Where the fish can’t go … yet | Column

Published: August 4, 2026

Updated: August 4, 2026

Category: Maine News

Author/Source: Sandy Stott - Your Land

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Kayakers take a floating snack break on the Androscoggin River during a July 18 excursion. (Chip Spies photo)

What does one call a grouping of 15 kayaks on the Androscoggin River? A pod? A plod? A float? A bubble? A bauble? A wisdom, perhaps?

It’s July 18, and I look out over the mildly stirred water beneath the Pejepscot Dam in northwest Brunswick at our recently launched party-colored boats and get distracted by a flyby of insects. Tens of brown-winged flyers fill the air.

“Caddis flies,” says float leader Chip Spies in a satisfied voice. “Caddis flies.”

And I get the implication immediately. These insects are a sign of healthy, oxygenated water. In recent memory, these insects and much else couldn’t survive a bath, much less a larva life, in the Andro’s waters. Caddis flies presage fish possibility.

Shepherded by Scott and Keegan, our two guides from Sea Spray Kayaking, we are a lot that ranges from first-time-in-a-boat to it’s-so-familiar-I-might-sleep-here paddlers. And we have joined the nonprofit Free The Andro on a simple mission: paddle and float your way into the beginnings of relationship with this 4-mile stretch of river between the Pejepscot dam and the dam at the Mill Falls in downtown Brunswick.

If you would run and float with the river as it seeks the sea, it’s best to drive a few miles up River Road to the Pejepscot Fishing Park. There, at the end of a half-mile access road, is a put-in beneath the shadow of the Pejepscot dam. Like its cousin downstream at Mill Street, this put-in delivers you to a tame river … at least if it’s not flood time.

A solo kayaker paddles along the Androscoggin River on July 18. (Jym St. Pierre photo)

Once out on the mild swirl of current that runs by the fishing park, you can turn away from the dam and float downstream. It is both gratifying and easy work in kayak or canoe.

• • •

In late June, I got an invitation from Spies, who had been paddling his kayak in the Androscoggin just below the Brunswick Mill Dam. It was fish migration time, and the gathering of shad and herring below the dam was so thick, Spies thought he might be able to walk over the water on their backs.

“They were that many,” he wrote.

What were all these fish doing milling about? Here’s a simple answer we often share with them: trying to get home. For those of us with crammed memories that shed constantly, it may be hard to imagine, but this generation of migratory fish was following an old story. One passed down from fish to fish for well beyond the nearly 50 years since the dam at the Brunswick mill closed off the Andro completely.

“Not this year” could be perma-painted across the dam’s concrete face. “But maybe next year,” the fish might reply as they milled about in their tens of thousands. And there they made do and made their next generation, too. Free The Andro is all about making this migratory fish wish to reach the river above the dam come true.

• • •

Flowing water is Earth’s bloodstream, and this paddling is arterial passage. You are down in … even slightly more so in the deep pocket of a kayak; you are both on the water and of the water. For an ocean paddler like me, the absence of long horizon emphasizes this closeness. Even given the Andro’s quarter-mile-wide back as it nears the sea, there is a tunnel-like feeling to floating here. The banks and its often big trees rise, and we and the water slip between them. The Andro’s millennia of gnawing at the earth, cutting even through rock in search of sea level, give us a river-focus. We, too, would go down to the sea.

For most of the 4 miles we paddle or drift, there are almost no houses on the banks; we could be in a wild world. Some of that stems from an irony. When I was a child, we would visit my mother’s family not far upstream in Auburn. As we neared Brunswick on Route 1, even on a hot summer day, my mother would tell us to “roll up the windows.” Apologizing to the dog, we would. We knew that the air outside wouldn’t pass even the slightest sniff test. The nearby Andro reeked, and we hustled through as quickly as traffic would allow.

Stopping in Brunswick? Not even a remote option. On instead to little uninsulated grandparents’ summer cottage in Friendship. Phew!

Now: only the scent of water, sometime rankish as water will be, sometimes washed; always life-bearing. Sightings and soundings from the paddle day: hawks aplenty, kingfishers lining out their banks-territory, eagles; an otter, mud prints left by fox and the ubiquitous raccoon; bass dimples on the water; the overall sense of floating through a forested homeland for many.

Here’s what I heard from fish and bird and fellow paddlers: Look up and learn more about getting migratory fish passage to our homeland on Free The Andro: facebook.com/p/Free-the-Andro-61585184032616/.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission and its Steering Committee for the Restoration of Mere Brook, and a member of Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s board of directors. He writes for the AMC’s Appalachia and a variety of publications. He may be reached at [email protected].