From The Narrows

“Swift Water” Committee March 16^th, 2001

Ice fishing ended yesterday (March 15^th), and most of the ice shacks have been hauled away. The buoys are frozen in, and one can just barely see the orange stripe around the top peeking up in the snow. Living here year ‘round, we are just about ready to see the flat, white blanket yield to dark waters spotted with white caps rolling through the Narrows.

This has been some winter. With a mile and a half of fire road to plow, we’ve been quite busy. We’ve had about 90.1 inches of snow this season so far, but there have been some differences from other years. We’ve not had the usual January/February thaw, so it’s left us with a snow pack of about 28 inches.

Because of seasonal winter temperatures, with very few warm rain events, the snow is light in texture, but even so, I’m told the snow pack translates into about 7 or 8 inches of water, should it be melted. One guess is that when we have the first spring rain (any day now), the snow may absorb the brunt of it; when we get the second rain event, however, the brooks and streams will really run.

Now, whether you step out on your deck with your morning coffee and look up at Granite or Ragged Mountains, Grapevine Ridge toward the Buttermilks, Ladd or Moulton hills, or at Benson Mountain…whatever your view… all that snow and new rains are going to run off into Sebec. You see, we have a watershed area of some 327 square miles which feeds directly into the lake. This is one of the largest watershed areas in relationship to the size of the lake in Maine.

President Dave Raymond appointed a committee to enter into a dialog with the Swift River folks who operate the dam in Sebec. We met in early March for the first time, and we learned a lot about how the dam functions, about the mutual interests that camp owners and the power generators share, and about the realities of the above-mentioned quirks of nature.

The lake right now is at about the level it is when the water is lowered in the fall. That puts things in a good position to accept the inevitable melt-off. The splashboards are off at the dam, and the river can accept more water downstream. One of those quirks of nature, though, is that in early December we had a wicked rain, raising the lake, which then froze, leaving ice kind of high on the shoreline. The lake subsequently was drawn off and has remained at its low mark under the ice. When the eventual melt-off occurs, the lake will rise, and may lift that ice, along with whatever is attached to it.

By this time a year ago, we had a terrific rain around March 1^st and another around the 12^th which really raised havoc with the ice which was breaking up on the lake. So far this year the warmth of spring has been graceful, and we haven’t seen the inevitable rain event. But rest assured, it’s coming…it’s not “if,” but “when.”

The committee and the operators of the dam are committed to maintaining a safe balance between nature’s wrath and man’s love for his property. There’s one gate open at the present time, and there’s a temporary equipment repair underway at the other gate to try to get us safely through the spring. Parts for permanent repair are on order and, assuming the temporary repair holds, the permanent repair will be done when drier weather comes and the turbine gate can be closed for the necessary time.

The facts are that there’s a lot of snow to melt, there’s a lot of land mass to leach into Sebec Lake, and spring rains are inevitable. It’s also fact that the operators of the dam are prepared and committed and they share the interests of those who live on Sebec’s shores. Now it appears to be a question of how benevolent nature will be to us.