Caty and Perley Frazier’s Lobster Shack

by Sandra Dinsmore

Caty and Perley Frazier. He and Caty operate the truck three days a week in summer, but for the last two summers. “It’s a 12- to 14-hour day. It’s a lot of work.” Marjorie Mills photo

Stonington lobsterman Perley Frazier and his bookkeeper wife, Caty, already busy with their own primary businesses, started what they thought would be a retirement business in 2007, operating a seafood truck. As Caty explained, “Perley said, ‘You know, we’ll start slowing down, and we’ll have the truck. We won’t fish as hard, and you won’t work as hard.’ She then said, “We work twice as hard on the truck.”

Perley hasn’t slowed down though he’ll be 68 in September. He fishes five and sometimes six days a week and said, “I can make more money fishing than I can on that truck.”

That’s because although when he sells his catch on the truck he’s selling retail, it’s only a tiny percentage of his overall catch, which he sells to a wholesale lobster dealer. “On a good day,” Perley said, “we might sell 100 lbs. on the truck.”

He made clear though, “You can make as much as you want to if you want to work it seven days a week,” but explained that he only works the seafood truck in the summertime three days a week and that he and Caty do both organic and regular farmers’ markets. He said, “We do the Stonington market in Friday for two hours, then we’re in Orono Saturday for three or four hours. And we go to Bar Harbor Sunday for three hours,” noting that there are other markets around and they’re profitable to do, but he stopped for a moment then explained, “Long hours, long days.”

He and Caty operate the truck three days a week in summer, but for the last two summers Perley’s daughter, Lindsay and her husband, Brad Copeland, have done it on Saturdays and Sundays. Caty takes it on Fridays, and Perley and Caty do the truck themselves once a month, Perley said, “because people want to see us, Cate and I. They tell me, ‘We can buy fish anywhere, but we can’t listen to you anywhere else.’”

Perley’s daughter and son-in-law had been considering doing a seafood truck business in Florida, where they live, so when Perley had a triple bypass operation a couple of years ago, Caty and Perley asked them to come up and run the truck for them on summer weekends.

There’s a lot of planning and preparation, Caty said. “You have to know, like, three days in advance what fish you want to do. I have to run over and get the smoked mussels. I have to run up and get the crabmeat, and I have to get the clams. There’s stuff I have to go to Sullivan [from Deer Isle] to pick up. So there are a lot of fish stops in the morning to make sure everything is on the truck.”

As for Perley, who has had two pacemakers since the original bypass, he’s up at 4:30 and between then and 5 a.m. he goes down to the shore to get fresh lobsters. (“The less they’re out of the water, the better,” he said.)

Then it’s an hour and 45 minutes to get to Orono followed by a four-hour market. Then an hour and 45 minutes to get back to Stonington. As Perley said, “By the time we get back and clean all the dishes and wash everything, cause you have to be ready the next morning, it’s a 12-hour day.”

“It’s a 12- to 14-hour day,” corrected Caty. “It’s a lot of work. And we knew this, which is why we wanted Lindsay and Brad to try it here first, so they would know what they were getting into.” Keeping the Lobster Shack seafood truck HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) clean is a tremendous amount of work. And that’s not all:

“You get people calling you at 9 o’clock placing a pre-order,” Caty continued, adding that the calls come in at 9 p.m., not a.m. “They have to leave a message on the answering machine,” she said, “because we’re already in bed.”

When they get there with the truck, they often find a line of 10 to 15 people waiting for them. “They’ve lined up where they want us to park.” Marjorie Mills photo

Although all the preparation and cleanup is hard, both Perley and Caty enjoy the actual market. When they get there with the truck, they often find a line of 10 to 15 people waiting for them. “They’ve lined up where they want us to park,” Caty said. “They tell us where we have to park that week.”

“They’ll keep other people from parking there,” Perley said, adding that the week before the interview they had an automotive problem and were an hour late.

“We put it on Facebook that we were going to be late,” Caty said, “and they waited for us,” she said of their customers. “They are the nicest people.”

Some of these customers have Lobster Shack debit cards. “We have four levels,” Caty explained: “$100, $250, $500, and $750. The customer pays us one of those amounts, and we give them, 5 or 10 percent extra depending on which level they purchase. We load their money onto the card and they can come in and buy anything on the truck using their card.”

But despite eager customers with debit cards, from January through April the Fraziers do the truck only twice a month.

“One time we got as far as Dedham in an ice storm,” Perley recalled. “Cars were lined up by the side of the road. The truck started to go in a circle. We hauled down to the family store down there. We turned around and came home. Froze the fish.”

“We put it on our Facebook page,” Caty continued. “ ‘We’re going to have to freeze everything.’ And the next time we went up to the market they all came and they all bought our frozen stuff.”

“They don’t buy frozen if they can help it,” explained Perley, “But they did it because of the storm,” said Caty, finishing his sentence. “They knew …”

“To help us out,” said Perley.

“That’s how loyal they are,” said Caty, which explains why a bookkeeper with her own business, Island Bookkeeping (Perley is not allowed in her office, but even if he were, Caty said he wouldn’t know the password, so he couldn’t see her customers’ files), and a fisherman who has had congestive heart failure, a triple bypass and two pacemakers, the last one just added in mid-January—he’s fine now—put in all that work and those long days.