Saco Salmon Restoration Alliance & Hatchery
P.O. Box 115, Saco, ME 04072
We are a publicly funded all-volunteer non-profit organization. Our volunteers are continuing to contribute between 2000 and 3000 hours yearly to keep our salmon hatchery in operation.
Saco Salmon Restoration Alliance & Hatchery – 2024 News
January 2024
In 2023, volunteers contributed 2008 hours to help maintain the hatchery and our organization.
Sarah Bourdeau and Mia Meister are UNE students who have joined our volunteer staff, and they will be helping us until May 2024.
February 2024
We have two UNE citizenship volunteers helping at the hatchery. Anna Sinclair and Tyler Druck. Citizenship volunteers are requested to complete fifteen hours of volunteer service.
Dan and Denis have developed a self-contained system for incubating eggs that we receive from the University of New England (UNE) Marine Science Center (MSC), and it is currently operational. We received some small fertilized wild Atlantic salmon eggs from our UNE broodstock which Denis is incubating to see if any will eye-up.
Our Fish Friends volunteers, Pam, David, and Connor are making sure that the twelve area schools that are participating have the necessary equipment and supplies and are prepared to receive eyed up eggs for educational purposes. The schools are then provided with instructions on how to set up and operate their aquariums. For this season, eyed-up eggs will be sourced from the Green Lake Fish Hatchery for the Fish Friends program and the schools will receive their eggs on March 6th.
As of 2/5/24, the hatchery volunteers are taking care of sixteen e-fished parr and sixty-nine smolts that are 3.5 – 4.5 years old. The UNE MSC is holding 121 broodstock.
The broodstock is getting older and it is now becoming more of a problem getting good eggs from the ageing broodstock. We will be having meetings with UNE, Division of Marine Resources (DMR), Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IF&W) and NOAA to discuss if we can get more adults, smolts or Parr for the program.
We are working on securing eyed up eggs for 2025 from another source that is south of us for the Fish Friends program and egg planting.
March 2024
UNE stocked fifty wild Atlantic salmon in the lower Saco River below Cataract Falls on March 10th. That leaves seventy-one salmon broodstock in the tank at the UNE GMSC.
April 2024
UNE has decided to cancel our agreement for the broodstock program and return the remaining salmon to our hatchery in May. The reason is that they are upgrading the MSC to manage all life stages of the entire broodstock program. UNE has received funding from another source for the upgrades to the MSC and will not need to be funded this year from SSRA&H for the broodstock program.
May 2024
Seventy-one salmon broodstock were returned to the hatchery from UNE on May 11th. We now have a total of one hundred fifty-five wild Atlantic salmon in the hatchery to take care of.
All the student volunteers have finished their volunteer hours at the hatchery. Our regular staff will take care of the salmon until next fall when the UNE students return to school.
June – July 2024
One UNE graduate student is helping us this summer along with our regular staff. We are maintaining the hatchery and performing maintenance as needed to keep the salmon happy and the hatchery operational.
August 2024
Work is continuing in the new space for holding all ages of fish in the UNE MSC. Discussions have not yet begun regarding funding or receiving wild Atlantic salmon broodstock and smolts from the hatchery.
Sept – Oct 2024
We currently have eleven citizenship volunteers helping to keep the fish happy and healthy. Citizenship volunteers spend 15 hours at the hatchery learning the whole operation. Antoine Mier, UNE Graduate 2023, to assist Garry with the volunteer coordination at the hatchery.
Dr. Rex Yoon was hired by the UNE MSC and is interested in performing research work at the hatchery with students’ help. The hatchery may have to be certified by UNE Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Note: When Antoine Mier, UNE intern in 2023 was volunteering at the hatchery, he followed all the guidelines required by IACUC.
Earlier this year, SSRA sought out a variety of potential sources of Atlantic salmon stock for placement in the Saco River watershed. After months of communication and cooperation between Maine and Connecticut officials, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection agency advised that it was unable to provide eyed eggs as hoped from this year's spawn. We have been informed that their agency requires additional time to plan, staff and prepare hatchery operations to conduct and complete fish health sampling requirements and for those reasons our request was denied for this year. Although we received conditional permit approval for these Atlantic salmon eggs for transport from Maine authorities this year, CT DEEP has invited us to restart the process and make another request for 2025
November 2024
We currently have 13 UNE citizenship volunteers at the hatchery. The students have planned to complete 15 hours of training before the end of this semester.
December 2024
All the UNE student citizenship volunteers have completed their citizenship hours at the hatchery and have headed home for the holidays. We were grateful to have the extra help this fall.
Our regular staff are continuing to volunteer at the hatchery to help keep it in operation. Except for Dan LeBlond, Director, who has retired to Florida for the winter. He is available to answer technical issues regarding hatchery operations if John Blunt is not available.
Volunteers have had three successful wild Atlantic salmon spawning sessions at the hatchery as of December 29th. John Blunt, President and Hatchery manager, reported that we have at least 45,000 good looking green eggs so far.
January 2025
As of 1/15/25, we had a total of 135 salmon in our hatchery.
There were two more spawning sessions in January at the hatchery resulting in a total of about 60,000 salmon eggs being incubated at the hatchery. Eyed-up egg planting will begin January 25th and last for four weekends. Our eyed-up eggs will be planted in Swan Pond Creek in Dayton with our Redd-o-Matic equipment.
The Fish Friends program sponsored by the Maine Council of the Atlantic Salmon Federation will continue this year with eggs supplied from the Green Lake fish hatchery. We have at least four volunteers helping distribute eyed-up eggs to fifteen area schools.
Max Wassitsch, our UNE Intern this semester, will be helping to keep the fish healthy and perform the necessary maintenance to keep the hatchery in operation.
Newsletter prepared by Garry Kasten & David Adams
Thank you all for your generous support.