Every Fisherman Has a Story to Tell and Every Story is Different – Part I

by Sandra Dinsmore

Sune Noreen estimated he’s hauled more than 4,000 boats at his Jonesport Shipyard. The first thing he bought when he got the land the yard is on was a hydraulic boat hauler, the first in the region. Jonesport Shipyard photo

“Every fisherman has a story to tell, and every story is different,” said Stonington fisherman Frank Gotwals. Without question, this eastern Maine fisherman’s story is different, although it started in the usual way. He comes from a Stonington fishing family on his mother’s side. She was a Joyce. And like so many fishermen, he developed an early love for being on the water by spending a lot of time with an older relative who fished. In Gotwals’s case it was his great-grandfather, Frank Joyce.

Although Joyce worked in Boston at a freight business he eventually bought from his uncle, he was born and grew up in the Stonington house Gotwals now lives in. The house built by Joyce’s grandfather. This means six generations of Joyce’s and Gotwals have lived in Stonington. Joyce summered in Stonington, too. Gotwals recalled, “He always had a boat; he never lost that love for the sea.”

When Joyce retired, Gotwals said, “He bought an old lobster boat and so, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time with him on the water.” The two would go hand lining and mackerel fishing, and the whole family would go for picnics on islands and dig for clams. Back then, Gotwals said, “You didn’t need a recreational clam license. You’d just do it. You did need a license to dig and sell clams commercially,” Gotwals explained, but anyone could dig them for personal use.” Gotwals spent his summers in Stonington because his father was a college professor who had summers off.

Along with that love of being on the water, Gotwals, who inherited musical talent from both parents, grew up in an academic household with a love of learning and music. His mother, Carol Gotwals, a piano and voice teacher and choral director, started giving him piano lessons when he was five. Playing piano didn’t really take, but when he was 13 or 14, in the late 1960s, playing the guitar did. With money earned shoveling snow and babysitting, Gotwals bought a Yamaha classical guitar and a Peter, Paul, and Mary songbook, and taught himself how to play. Ever since along with fishing, he has played guitar, sung, and written music.

Gotwals spent most summers of his high school years raking Irish moss. In the spring of 1973 after his first year of college, he took a formal leave of absence. Because he had that Irish moss job waiting for him in Stonington, Rather than going home to Northampton, MA, where he grew up, he went to the family house in Stonington.

“I had a very supportive family,” Gotwals said. When asked what his academic family thought of his leaving college, Gotwals’s mother said, “We felt he needed to find himself by himself.” She added, “He’s always been a learner, but in a hands-on way. I call him my practical marine biologist.” Gotwals credits his parents for teaching him to work hard and not quit when things didn’t go right. “They also let me find my own way in life,” he said.

The Jonesport peapod built by the Jonesport Shipyard. It is based on the traditional peapod that was the small boat workhorse back to the early days of European settlement. Historian John Gardner suggests it’s roots are in the canoes of the Passamaquoddy tribe of downeast Maine. Jonesport Shipyard photo

“My parents almost always explained their decisions affecting us as soon as we were old enough to understand,” Gotwals explained. “They taught us to gather information and to differentiate between fact and fiction and the gray areas in between, and also how the sources of information affected how to value it.” Of his parents, he added, “They encouraged us to make decisions for ourselves and allowed us to experience the consequences and deal with them as well.

“I wasn’t intending to stay [in Stonington] necessarily,” Gotwals recalled, but when offered a job doing caretaking and light carpentry, the 18-year old took it. After completing the six months residency requirement, Gotwals got his clam license. He then dug clams and did carpentry, supporting himself for the three years of residency then required for a lobster license. And as he did, “It just became more and more obvious to me that I was probably going to stay here, and unlikely that I was going to go back to college.” Forty years later Gotwals declared, “I’ve made a life here in Stonington, a good living, and a lot of good friends. There was no way I could have anticipated that in 1973, when I came here. I might just as easily left at the end of the summer and moved on. Instead, I learned how to go fishing and was accepted.”

At one point, Gotwals did contemplate going to school for carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he really wanted to work on the water. So, he said, “I just kind of decided I was going to go. I had a family outboard (boat #1), I bought a new outboard for it when I started using it for clamming, and I just started.” Aside from basic necessities, Gotwals put his earnings from clamming, carpentry, and other jobs right back into traps.

Former co-op president Richard Bridges observed, “When Frank started, he started by clamming, but it seemed to me he was always building traps. He was always working towards being a lobster fisherman.” Bridges also noted that unlike most young fishermen starting out, Gotwals did not have a relative helping him.

In 1976, the first year he was licensed to fish for lobster, in addition to digging clams, the then 21-year-old Gotwals had about 20 traps he hauled by hand from his small outboard. “I’d scrounged together some old [traps] that people I knew gave to me, and maybe I built ten or something,” he said. “The next winter I bought some old, used traps and then I built another hundred or so brand new ones.” Gotwals said buying old beat up traps from fishermen was the cheapest and quickest way to build up a gang of traps. “Everyone built their own traps then,” he recalled, adding that back then all traps were made of wood.

Wood, fiberglass, commercial and pleasure boats all find a home at the Noreen’s new shop. Jonesport Shipyard owner Sune Noreen apprenticed with the Frost family of builders who first built this torpedo stern design in the Jonesport area around 1920. Jonesport Shipyard photo

By the fall of his second year of lobstering from an outboard, Gotwals not only had about 150 traps to haul, he was also digging clams, and, he said, “Still doing other stuff, too.” 1977 was a momentous year for the young fisherman: he became a member of the Stonington Lobster Co-op and that winter he met his future wife, Donna, and her two young children.

That fall, Gotwals and a friend from a local fishing family with a 32-foot lobster boat pooled their traps and hauled together. “Between the two of us,” Gotwals said, “we scraped together maybe 320-330 traps.” When they hauled up their traps in the fall Gotwals decided to look for his own powerboat.

He bought a 22-year-old, 32-foot lobsterboat (boat #2) built in 1955 for a local fisherman by Frank or Arno Day. “I’m not sure which of the brothers built it,” Gotwals said. “It’s possible that their father was also involved.” Gotwals was the boat’s third owner, that it had a Chevrolet gas engine, and that it cost him $5,000.

The now 21-year-old rigged it for scalloping, and though he had zero experience, he went scallop dragging. “Why I didn’t kill myself, I don’t know,” he said later. “I had no idea what I was doing. I learned by watching and asking questions. You know,” he added, “it’s the kind of thing you can only do when you’re in your early twenties. I just had a feeling I could do it. I took it seriously because I knew it was dangerous, but I wasn’t scared to try.”

Part II next month.