FRANKLIN, Maine — May 30, 2015 — The 2015 elver fishing season has come to a disappointing end, local fishermen say.
“Horrible,” fisherman Abden Simmons described it. “I don’t think I’ve caught half of what my quota was.”
“Normally we have an eight-week season, but this year we had a four-week season,” Darrell Young, head of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, said.
The season actually began March 22, but Young didn’t catch his first elvers until May 3.
Before then the water was just too cold, he said.
“It was a really cold winter,” Jeff Nichols, spokesman for the Department of Marine Resources, said. “Cold weather does have a tendency to reduce the fishery and slow things down and make it so the elvers aren’t moving up into the rivers and streams.”
Elvers are juvenile eels that are born in the Sargasso Sea region of the Atlantic Ocean and then migrate to North American freshwater lakes and rivers. Elvers generally are caught at night in tidal rivers and streams by fishermen using funnel-shaped fyke nets or small, hand-dip nets mounted at the end of poles.
A lack of spring rain also hurt elver fishing. When water levels are low, eels swim up the middle of the streams and rivers instead of along the edges, where fishermen can catch them, Young said.