May 21, 2026 — As summer approaches in Downeast, Maine, there is a certain sadness about visitors who no longer arrive in the border waters shared with Canada and the Passamaquoddy Tribe. For tens of thousands of years, big cod, pollock, and haddock swam into what we now call Cobscook Bay, Passamaquoddy Bay, the St. Croix River estuary, and surrounding waters. And for thousands of years, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, the people of the pollock, lived a rich life harvesting these fish.
“By 1988 it was all over,” says Jane Cowles, who with her late husband, Rick, once bought fish from the mosquito fleet in Eastport, Maine. “We were there for about ten years,” she says.
“I imagine you can still catch some to eat,” says Edward French, owner and editor of the Quoddy Tides, the easternmost newspaper in the USA. In 1998, French interviewed Reid Wilson of Eastport, Maine. Wilson had been a leader of the mosquito fleet—about twenty fishermen who buzzed out of the harbor before dawn, racing their outboard skiffs to fishing spots no one knows the names of anymore. They’d be back by noon, unloading hundreds of pounds of large and whale cod, pollock, and haddock. Eastporters loved the haddock but not the cod. “Too wormy,” they said. You couldn’t give cod away in Eastport; it all went down the road to processors in Portland and Boston. Those high-quality fish, less than 24 hours out of the water, sold for the same price as 10-day-old cod from the offshore draggers.