The Community of Fishing: “A Lot Has Disappeared”

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Also on the panel were Michael Radcliffe, owner of Thurston’s Lobster Pound, and George “Bud” Trask, who as a child used to fish with his father out of Bass Harbor.

Seavey’s father was born in 1895, and started tub-trawling around 1912. “Now, if you asked my dad when he started, he wouldn’t have a clue. What year it was on the calendar, it didn’t matter,” he related.

Once the trawls were set, the vessel picked the men up from the dories. They had breakfast, and then they’d go back and haul. After getting the trawls back, the fishermen dressed and iced the fish. If they got a lot of fish, they wouldn’t get back to port until late.

“So picture – you get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, get done 11 o’clock at night,” Seavey said, then joked, “and the skipper used to say, ‘That’s the trouble with these short days. You can’t get nothing done.’”

These were the days before electronic navigation devices. Fishermen contended with all kinds of weather and navigated by sextant and compass. “My father said the easiest reading to take from the sextant was the noontime sun,” Seavey said. “The hardest was to shoot the moon.”

The loss of life was tremendous. Fishing communities would set up widow funds, funded by a percentage of each fisherman’s catch. Seavey’s father fished through World War I, the Great Depression and beyond. “He told me he’s gone into Portland Harbor in the winter and seen as high as nine vessels with flags at half-mast,” he said of the loss of life in the fisheries.

Back in his father’s day, he said, one of the best fishermen in Boston was Captain Ernest Parsons. Although every man on a boat was allowed to forecast the weather and give an opinion on whether or not to start a fishing trip, Parsons always voted to fish.

“Well, that man went many years and never lost a man,” Seavey said. “He was a legend in his time. They say he could tell his wife at the Boston fish pier where he was going, the type of fish he was going to fish for, the amount of fish he would get, and the day he’d be back, and he would be accurate.”

Not only has fishing declined in recent years, but fishing communities and the fishing culture have changed, the three speakers said.

Radcliffe brought along old ledger books for folks to view, dating back to the 1930s. Thurston is the owner of Thurston’s Lobster Pound in the village of Bernard, located on Bass Harbor. His great-grandfather, Fred Thurston, purchased the property from another family member and started a wholesale lobster business, F.W. Thurston Company, in 1946. Since then, the dock on Bass Harbor has sold fuel, bait, and supplies to local fishermen, while serving as a space to purchase the lobsters they haul in.

The ledgers were notable because they contained the names of fishing families that once lived in Bernard.

“Back in the 1940s, you walked down the hill to get in your punt and row across to your boat,” Radcliffe recounted. “In those days, you could walk to work.”

When he was a kid, he said, most of the neighborhood’s homes were owned by local fishing families.

“Now, hardly any of the structures in town are owned by fishermen, and a lot of them are dark in the winter,” he said. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s just the nature of the way things go. But I do think it’s a sad thing that a lot of the guys who fish here in town now commute, some even from off the island.”

Radcliffe said today’s concerns center not only on challenges in bringing back fish populations, but on the de facto monoculture nature of the lobster fishery. “These things are kind of all related,” Radcliffe said. “The fact that we’ve become so efficient at catching groundfish, we’ve decimated those populations. And they are major predators on lobsters, both in the water column before they settle on the bottom, but also soft-shell lobsters of any size.”

The more lobsters there are, the more they reproduce – great for the lobster harvest, but further driving down species diversity. Also worrying, he said, is the potential for stressors that could one day cause the lobster population to crash. “It’s like the largest informal aquaculture project that I’m aware of, all this bait we put in the traps, all the traps we put on the bottom,” Radcliffe said. “It’s like nothing we’ve ever heard of,” said Seavey. “The old-timers predicted the demise of the fisheries, but they also predicted the demise of the lobster. But that’s where they were wrong.”

Maine’s lobster harvest in 2012 was 126 million pounds. Two decades earlier, in 1992, it was 26 million pounds. But the enormous availability of lobster on the market meant declining prices. The 2012 haul’s value was $3.7 million less than 2011.

Unintended Consequences

Radcliffe commented on another challenge to the way of life. One the local level, he said, commercial operations like his are threatened by public funding to acquire public waterfront access. While Tremont’s purchase and rehabilitation, 20 years ago, of what is now the town dock on Bass Harbor was a well-intended and successful project, it had unintended consequences on commercial operations. The town allows seafood buyers to pay a fee to set up on the dock and buy from the boats, trucking product to facilities elsewhere; and the town pays for infrastructure maintenance at the wharf. But there are also a number of dealers in the area who have had their facilities on the waterfront for generations.

“They [the town] secured a third of the working waterfront in the harbor, but they’ve made the other two-thirds of it at risk, because we can’t compete against the guys who buy lobster at the town dock because our overhead is too high,” Radcliffe said. “Now is the end of an era, I think. My daughter is the fifth generation to be here. You probably won’t see a sixth and seventh, because the industry’s changing.”

Legislating Quaintness

One member of the audience, indicating herself as a person “from away,” asked the panelists, “What do you think the future of Bernard is with respect to the local guys who used to walk down to their boats? Do you think the whole town will go to people like me?”

“I have a saying – you cannot legislate quaintness,” Radcliffe said. “I think it’s inevitable that Bernard, Bass Harbor, will become gentrified.”

“What is it about fishing as a career that keeps a person involved in it?” another audience member asked.

“You make your own schedule, go where you want to,” Radcliffe said. “It’s an adventure.” Trask recalled that fishing came naturally to him when he was a kid: “The outer harbor of Bass Harbor used to be reserved for what was called the mosquito fleet – all us little kids with punts and outboards, and 50 or 100 traps.”

Trask was about 9 years old when his father told him he could have a punt and some of his old traps. “Then he and my uncle, Cliff Rich, built me a 13-foot punt, and I went the first year with maybe 20 of his old culls and a 7-foot pair of oars. With the money I made that summer I bought a 3 ½-horse Evinrude. I built some spruce traps that winter and I fished maybe 50 the next year. And maybe 75 the third year, and I had 5 ½ horsepower. And then I ended up, because the hake came back, trawling with my father for four summers. That was 1955 through 1958. I was 12 through 15.”

The first year of haking with his father, Trask said, he had to stand on an upside-down tub so he could see over the bulkhead. One time, he recalled, he was steering and his father got a hook in his thumb.

“He had told me, Don’t put it in reverse and come on it too fast because she’ll stop,” Trask said. “Of course I panicked. Here he is walking aft with his thumb stretched out over the side. She had a riding sail on the port side. He’s got his arm around that and he was really stretched out, and I got it started again and I backed it up slowly enough, got a pair of pliers out and cut the barb off.”

Radcliffe brought out some artifacts from his family’s fishing days. His stepgrandfather was Harvey Moore. His siblings included Trask’s mother, Esther, and noted Maine author Ruth Moore. They all grew up on Gotts Island. Moore carved his fishing buoys, using a hand adze, out of blocks of cedar that he probably cut himself in the woods. Radcliffe still has Moore’s branding iron, which he used to put his initials and license number on the buoys.

It’s still tremendously hard work to ply the lobster fishery these days, noted Radcliffe, but certainly it was harder in days gone by. Fishermen used to use heavy wooden traps, which became all the heavier when they soaked up seawater. Before hydraulic hoists, they used a pulley and winch system to help them haul.

“You weren’t lifting the weight but you were taking the rope,” said Seavey. “Your arms got a lot of movement. You could feel it in your shoulders, hauling 80-fathom warp.”

Still, modern materials and technologies meant loss on another level. “One of the best things about the way they used to have to do it was the fact that they all hung out at the dock,” said Radcliffe. “There used to be a pool table down there. They’d play pool, they’d tell stories, they played jokes on each other. A lot of that was because they were forced to be there to work on the dock, to maintain all their gear. That camaraderie, the community, a lot of that has disappeared.”