Moosehead Lake Region fishing report

By Tim Obrey, Moosehead Lake Region regional fisheries supervisor

About six years ago, we started getting a few reports from different anglers that the salmon fishing in Harrington Lake was in poor shape. The reports were from some knowledgeable people, so we took a deep look at the situation.

Harrington Lake has both a wild salmon and wild lake trout fishery. The salmon utilize the small tributaries and the outlet for spawning and nursery habitat. Over the years, ME IFW and Great Northern Paper Company fisheries staff had both surveyed these tributaries and the lake to evaluate salmon recruitment, so we had a little bit of historic data for comparisons.

We electrofished all of the tributaries and the outlet to see if recruitment was down. We also trapnetted the lake in the fall to capture adults during their pre-spawning movements. Unfortunately, we found the angler complaints to be very much warranted. We did not find any young salmon in the tributaries, and we took just a couple adults in the lake. We did find some young wild salmon in the outlet stream.

It appears that there were some unintended consequences from the placement of stoplogs in the dam. This was a requirement from the settlement process in the relicensing of the dams in the upper Penobscot drainage system back in the early 2000s. The stoplogs were intended to help wetland development in the lake, but they may have also hindered the passage of young salmon back into the lake from the outlet.

Fortunately, when the dam was rebuilt in the 1980s, Great Northern Paper made space for a future fishway. ME IFW did not want a fishway at that time because there were perch downstream and not in Harrington Lake. Both white perch and yellow perch have found their way into the lake more recently so that is no longer a concern.

We worked with the staff at Brookfield Renewable (the current owners of the dam) to remedy the situation. Brookfield engineered a fishway design for the dam and they installed the fishway

components in the summer of 2024. We appreciate Brookfield’s cooperation with this important project. We believe the new fishway will allow young salmon that are still present downstream to pass up into the lake and rebuild that fishery over time. We hope to evaluate it in the next few years.