After the first rounds of commercial shellfish license sales in Waldoboro wrapped up this summer 59 licenses remained unissued, over 30 percent of the total available, according to Town Clerk Linda Perry.
As of July 24, after the issuance periods for all four classes of applicants had expired, there were 34 resident adult, seven non-resident adult, 16 resident student, and two non-resident student licenses still unclaimed.
“This is the most we ever had (left), this year,” Perry said.
Hearing from clammers coming in to get licenses, Perry said she has heard the flats in Waldoboro have a lot of seed clams but not many ready to harvest.
“A lot of them said it,” she said.
Glen Melvin, the vice chair of the town’s shellfish conservation committee, confirmed the clamming in Waldoboro is poor right now.
“There’s none down there,” Melvin said. “That runs everything. If we have great clamming then everyone wants to do it; if we don’t, then nobody wants to.”
Melvin pointed to green grabs as the cause.
“The green crabs wiped us out. We lost at least one generation if not two,” he said.
Melvin said the seed clams in the river take between one to three years to grow to two-inch clam that’s ready for harvest, which means it could be another year before the clamming rebounds.
“We’re hoping that the future’s seed will set in and it’ll take off in the next year or two,” Melvin said.
Bill Bragg, the town’s longtime shellfish warden, believes several factors could be contributing to the amount of leftover licenses, including the influx of green crabs last fall, rainfall, change in the licenses’ cost last year, and a lot of the old timers giving up on digging without as many younger clammers coming in behind them.
Leftover licenses happen in spurts, he said.
“I think it’s a whole host of things, I don’t think it’s just one thing,” Bragg said.
In last two years, the leftover student licenses of both varieties were roughly the same as 2014, but there were considerably fewer adult licenses left on the table, according to Perry’s records.
In 2013 there were only nine resident and three non-resident adult licenses left over after the initial issuance periods; in 2012 there were eight resident and two non-resident adult licenses left.
The total available licenses for 2014 were 150 resident adult, 19 non-resident adult, 20 resident student, and 2 non-resident student, according to town documents. Perry said the current totals have been in place for at least two to three years.
As of Aug. 28, there were still 18 resident adult, 14 resident student, and two non-resident student licenses available, Perry said.
Usually within a week or two after the initial issuance periods wrapped up, any leftover licenses would sell, Perry said.