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2025 Annual Salmon Release into East Grand Lake

Frank Bolton

 

The Chiputnecticook Lakes International Conservancy (CLIC) spearheaded by the late Donald “Bones” Ellis who, before retirement as a school principal in Hodgdon, set up a program for young students to nurture salmon fry in freshwater tanks in their classrooms. In abeyance during Covid, the program resumed last year with five schools participating.

On May 23, 2025, the day scheduled for the release, the weather was far from pleasant: rainy, windy, and quite cold. As a result, not all the classes attended the event on the  release date.  The students from Jacqueline Rogers' Southside Elementary School in Houlton huddled on the bus until 10:15 when they came to the water's edge by the bridge between Orient and Fosterville NB to release their fish.

The bus with Aimee Goff's students from the Mill Pond Elementary School in Hodgdon arrived at around 10:30, simultaneously with the personnel from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The students released their fry and the IF&W dropped 1,500 trout from the bridge. In the meantime, Peter Chase began cooking hot dogs. The Houlton students ate, then carried buckets of fish to the lake while the Hodgdon students ate.

On May 29th, the students from Haley Dekeyser's Danforth Middle School class went to East Grand Lake and released 212 fry and on May 30, students from Gina Moloney's Woodland School in Baileyville released 198 fry into Grand Lake Stream. Nathan Foster's class at the Greater Houlton Christian Academy also participated in raising salmon fry.