The Edge of Maine (6 page)

Tom's story was of a misadventure that had befallen the skipper and crew of a dragger from way up west in Gloucester. This happened some years before, but what brought the story to Tom's mind, he said, was that like us this crew was Monhegan-bound, and like us they got shut in by a pea-souper. Having given up on the light on Monhegan, they were listening for the whistle nearby. No whistle. Time passed, and finally they anchored. A couple of hours later, come dawn, a lobster boat appeared nearby. “Where are we at?' asked the Gloucestermen. Matinicus was where. On a ledge was where. They'd anchored over that ledge with a foot or so to spare at the high point of a full moon tide. A month later the moon filled again, the tide washed enough water over the ledges to float the dragger, and the fishermen dragged their asses home to Gloucester.

Time to weigh anchor.

G
iovanni da Verrazzano, sailing under the flag of France, visited the coast of Maine in 1524. However much he may have admired the flora, fish, and vistas of the shore near Cape Small and Pemaquid Point, he disapproved of the natives. For their part, the Abnaki—having had previous experience of visitors “from away”—treated Verrazzano and his crew with scorn. Pierre Crignon's fabulation of glorious Norumbega fraudulently named Verrazzano as the explorer so impressed with the native inhabitants' docility and comeliness and goldsmithing skill. The facts of the encounter were otherwise: “Clothed in peltry of bear, lynx, ‘sea wolves' and other beasts,” the Indians shot arrows at the Europeans as they tried to land. Nevertheless, some primitive trade was conducted between the visitors and the visited, by the expedient of exchanging goods placed in baskets lowered from the headland cliff to the beach below. The Europeans, surrendering fish hooks and knives and receiving in return a few root vegetables, got the worst of the deal, a shame emphatically commemorated by the Abnaki, who “showed all signs of discourtesy and disdain, as was possible for any brute creature to invent, such as exhibiting their bare behinds and laughing immoderately.” Verrazzano's contempt for the natives' rude disregard for European courtesy is recorded in Samuel Eliot Morison's
The European Discovery of America,
which reports as well that the celebrated explorer baptized the Maine coast Terre Onde di Mala Gente, Land of Bad People.

The Abnaki had their grievances against explorers, and I guess many lobstermen
^*
have theirs against yachties. They dismiss sailing vessels as “blow boats,” and blow boaters either amuse or aggravate them. As with Abnaki, lobstermen run the temperamental scale from tolerant to agitated, and local history—tales told and retold at the co-op down by the town wharf—retails the individual responses to the presence of many mariners with different priorities. The captain of a container ship or the high-speed ferry bound from Bar Harbor to Nova Scotia means to go in as straight a line as possible, and his cry is, “Look out, here I come, make way!” The new ferry
Cat,
a behemoth with thirty-eight-thousand horsepower running forty miles per hour on wave-piercing double hulls, has already mowed down a fishing boat in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, killing her captain. Her huge wake comes out of nowhere, adrenaline-pumping indeed in the fog.

Right-of-way on the water seems at first glance to be a matter of common sense: Keep to the right is the basic rule. But maritime litigators make comfortable livings off the exceptions. A sailboat on starboard tack (with the wind blowing over its right rail and toward its left) has right-of-way over a sailboat on port tack. A sailboat not under engine power has right of way over a sailboat using the iron jib. A sailboat hard on the wind (sailing so close to the wind—or “pinched”—that it has limited maneuverability to windward) has right-of-way over a sailboat sailing off the wind. Sailboats have right-of-way over powerboats,
except
… there are many fine-tuned
excepts,
most matters of fundamental common sense. Except when the motorboat is dragging nets, let's say, or the oil tanker requires two miles to stop its forward motion.

Surfing the net a few years ago, looking for chart updates to navigational hazards and marks in the area of Grand Manan Island, I bumped into this transcript of a radio communication between Canadian authorities and the bridge of a United States Navy ship approaching Newfoundland in limited visibility but with state-of-the-art radar on October 10, 1995. The transcript was released by our Chief of Naval Operations:

 

A
MERICANS:
Please divert your course fifteen degrees to the north to avoid a collision.

C
ANADIANS:
Recommend you divert YOUR course fifteen degrees to the SOUTH to avoid a collision.

A
MERICANS:
This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

C
ANADIANS:
No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
AMERICANS:
THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER U.S.S.
LINCOLN,
THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS, AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE FIFTEEN DEGREES NORTH, THAT IS ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTERMEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.

C
ANADIANS:
This is a lighthouse. Your call.

 

The owner and skipper of
Never Again V,
an awl-gripped flag-blue Hinckley Bermuda 40, gleaming with varnished mahogany, all sails flying and pushed by a hearty nor'wester through Merchant Row, believes he owns the goddamned world. He flew in from New York last night and he's here to have some serious fun. That idiot hauling pots ahead better scoot, chop-chop, here I come, make way! The captain of the
Susan B. Anthony,
who has felt obliged to concede right-of-way to an oil tanker or the
Cat,
thinks that blow boater might cut him some slack. This is where he works, after all, and an hour ago he had to dodge around for a string of sea kayakers—
ten
of them lined up like a string of ducklings by a sea-adventure operator out of Bar Harbor. He's had a hard morning slamming into a right chop kicked up near Leach Rock, and his sternman—between torturing his back on the hauling wheel, pulling fifty-pound traps, and sucking diesel fumes and the stink of rotten bait—has reported a whole string of traps missing, hundreds of dollars' worth of them, their buoys no doubt cut loose by
that very asshole,
all sails drawing, bearing down on him now. That yawtsman—busy admiring the epic grandeur of granite and spray and the picturesque little lobster boats—no doubt tangled the buoys' warp around his centerboard or rudder or propeller. This intruder would be the fellow yawt club member of the sailor who languished at the fuel dock yesterday afternoon when the
Susan B. Anthony
was waiting to fill up for today's work after a hard morning on the water. Even worse than kayakers are Massachusetts hippies who tie up to the public float and walk around Stonington in rubber suits and maybe buy a granola bar. What good are those people? Not to mention that this lobsterman has a cousin who caught a guy in a big sailboat hauling one of his traps to score a free dinner under the stars with his wife and kids in the cockpit. Story was, mebbe so, mebbe not, that after that encounter a few blow boats sailing into Carver's Harbor got moose-rifle bullet holes in their Hood Easi-Stow mainsails. Story also was that a blow boat the very same color as the boat of that asshole who is still
not
changing course had attached to the propeller shaft a lobsterman-loathed device named SPURS, a weed, net, and line cutter with razor-sharp blades rotating at about three thousand rpm. With SPURS in place, the yawtsman had no need to dodge trap buoys here in Merchant Row, the most densely lobster-tapped minefield in the Gulf of Maine. That fella yonder could just run his engine in gear and cut through a dozen buoy warps during an afternoon outing, leaving a few hundred dollars worth of traps lost on the bottom.

Now someone had to give way, and the
Susan B. Anthony
gave way to
Never Again V,
whose helmsman gave a manly wave of acknowledgment as he boiled past, and received a return salute, middle finger raised and pumping up and down. This was an old story, but every now and then its reciprocating plot components build sufficient pressure for a new story, such as unfolded before my family and me a few years ago in these very waters. We were aboard
Skyfair,
a thirty-five-foot Duffy & Duffy powerboat with the lines and handling characteristics of a lobster boat. We had chartered her for two weeks out of Bucks Harbor on Eggemoggin Reach, not far from where she'd been built. We were a week into our cruise and every day seemed better than the day before. We'd been ranging the coast between Cape Rosier and Schoodic, and on this day we had spent the previous night at anchor in Burnt Coat Harbor, on Swans Island, and we were entering Merchant Row from Toothacher Bay. We were in what is arguably the most thrilling body of water in the Gulf of Maine, which is to say in the world. Throttled back to a modest ten knots, we were making what would have seemed from the air like a drunkard's erratic path through the obstacle course of lobster pot buoys. It was a bright, bright afternoon, the light coming brilliantly off the chop, and it was so good that we were laughing at nothing. I was aboard with Priscilla and Justin and Megan, Justin's fiancée; we had bought from a fisherman a few hours earlier a piece of tuna that we meant to grill in the cockpit. All that remained to complete our happiness was a snug anchorage, and we had many to choose among. There are dozens of islands in this archipelago—Grog and Enchanted and Hells Half Acre and Devil and Wreck—and the pink and rose and orange granite shores are ornamented by dark evergreens. This is quarry country, the source of the granite that built the Library of Congress, the U.S. Treasury building, the Naval Academy, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the grave of President Kennedy.

We chose McGlathery, owned by Friends of Nature and inhabited by woolly wild sheep. It was a Sunday night, and after we got settled several other boats came in, all cruising sailboats, one of them a windjammer. McGlathery has a lot of room, and everyone was respecting one another's territory, and talk and laughter were subdued. A couple of sea kayakers had drawn their boats up on the beach. I don't want to suggest that being at anchor in that place was like visiting a cathedral, but you see the picture. In the cockpit of
Skyfair
we had a couple of rum drinks, and about an hour before sunset we marinated the tuna and fired up the grill. We saw smoke curling in the light breeze from the transoms of a few other boats; the sea was flat calm, as it often is at that time of evening, so we had been careless about stowing our cruising paraphernalia: cameras, binoculars, plates and bowls, the rum bottle and ice bucket.

Many lobster boats have business in these waters, so hearing an engine whine nearby wasn't odd. This engine, though, was unmuffled, and it reminded me that the week before there had been lobster-boat races out of nearby Stonington. These are taken seriously by boatbuilders and the lobstermen, who devote great ingenuity and much money to setting speed records. Speed in a lobster boat is not a frivolity when you are racing competitors to market, and even sailors from away have respect for the enterprise. Now it seemed we were to see a fast one up close, because it was approaching at thirty-five, maybe forty knots. We expected it to throttle back to an idle, right now! It didn't throttle back; the boat, red-hulled with gray trim, its name covered with a piece of canvas, came through the anchorage at top speed, the helmsman and sternman neither laughing nor frowning. They looked straight ahead, as though we weren't there, and did a circle around us all and headed back where they came from.

Nobody capsized in the surflike wake, but Priscilla was in the galley and a heavy pot of boiling spuds fell to the cabin sole and gave her an awful scare. We lost the tuna off the grill, and cameras fell from the cockpit table, and glasses broke, and dishes. And of course shouts of fury rose from the anchorage, and as the sun fell over McGlathery it occurred to us that we might not be welcome in these waters.

This shouldn't have come as a shock. I'm privileged to be an acquaintance of Proctor Wells, a town selectman in Phippsburg and the father, brother, son, grandson, and great-grandson of men and women who have fished out of the sea just about every kind of thing the sea provides. My elder son Nicholas has shipped out with Proctor during the past several summers, as a research scientist investigating lobsters in their larval and pre-juvenile stages, east from Boothbay to the Canadian border. Proctor's
Tenacious,
a Westec 49 rigged for ground fish, tuna, shrimp, and lobster, for an investment of half a million dollars, is as well-equipped as a working vessel gets, and Proctor puts it to the service of scientific inquiry because he has no beef with science. His curiosity about how many fish there are—and where they go, and how much fishing they can sustain—trumps his sense of partisanship. He is a man of very strong feelings—listen with him to a Yankees v. Red Sox game on a radio tuned in from Roque Island—but he takes the long view. He worries about plenty of things: Are lobster hauls sustainable? Can cod make a comeback? Do federal courts understand or care that their rulings, sometimes capricious, put families out of work? He worries a lot—as a selectman—about waterfront. The Wells family has held since colonial times a priceless piece of property in Sebasco, near the mouth of the New Meadows River. Proctor's mother lives in the big house, keeping watch over a large, working boathouse and a dock where she keeps (and uses) her tuna boat, and where Proctor and his brothers keep their boats. The value of such property to a rusticator must be dizzying to contemplate, but tax assessors sure know how to compute it. These taxes have ruined many a fisherman. Among the ones who sold out their shorefront land because they couldn't afford to keep it, some continue to fish. They live inland, in a comfortable ranch house or maybe a double-wide. To reach their lobster boats they must drive to their dinghies, pulled ashore on some generous soul's rocky beach. Scrabbling over these seaweedy rocks they earn a name—“kelp rats”—that I suspect they don't find amusing.

All of them can tell stories about those from away who have bought once-working waterfront land. Proctor tells of the lady from Chicago who bought harborfront property in Phippsburg, and after her contractor had torn down the house that came with the property and built a grander one, she moved in. The afternoon following her first morning on the water, she phoned her selectman to complain:

“Is it really necessary for those fishing boats to make so much noise when they pass our house?”