The Connecticut River Valley Is About To Get Big

Federal grants highlight the region’s boating and fishing splendor.

- Steve Knauth

Emmett Lyman can remember being a boy, trying to boat and play along the Connecticut River during the 1950s and ‘60s. It just wasn’t the kind of place that any boy’s mother wanted him to hang out.

“It was an absolute sewer,” he says. Now a first selectman in East Haddam, Connecticut, Lyman is also a member of the Connecticut River Gateway Commission, a conservation group that, among other things, has worked to clean up the waterway. “It’s remarkable what has happened in the last 40 to 45 years,” Lyman says.

“The river is now pristine all the way up into Suffield and above. The fish are coming back, along with the eagles and ospreys. That makes the river a very special place.”

Lyman and other officials are now working to ensure that boaters have access to everything the modern-day Connecticut River offers. In mid-June, he joined U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-CT, and Rob Klee, commissioner of the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, at a ceremony to announce new facilities being opened and planned thanks to Boating Infrastructure Grants (BIG) from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The BIG program’s goal is to create transient access points and services for boats 26 feet and larger, as a way to increase marine tourism. The grants, funded by taxes on fishing equipment, trolling motors and more, are available to municipalities, public agencies or private facilities along the Connecticut River.