Maine State Heritage Fish Signs: Milestones...

In the spring of 2018, the Maine chapter of NFC undertook NFC’s largest volunteer effort to date. An aggressive undertaking even for a large well-established organization, newly established Maine NFC worked with Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to post informational signs on Maine’s unique and important State Heritage Fish waters.

At 385 waters and counting, most of which are off the grid and accessible by dirt road only, some of which are trailless, the project will take 4-5 years to complete, and will likely never be fully implemented due to permissions, logistics, and access. But even if we can get 75% posted, and we’ll likely do better than that, we have gone a long way toward protecting these irreplaceable resources.

At the beginning of the project, we estimated it would take over 600 signs, 1500 screws and nails, a thousand or so hours, and possibly tens of thousands of miles, as well unforeseen challenges such as custom signs for public lands and tribal-owned lands, painted wood backboards for state-owned land, etc. Based on where we are now at, roughly 50% done, our estimates were pretty accurate.

Since we started, there have been many memorable milestones. Below are a few of them: