For the first time since 1979, Isle au Haut’s thoroughfare is set to be dredged to a depth of six feet in the fall of 2026.
Over the past 47 years, the channel has filled in to the point where sometimes, during extreme low tides, the Isle au Haut mailboat has to go around Kimball Head, which takes extra time and fuel.
The mailboat captain, Garrett Aldrich, said that it has become worse in the past few years and sometimes they have to change the schedule or even cancel a trip due to extreme low tides.
Abigail Hiltz, first Select Board member on Isle au Haut, said the board had been reaching out to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for several years before it sent a project manager out to Isle au Haut last spring and progress began to quicken.
“In the grand scheme of dredging projects in the state of Maine, it’s not a huge project, which is good and probably also hindered us because we [aren’t] as much of a priority,” Hiltz said.
Hiltz said the Select Board leveraged the fact that the mailboat provides emergency services for the island, and the channel helps expedite those services. They also used the fact that the mailboat provides access to the national park on Isle au Haut. Aldrich said that the mailboat ferries between 3,000 and 5,000 passengers to the park every summer.
Although the town of Isle au Haut had asked the Army Corps to dredge the thoroughfare as early as 1910, the 1,200-foot-long and 75-foot-wide channel wasn’t established until 1958, according to the corps’ website.
The Isle au Haut historical society states that prior to 1958, the mailboat landed at Point Lookout’s private dock and was moored at the northern end of the thoroughfare. If a local wanted to board the boat from town, they had to row out to the boat from the school beach.
Since the channel between Isle au Haut and Kimball Island is a federally designated channel, the cost to dredge the thoroughfare is paid for by the federal government.
In a Sources Sought Announcement on SAM.gov, the Army Corps said it expects the time needed to dredge the required 3,355 cubic yards of material to take one to four weeks and cost between $1 million and $4 million. For comparison, in 1979, the estimated cost for the dredging was between $25,000 and $100,000 to remove 650 cubic yards.
No moorings will need to be moved, as the dredging won’t take place in the harbor. Lobstermen, though, will have to remove any fishing gear from behind Flake Island, which is where the dredged material will be deposited.
Hiltz said that the deposited material behind Flake Island created good lobster fishing last time, and hopefully the same thing happens this time.
