EASTPORT, Maine — The annual Eastport Salmon and Seafood Festival returned for its 35th year Saturday as vendors and visitors filled Water Street, all while an Irish fiddle band kept the melody.
The event celebrates one of Eastport’s most important industries, salmon farming, as well as all the fisheries that have kept the city afloat over the centuries.
“The living is provided from the sea,” Jeff Crane, a longtime resident, said Saturday. “Everybody knows everybody and either they’re involved with fishing or something related to fishing.”
Straddling the border with New Brunswick, Canada, Eastport is a place of extremes. It's America’s easternmost city, its deepest natural port, and at one time, home to the world’s largest sardine cannery.
But those accolades, which have at times put the small city of barely 1,000 people at the center of global importance, have yielded to very real issues like unemployment, shifting economic focus, and the ebbs and flows of the sea.
As Caryn Chahanovich, who has lived in Eastport for her whole life, remembers, "We had some lean years. And then [COVID-19] hit, and it was even really lean.”
The decline of the sardine industry combined with fledgling tourism brought a lull to the local economy with salmon farming only picking up some of the slack.
But on Saturday, a triumph of sorts, as locals and out of staters filled Eastport’s downtown in celebration of everything this city has been, and everything it could one day be. Sunday promises to be another event-filled day, with special attention paid to the salmon farmed in the waters nearby.