be too waterlogged to use as firewood, but water-body wood, typically called sinker logs, has an array of uses from furniture to musical instruments. Environmentally conscious consumers like it because it’s already dead and felled and, in many cases, several decades old, said Loring, who has found wood at the bottom of the Penobscot, Cold Stream Pond and Moosehead Lake.

Loring isn’t the first to make the discovery. Millinocket’s John Dicentes has long extolled the wealth and utility of wood found in the Katahdin region’s water bodies.

But Loring and his business partner, Thom Labrie, plan to start harvesting sinker logs this summer. Their Underwater Wood Specialists Co. of Enfield will be aided in their efforts by a $10,990 grant from The Maine Technology Institute that they are matching with $15,750 of their own funds.

The company’s award was among 25 seed grants given to technology companies across Maine. Nearly $265,500 was awarded, leveraging more than $680,000 from other sources, as part of MTI’s latest round of grant awards.

Underwater Wood Specialists will develop a system for locating, tagging, inventorying and harvesting sinker logs that can be used by artists, craftspeople and wood products manufacturers.

As someone who has kept a close eye on Millinocket’s water bodies for decades, DiCentes was impressed with Loring’s initiative.

“They used to say that 1 to 2 percent of logs from the old river runs went to the bottom,” DiCentes said Tuesday, “so overall if you look back at when river runs started back in the early 1900s, you can figure that there are probably millions of cords of wood all along these rivers, ponds and lakes.”

One estimate placed 900,000 cords of wood at the bottom of Ferguson and Quakish ponds, he said. “And that’s just two ponds behind the mill,” he said.

About 10 years ago, someone tried harvesting sinker logs in Katahdin, but the effort ran out of money not too long after it began, DiCentes said.

Other MTI grants are going to:

. Naturally Exquisite of Camden, which will research the use of Maine blueberry leaves and Maine sea kelp as added ingredients in skin care product manufacturing by developing a process of extracting and processing blueberry leaves. The grant request of $9,178 is matched with $9,436.

. The Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor will create a device to automate in vitro fertilization procedures and thus increase quality of its IVF services. The grant request of $12,500 will be matched with $12,500.

MTI seed grants of up to $12,500 are offered on a competitive basis to support early activities for product development, commercialization or business planning and development. A company may only be awarded up to a total of $25,000 in seed grants for a specific project. Each grant requires a one-to-one match of actual cash, salaries, staff time or equipment directly attributable to the proposal. Seed grants are awarded six times annually.

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