Maine's Department of Marine Resources has launched an unusually aggressive enforcement push on the Saco River, where Marine Patrol officers wrote more than 50 summonses and 20 warnings to striped bass anglers in the space of three weeks this spring.
The violations cluster around Factory Island, where fishing is barred within 150 feet of the fishway on the Saco side and closed entirely above the Main Street bridge on the Biddeford side. The closures exist because stripers stack up below the dam as they chase migrating herring and alewives — and because too many released fish were dying there.
In an open letter to anglers on June 8, DMR Commissioner Carl Wilson made plain that patience had run out.
"Unfortunately, many of those summonsed in recent weeks on the Saco River are repeat offenders who have acknowledged understanding of the regulations yet continue to demonstrate a blatant disregard for the resource by engaging in ongoing illegal activity," Wilson said. "This disregard for our striped bass resource in the Saco River cannot continue."
Wilson tied the crackdown to the wider fight to rebuild a stock that regulators have hemmed in with a one-fish bag limit and a narrow 28-to-31-inch slot. "We've been working hard to rebuild the striped bass stock in the midst of low recruitment, and that has resulted in a narrow slot limit and low bag limit," he wrote. The violations, he added, "do not align with the conservation ethos I often hear when speaking to recreational anglers." His parting line: "Our collective actions need to change to achieve that."
Sgt. Matthew Sinclair told the Portland Press Herald the summonses have been forwarded to the local district attorney and could bring fines of $100 to $1,000, with officers confiscating rods in some cases. He described the spot below the fish ladder bluntly: "Fish in a barrel."
The scale of the problem, he said, is new. "It has become a much bigger enforcement challenge for us," Sinclair said. "The amount of violations has blown up exponentially." The closure on the Biddeford side, added in 2023, came after officers watched released fish die against the river's steep cement walls. "Just a line of dead striped bass floating down the river," he said. "There wasn't really an adequate way to handle the fish properly and release them in a healthy way."
Part of the draw is the size of the fish, with some Saco bass pushing 40 inches this year. Zach Whitener, a senior research associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, cautioned that trophy fish are not the same as a trophy fishery. "Now people are catching fewer, bigger fish," Whitener said. "It's fun to catch a big fish, but if you're not catching little fish to go with them, you can see yourself there's a population problem."
Maine anglers caught close to 840,000 striped bass last year, releasing all but about 7.3 percent of them. The enforcement squeeze is not confined to Maine: The Fisherman reported a separate striper bust in late May at Hempstead Harbor on Long Island, where New York officers ticketed anglers in the same regulated fishery that runs the length of the East Coast.
For now, Wilson's message to Saco regulars is a warning shot. "Marine Patrol Officers will continue active enforcement as necessary, to include the issuance of summonses and the seizure [of] fishing equipment used to violate the law," he wrote.