Outpost Matinicus

Being a Good Stranger

2012-01-26T14:49:00.000-08:00

This week, I've learned to cut and help thread and assemble 2 inch cast iron pipe to outfit a new oil tank. This is not like other plumbing I've faked my way through in life. Cast iron pipe in a 2 inch diameter has about as much give as 2 inch cast iron pipe. Oh yeah. Right, so the pieces really need to meet up exactly. The threads are cut with a very serious piece of power equipment that can lift a large person off the ground if it becomes fetched up, misaligned, or there is not enough oil squirted on it. Nowhere in my farming, musicking, fishing, lawyering or home fixup have I done this before. My mentor can do it all asleep.

Installing circulation pumps. Cracking old very medieval cast iron drains. Rolling, documenting and dollying gas bottles. Refreshing my feeble knowledge of cutting, cleaning and soldering copper pipe. I've only torched a couple, but I'm watching a master and paying attention. Taking apart oil burners and learning the components. Many new puzzlers over how things work, where does that pipe go, what's this for, how long does it take for a soldered joint to cool down, what is that rash on my arm.

Being new at things is probably really good for the brain. In my rock hopping, I've had more than the usual middle aged man's share of being the new guy in the office, on the boat, on the construction site, in the school environment, at the bar. I sometimes feel envious watching masters, people who have long term devotion to a particular skill, being such a jack myself. More often, though, I love the buzz I get from adapting and integrating in unfamiliar places, groups and tasks. I actually think that this is a distinct skill set as much as being a master plumber or tax lawyer. I'm a master novice. It is a rich experience.

I'm still in my first month on a new street on a different island working a new job. Even tasks and tools I'm somewhat familiar with are challenging in a new context. The super fancy chop saw with the laser sight and automatic dust collector stymied me for a few minutes until I found the "on" switch. No chop saw I'd ever used had such a thing. I just plugged 'em in and pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, the plumber is waiting for a 15 7/8" piece of 2X4. A hundred of these challenges present themselves every day and there is a gradual sense of how to rapidly and quietly fit into the new niche.

A few pointers for any of you thinking about diving into the novel situation. Have big ears, big eyes and a small mouth. Talk and joke enough to assure everyone you're not a poorly programmed antisocial animatronic device, but watch, listen, breath in the details. Pay close attention to unfamiliar words. Memorize where things are. Don't be afraid to take on a completely new and alien task. Do be afraid of breaking things or making mistaken assumptions. Ask questions quietly, and don't ever, ever try to sound like you know something about something you don't really know about. Let people get to know you, but don't rush it. Take an interest in the interests of your new people. Smile. Absorb. Forgive your own awkwardness.

The Temporary Normalcy Adventure

2012-01-23T16:27:00.000-08:00

Today is Monday. I did not work yesterday. I did work today as a plumbing assistant. My work schedule is Monday through Friday 7 am to 4 pm. This is remarkable in my life. Work begins and ends at particular times instead of flooding into or eluding and thwarting me during every possible moment and configuration of days.

The furnace needed to go in through a bulkhead entrance. First puzzle: Bulkhead doors open approximately 3 inches- several feet short of the gap through which a boiler will fit- because two new decks and stairways were constructed too close on either side. Doors must be detached from their hinges. Having been detached from my hinges myself, I can say that the doors came through it a lot better than I do.

Second puzzle: cellar stairs have to come out, but are screwed into the concrete floor and fitted extremely snugly against the concrete walls. After undoing the anchor screws, the process of trying to lever the staircase out is unsuccessful. Taking off one piece at a time in hopes of removing only just enough to get the assembly out works great, except that "just enough" means every last piece gets unscrewed.

The furnace is lowered thanks to a hydraulic boom truck- very handy thing. I'm much more used to a bunch of guys shoving, swearing and in disorderly but effective fashion moving heavy things with only a grudging tolerance or complete indifference to the concept of planning for the effects of mass and gravity. The boiler and oil tank are in within 5 minutes. Preparing the way required an hour's action by the puzzle squad.

Puzzle three: test plugs that don't fit in bath tub drains. Another process I never gave any thought to was checking new plumbing for leaks. My method is to wait for drips from the ceiling or other incontrovertible evidence of leakage. The pros substantially complete the system and then put caps or plugs on all the pipes and drains and use an air compressor to huff and puff and stuff a lot more air in the pipes than would comfortably fit at sea level atmospheric pressure. As the air seeks somewhere less crowded to go, we watch the pressure gauge for nice dry evidence of leakage.

One little obstacle today is that the bath tub has both a drain and an overflow opening. Plugging the pipe far enough down to catch both air escape routes is not an option. Unfortunately, the tub drain is a wee bit too big for one plug and way too small for another. Solution? Not duct tape. Not a paper clip. Process of elimination leaves only one other possibility: Rubber bands. They provide just enough additional circumference to get a good seal, though the first time Rex charges the system...pop! goes the innovative hybrid plug. Next time, I twist a little harder on the wingnut. Not as messed up as it sounds. And it holds.

Thus goes the day. The day with a schedule. Not the coin flip of having to either go like buggery or be idled depending on sunrise, wind direction or when high tide is. Tomorrow the schedule will be the same. How about that? Two days in a row!

Generosity to a Stranger

2012-01-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

New situations are usually invigorating for me. New locations, work, people. A new route to the grocery store. A different pub. Learning where lightswitches are, how to work different machines. Learning faces and names. I love traveling, especially when the adventure is shared with others who also enjoy the new.

Our first seasonal migration to North Haven was not immediately such an experience for me. After the first couple of days where I had the initial rush of experiencing the new house footprint, neighborhood, beer store, school, community center and airport, I had to go back to Matinicus because that's where work was, along with many, many hastily abandoned tasks to be completed.

I have also had epic amounts of financial stress, guilt and shame. Since the decision to move was made, there was not one minute of a day of the last 3 months when I wasn't pinched in the abdomen worrying about imminent bankruptcy. A new household to pay for. The old one to hold onto. Transport. Lisa and I both trying to get new businesses off the ground and neither having anything approaching full time work.

Things happened gradually, then suddenly. The biggest was that in the midst of up- all- night despair and thoughts off auctioning my body parts to research facilities and non stop door to door, phone and email begging for work, a kind soul offered me a job. It's work I enjoy doing and will keep me busy and help me catch up with the encyclopaedic sheaf of overdue bills I've been stuffing out of sight.

Now I'm back with a light heart enjoying the business of fitting in to a new community. I went bike exploring today up the South Shore Road. I came back well frozen. I am a child roaming a new place. Monday, I will try to honor the generosity Mr. Crockett showed in taking a chance on a stranger.

Year End Inventory

2011-12-31T13:56:00.000-08:00

On this New Year's Eve, I'll be blunt: I'm pretty happy to see the departing back side of 2011.

Despite this truth, even in a year like this has been, there were many great days, high highs and large fun times with the best friends a person can have. A brief, spotty list with partial anonymity to protect the unindicted co-conspirators follows.

January- I got to finally redo the younger kids' rooms while they were skiing with their classmates at Sugarloaf.

February- St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Holy wow, what a time that was! Lots of exploring, snorkeling, sitting in with the Blues Society, playing a bunch of my own shows, witnessing an epic, car-melting refinery fire, several "early starts" and hanging with Tom, Orris and Tess. Tugboat Tommy you are platinum. Hope you make it back up this way.

March- Fishermen's Forum, jamming with Brian as much as we could fit it in. I didn't make it to much or any of the seminars due to being engaged in playing guitar and singing. What a wonderful detour. Brian, sushi's on me, 'specially if I find work.

Washington DC. Seeing the good of our nation in this unfairly maligned city. Staying in a highly efficient 6-to-a-shoebox configuration. Loretta, we owe ya big.

April and May- horrid weather. The rest was not so nice. The bright spot was an absolutely inspiring 3 day stay at the Carpenter's Boatshop. I never had such a growing and joyous experience not being selected for a job in my life.

June saw Sweet Pea back in action with the added feature of solar-electric propulsion, more traps and lots more learning about small boat, zero carbon commercial fishing, and solar math, involving amps, watts, volts, weight and time. Another inspirational and growing experience that on paper was not a success.

June also meant the beginning of not being able to haul on Sundays, which, in turn, made for many great Saturday nights of music on the dock with Jerm, Dave L, Dave N, Maury, Dennis, Lydia and uTom. Other memorable gigs happened with Jeff, Andy, Alfred and Dave at the Bowdoinham barn show, outdoor concert, Monhegan, the Lobster Festival and the end of year party at the Waterfront in Camden.

July was when Kathleen Shannon and Dennis from 207 finally got out. They stayed for several days and got great stories, and got them right. July also saw all four out alive.

Toward the end of August, two words: Close Enough!!! My new 26 foot Webbers Cove with the 210 Cummins in the engine box. She's a beaut. I love looking at her down at the boatyard whenever I go by. Big, Big shout to Clayton for helping me through so many stressful firsts- you probably saved me from an aneurysm or 4.

In November and December, I finally got to do the landscaping job I've always wanted to do down at Condon Cove. Thanks Jim, Sue and Betsy. I think it'll be glorious round about May.

The end of the year finds us on North Haven, where we've been welcomed into a new community, and where our kids are attending school, and we have the great advantage of inexpensive access to the mainland 3 times a day on the ferry.

Now, with that wealth of great experiences, what was I complaining about?

Hauling Out

2011-12-16T06:08:00.000-08:00

Friday morning is warm and sunny despite the wind. Saturday and Sunday look to be very cold. It's time to take Close Enough out of her element and into hibernation 'til April. I hate to lose the sense of autonomy that I get from being able to buzz back and forth to Matinicus, but I'd hate even more to shred expensive parts or seize the motor because it's full of ice.

The consolation is that here in my new neighborhood on North Haven, I'll be able to look out the back window and see her in of the two boatyards sandwiching our rental house. She'll be close enough to go visit.

It's also time because the wind, waves and temperatures have gone from occasional belligerence to a constantly foul temper, offering a pissed off bull ride like the one I took on Monday.

By Monday, after flogging my way through 5 days of taking up gear, landscaping, roofing and trying to catch up with tax collection business and car registrations, I sorely wished to see my family. I was sore everyplace from orthopedic abuse and the muscle confusion of changing physically demanding jobs 3 times in 5 days, but a lot more achy inside.

I raced the clock to finish up gathering things I'd need on the other side. This is an ongoing aggravation of having two home bases close enough to each other that one does not have to absolutely get everything this time around. Tools, electronic connector cables, clothes, a bike pump, mail, music gear- it all had to be rounded up and cargoed aboard.

The Matinicus Rock weather station had been phoning in 23 knots gusting to 26 or 7 all day long, and I was pretty teetery on whether to go at all, and kept waiting for the NOAA-promised slackening of the wind later in the day. I'd get a whole lot more teetery later.

Just as time is running out to make a decision because I do not want to be a greenhorn captain in a strange place in the dark when it's blowing 25, I get a call from a friend who needs me to do my tax collector job. I oblige. Then time is really running out, but I decide to try it anyway because 'I can always turn back, right?' I call my advisor who figures I'll be OK 'cause the wind is directly behind me on my course to Heron Neck Light.

As I head out on the 30 degree course, my boat surfs large, steep waves, seeming to skate on her keel and seeming about 7 feet taller than I remember. This is crazy, but kind of fun. And I'll get to see my family.

Yes, it's all fun 'til I see coolant spurting out of the hot tank line. Then the fun drains out of me even faster than the vital cooling fluid that's now soaking into my guitar case. Overheating is bad for my motor. I look at the fittings and hose and can't see where the leak is. I shut down in order to disconnect the hot tank, hoping that will stop the bleeding.

As Close Enough obligingly turns side-to in the suddenly intimidating wolf packs of December breakers, I feel a special loneliness, a quiet, a distance from family, home and safety. I focus and get the hoses both unplugged, and restart. Nope. Back I go. I'm not getting to my family tonight.

The waves are considerably more difficult to contend with going straight into them. I am the pale, scrawny musician kid thrown into a rugby game designed to distract me from my broken heart by breaking some of my ribs. Big gray-green rugby bullies, planting me on back side a couple of times, this loss of stability brought on by trying to talk on the radio and steer at the same time. It never occurred to me that that would be such a challenge.

The radio connects me with my salvors back on Matinicus. After a very slow and rolly trip back to the harbor, Clayton puts wrenches and screwdrivers to the problem forthwith.

I head home, miserable.

The next day was rough, too, but blowing from the north-northeast, so waves are much more manageable, and I'm soon in the lee of Vinalhaven. Still a bit of drip, but we'll catch up with that next spring.

Foy is extremely accommodating and agrees that today is probably the day. He'll skiff me out and guide Close Enough into the lift, onto a trailer and perch her on stands out back.

I guess it's time to haul out, if for no other reason, at least to not have those kinds of crossings for a while. Now on to other things. Getting to know my new surroundings. Scrounging for work. Staying warm. Recording a new album. Now I'm talking...

Mo Jo Risin' I Ain't

2011-12-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

A wise woman taught me that a newspaper makes for a better start to the day. A fisherman she is, the newspaper being good for the skiff seat on soggy days.

I had an unceremonious Wednesday morning departure from North Haven around 7:40 or so. I'd dropped off a tote of survival items on the town float, taken the van back to the rental house and said goodbye to family for another trip to Matinicus.

The December 7 morning visuals were peculiarly uninviting on the Fox Islands Thoroughfare. (I'd have it be Thorofare without the "ugh" but that's my lowbrow thing). There was plenty of ugh to go around down there this morning, and the extra letters added no elegance. Soggy cardboard was donated into my skiff overnight. Every ripple, ferry ramp girder, treeline was the same shade of green gray. Probably my complexion as well, but I was spared from that as there's no flip-down or rearview mirror in my skiff or on Close Enough. Rain. December rain. Drismalness at all compass points. Newspaper is a good accessory today.

My 5th crossing started out well. I paddled down the Thoroughfare to Close Enough and loaded my survival tote bearing thick socks, laptop, sausages and other comforts. CE came right to life, anxious to run. I yanked my skiff up and into the boat, by which I mean I grabbed the bow and essentially laid down near horizontal until the contest of my weight, the skiff's weight, leverage and gravity resolved in favor of plopping the skiff onto the platform.

After cruising through the narrows and Hurricane Sound, I fortified with a cup of black tea. No hibiscus or goji berries or any other froof or flimble, just tea. From a steel thermos with no pictures on the casing. I got to the end of the Sound at Heron Neck lighthouse and decided not to use electronics to get me to Matinicus.

The vista was that of a wet gray sheet of cardboard like they use for the backers of pads of note paper. I had a vague recollection of the course I took to get to this point going the other way and added 180 degrees.

More importantly, and I kid you not, I went by feel. The twisted, rich vortex that is Matinicus gives off some kind of energy- enough to pull me and my boat back. Everything is harder, more intense. There must be some mineral deposit or confluence of ocean currents, magma, magnetic field or other force.

Here's the offer of proof: Yesterday, I was splitting spruce I'd cut on North Haven. Splitting by hand, that is. I've split a fair amount of Matinicus spruce. It is, as Captain John Griffin calls it, "chewy". That's a broad shouldered euphemism for what a scrawny guy has more profane names for, but essentially is dense, twisted, fibrous beyond belief and wicked hard to cleave with a maul.

I was frustrated Tuesday morning, having to choose between coming back to Matinicus to try and earn a few bucks, or seeing my kids' first concert on North Haven. I resolved in favor of the latter and took out my frustrations on the pile of spruce chunks. One time after the next, I handily cleaved pieces that, to my experienced eye, would've thwarted the maul on Matinicus in the first quarter inch or so. One stroke instead of 7, what's up with that? Pieces with branches sticking out. Crack! Thick trunk chunks. Whack! Maybe the wind blows harder and forces the plant to grow tougher.

Whatever the metaphysical, sprucified bullshit, this morning I was pretty sure where I was headed with only the most landubberly, muddle headed, middle aged conscious thought. 20 minutes or so past Heron Neck, I realized that what showed straight before the bow was an ever so slightly more gray wet cardboardy looking horizon than what lay to port and starboard. Aye, there's home, then.

As I dropped the skiff off in the harbor in anticipation of heading out to take up my last load of traps, the temperature felt to drop 20 degrees and the wind picked up a dozen knots. No matter. I'm getting this done today. Off I go and start coiling rope on the engine box, untying and picking traps, stacking them on the stern with firm instructions to "stay." Waves get gruffier. Green gets more dour. Traction ripples on waves get grabbier as wind agitates water. I'm alone a couple or three miles east northeast of the Zephyr Ledge marker.

Several hours of slogging culminate in 5 traps disobeying my directive. I stare. I curse people who have no fault to account for in this. I keep going. Then the last pair of traps of the season, setting in 30 fathoms, come aboard.

Since my first season, the end of lobstering always feels like the carny leaving town. Even though my rotator cuffs and trapeziuses are glad, the rest of me is sad. Even though I'm relieved, it is an end.

Jim Morrison, I am not. The end is not my friend. I'm relieved, yes. Gear is in the yard. My boat will be safe on land for the worst few months. I'll forget the smell of bait. Other priorities will move up on the stage. Connective tissue will get rest and stretching. The full moon won't keep me awake.

The future's uncertain and the end is always near. Maybe so.

Cold Green Rings of Fire

2011-12-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

Fishing culture seems to involve a lot of what I'd call preemptive pessimism. It's the opposite of pride going before a fall. If you think and talk gloomy enough, things may go OK. Much of my worry on the boat doesn't end up coming to pass. Other misfortunes come as complete surprises. I'll experience both sides of this mental dance before day's out.

With all the rolling and tumbling of finishing up my first hauling season and moving the family to North Haven and trying to find work for the winter, I wasn't looking forward to arriving back on Matinicus. We've had many stresses and lots of accumulated emotional baggage. The departure from our home was hasty. Items were unplugged, yanked out from their spots. Holes in the arrangement of things in the house. Dust bunnies let loose and running wild. Dishes on the counter. Petrifying leftovers in the fridge. It was going to be a sad, hard landing.

I had lots of dread over getting work done, getting paid, putting an end to a less than lucrative first year on my own boat, another open ocean crossing, only my third. As with almost all my anxieties, this round evaporated as soon as I got going on a gray, rolly-polly journey through unfamiliar narrows. I loaded a few groceries and some clean hauling clothes into the puffin, paddled out, got the Cummins purring like a giant cast iron pussy-cat, and beat the ferry down the Fox Island Thoroughfare.

I came to the end of Hurricane Sound. As soon as I saw Matinicus gray and indistinct in the soggy cold distance, I got happy. Strange thing to make a guy's spirit rise so.

The crossing went well, and I got straight into taking up traps. I coiled rope by the mile, stacked pots on the boat and got them offloaded onto the wharf as it was getting dark. Pride going before a fall is a common mental note of caution for me lately- for good reason.

I was all pumped up from having gotten 3 boat loads of gear taken up instead of the two I hoped for. I was all set to keep the train rolling, loaded one batch into the pick up truck, backed between the log pile and an extremely cantankerous crab apple tree soon to get a severe pruning after it snatched a trap and dropped it on my front windshield. I unloaded, hopped back in the truck, all action, and snapped the ignition key off.

No problem, I'll get the other one since both pieces came out. Hmm. Not in the key place. Maybe it's at Tom and Ann's place since that's where the vehicle lived before. Not on the peg board. Or the junk drawer. A call to the mainland. A couple more checks. No luck. The extra keys will come out on a plane tomorrow.

I'm shut down from trucking traps way before I've cleaned up the big pile on the wharf that's right in everyone's way. Well all right, I'll get supper. It's late anyway.

The feral cat eating my kelp from my hauling bag and I both jump when we discover each other in MY kitchen. I leave the door open and invite the creature with much profanity to leave while I run an errand. Critter's been in my house and unable to get out judging by a couple of piles and a knocked over jar of paintbrushes from a windowsill. Critter also shredded my loaf of bread, preferring a couple of small bites from each slice instead of, say, taking one slice and leaving the rest for me.

The next day is all town tax paperwork catch-up. The keys arrive with dusk and I haul all the traps back home, stack them in the yard and bring back the wet coils of rope. The coils explode in green bioluminescence each time I pick one up or drop it on the ground. Dazzling and cool. What a privilege to see this spectacle. It's great to be home.

Feeling a little Bambi-ish

2011-11-27T14:03:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is often celebrated in well-worn places. Familiar rooms. Walls that echo and floors that creak in patterns we've recorded deep in our memories. A sagging couch. The dining and card playing table. A storm door with its signature rattle when someone's coming in. Home.

I cooked this year's turkey in an electric oven I'd not seen a week earlier. We are in the midst of exploring, feeling our way about and enjoying a change of scenery on North Haven Island.

Leaving Matinicus for the winter is wrenching. I'm homesick. Kids are homesick. We had a lot of reasons for leaving, but it still drags hard. Short version: our asses were kicked by nearly 6 years in a challenging, isolated environment we had no real experience with.

North Haven is very nice. We've been welcomed into another unique island community. The kids start school tomorrow, Monday. On Tuesday, I'll leave bright and early, reversing last Tuesday's journey up Hurricane Sound and steaming across to Matinicus.

I have two hundred and some odd traps to take up. Taking up is always a grind. The season has been long and draining. The air is cold, the sea inevitably choppy. Sopping wet mounds of rope must be coiled. It is a grueling sequence where traps get untied, stacked on the boat, heaved onto the dock, lifted onto the pickup truck, unloaded and stacked in the yard.

I'll be away a while longer to finish up some work commitments and prepare the house on Matinicus for winter.

I have the feeling I always got before we moved there: if I'm not on Matinicus, it isn't there. Matinicus is a cruel lover and I miss her.

Between the move, the new place, traveling to my family's home in Bowdoinham for the holiday weekend, and preparing to head back to Matinicus I'm feeling a little Bambi-ish; four hooves going in four directions, all of me spinning around. Hunting season ended yesterday, though, so I should be OK.

Just Another Warning Light

2011-11-25T06:49:00.000-08:00

I really needed to laugh. I really, really needed a laugh. "It's just another warning light, what's one more?" My sister had asked why the brake light stayed on as we drove to the grocery in my steadfast Ford Windstar. As we headed south on 95, I explained the recent history with this noble vessel, our family's only transportation. I could see the recall notices all trailing behind, fluttering to rest in the breakdown lane. So the brake light, joining the check engine and a rattling sounding like a loose cookie sheet fixed by one corner to the underside of the van sent us both into gales of laughter.

She understands. Not only the charms of the 2000 Windstar, but the charms of past due notices, unflattering mathematical projections for next month, waking in the night with the oil tank empty, the sense the Black Friday could only be a very pale shade of gray for shoppers of our liquidity, or perhaps more appropriately Further Into the Red Friday, fridges and cupboards that have a bit of an echo from time to time, sinking down in our collars whenever the words "financial" and "future" appear in the same sentence.

It's been a challenging few months. Challenging like Shackleton's guys finding South Georgia, only without all that British skill and stoicism. After a lot of agonizing, we've moved to North Haven island for the winter. I'm dreadfully homesick. I'm also pretty well wretching every time I try to figure out how we earn enough to get through the winter without losing our home on Matinicus, and, for me, without losing my beloved boat.

I never had even the slightest difficulty sleeping until recently. Now I have not the slightest difficulty waking up at 2:30 AM, my brain inventorying the vastness of our predicaments before the rest of me is fully conscious.

I must be an almost pathological optimist. I've done a lot of what I do best- music, law, fishing, and been a colossal financial flop all the way round. I still like what I do and the eccentric collection of work experience. I actually still like being myself, living my own way. You have to ignore a lot of warning lights on your dashboard to have that kind of outlook.

Adventure Books, The Crooked Path and Undeclared Bankruptcy

2011-11-14T16:57:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed reading of peril. On mountains, in boats, airplanes, being a Rolling Stone, rowing across the Atlantic, fiction, nonfiction- doesn't matter. Somewhere along the way, I got attached to risk myself, going from armchair adventure to the piss your pants what the hell am I doing?! kind of adventure. Odd for a spindly, late (really late) 40's guy.

True, I'm home at night. I'm working in a familiar area, with friends in boats not more than a mile or so away. It's still the Atlantic Ocean, though, 40 or so fathoms deep, way over my head. It's November. I'm inexperienced. I'm running a boat miles from shore.

Lisa has a yellow sticky note over her computer: "feel the fear and do it anyway." I have definitely felt the fear and lurched forward into the fearful place.

Inspirational yellow stickies aside, I want to talk about how low the lows and high the highs can be within 48 hours.

Yesterday at around 2:30 a.m., I was sitting in the living room, breaking down over financial and other stress. I more or less stayed up until it was time to go out to haul traps and try to get some grocery money. The previous day had begun with a $260 bite in the ass from a forgotten bill for gas that I only discovered when the stove wouldn't light for breakfast. That money was going to be groceries and the self esteem that comes from being able to provide them.

Fortunately, in spite of a less than inviting marine forecast, I got out aboard the boat and headed out to haul. The magic of that outing was not only that I got my grocery money back, but that the thrashing of the work aboard the boat matched the turmoil inside me perfectly. My soul was balanced in between, deeply satisfied by acting in the face of internal and external turbulence. Boat rolls up to buoy, swerves up and down and sideways on the chop, gaff the buoy, run the rope through the pulley and hauler, bring traps aboard. Tend them. Run them off. Yeah.

I said goodbye to my family and flew to town. I had not been to the mainland since the beginning of October, a month and a half earlier. That fact may explain some of my extreme black and white thinking minus the white parts. I sent groceries back on the 3:45 plane out to the island.

Today I had my annual refresher to keep my law license. I saw many friends. I was surprised by the wash of positive energy. These individuals obviously did not know what a train wreck I am, and I just as happy not to think about it myself for a few hours. I never really felt like a lawyer, like it was my career destination, though I spent a decade in Maine's courts. All the same, here I was surrounded by attorneys who have worked hard, been committed and accomplished something. The folks I caught up with seemed genuinely glad to see me and positive about my whacky life.

Therein lies the conundrum of the moment. What I see reflected back to me seems pretty cool. What I feel about my situation is often so chaotic and conflicted, desperate, reckless, irresponsible. In all the stress and isolation of this year on Matinicus, I've gotten to kicking myself pretty bad. I kind of like the outside-in view better. Maybe I should go with that.

After a windowless, fluorescent sit-a-thon listening to experts in real estate, environmental, corporate, municipal and ethics law, I headed up to Waterville to play some tunes for a retirement party for a couple of my Corrections colleagues. I had no idea how much I missed so many of them. Again, the DOC was not my career destination, and I often felt bad about being lazy and unfocused, but I sure did feel great seeing so many great people. Again, they all seemed so accepting and positive.

It took some courage to play the last song of the night, an offensive and expletive filled, but also well written original song, perfectly apropos to the moment. Many times, especially in front of groups of people, I'll bail on an a risky idea and regret it. Not so tonight. I think those fine friends really enjoyed the song. Looked like they were doubled over.

I could look at it that people are positive to me 'cause they don't know what a mess I am, or maybe they know better than I do that for all my wandering, my financial disasters and other ne'er-do-wellism, it's ok for all of us to be who we are. Crooked path, undeclared bankruptcy and all. That's the real adventure.

Taking Up

2011-11-10T02:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a cheatin' day. A dazzling bit of late summer misplaced in my favor into November. The day before? Same thing. When it's nice on the water, it is way too easy to think it will stay that way. 'I can keep hauling. I don't need to bring in my gear for the year. I'll just keep going indefinitely.' Easy thoughts to have on an easy day. In spite of all the seductive, mirage-ing, tempting-you-into-being out in a gale with ice forming on everything 'cause you waited too long type weather, I am taking up gear. It is time, no matter what the sunshine and soft air try to say to the contrary.

It was literally last week, Monday in fact, that I was still making up rope and taking gear out to deep water. These shore traps, though, are pretty well empty, and in very hard shape from the mauling they take over the course of a full season right up in the rocks. Getting these pots out of the mix makes it easier to concentrate my effort where it will do some good.

What a couple of months it has been since bringing Close Enough home from Rockland! I've handled this vessel without any serious mishaps and only a long running entertainment series of slow and graceless approaches to the lobster car for the benefit of other fishermen and the buyers. Many miles of new rope put together. Many traps patched and set out, some with years of vines, blackberry canes and other vegetation having grown in. Many days on the water- some hairy where I learn a lot, some tranquil where I just try to work.

The whole kaleidoscopic circus has to come lurching home soon. The silver blue warmth of today will turn suddenly to windblown ice crusted desolation. I'll take today.

Roxanne and the Connection to Nature

2011-10-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

A big park is proposed for the North Maine Woods. There was a bigger park proposed. Roxanne Quimby generously offered what to most of us would be a vast land holding to establish the park. I heard her speak on public TV about her efforts to create this wonderful resource. I've heard other opinions. What is missing from the debate is an acknowledgment of the deeper reason why some, particularly those who live in the North Maine Woods, resist the idea of a park.

Their concerns are usually portrayed as just about paper mill and wood harvesting jobs, or the opportunity to hunt, fish and tool around on snowmobiles and 4-wheelers. I think the real reason is that people who live in these areas value something a lot more fundamental than paper mill jobs and deer hunting. I believe residents are and want to remain part of the ecosystem. This means more than kayaking on days off from the office, skiing, leaf peeping and hiking.

This means the basic human interaction with the environment that goes on when we make our living in some way connected to the natural environment. It almost sounds crazy doesn't it? Our veggies come from Chile, electronics from Asia, retail and restaurant chain jobs from some other state, benefit checks from Augusta and Washington. What kind of loonie thinks that we can live and draw our living from our own surroundings?! I think many of us still have a deep-seated sense that we are part of the land, including our activities that take resources from the woods, the ocean, the soil, even when daily life doesn't look much that way.

A park would turn the whole ecosystem into an exclusive playground and sealed off nature exhibit. People are no longer welcome to live there. It's about a whole lot more than post WWII industry or deer camp or snowmobile trails. That's the part I think Roxanne and other park proponents just do not perceive.

I am fortunate enough to live in a place where we still interact with nature in our immediate vicinity to make our lives. It shouldn't be such an anomaly.

A few weeks ago, I drove into my home town through a back road and saw woods, fields and streams- a very rich environment. I looked at the homes and could see very little evidence of a connection between the human occupancy and the blessings of the land. But I know it's there, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels it.

Greenhorn Chronicles continued

2011-10-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Late middle September- We continue with tales of a very new captain:

I've hauled a number of days, getting more comfortable getting in and out of the harbor, onto the mooring, tying up at the bait boat and lobster car. It's a big heavy craft going through slippery water. Aboard Sweet Pea, the movement of the boat was immediate and physical, like a shopping cart or a wheelbarrow. If I moved my arms, the boat responded. Now there are diesel and hydraulic intermediaries between my hands and where the boat goes.

I gradually learn the coordination of throttle, transmission, hydraulic winch in two directions, flipping the trap aboard and running it back off without getting tangled. Every day a little more confidence spreads through my trunk and limbs. The moves get natural. Once again, I'm choreographing all the dance moves as I have for each boat I've worked aboard. Only this time, I am captain and sternman. On My Boat.

I deposit a couple of checks. Not big numbers, but huge for morale.

I've also become a gear and rope preparing machine, thanks to having a lot of gear and rope given to me. Whenever I'm not hauling, I'm in the yard, walking and unkinking rope, patching traps, rigging buoys.

I'm also starting to get seriously burnt out. 7 days a week I've been at it since early August- finding the boat, jumping through hoops, arranging financing, having drivers ed after taking the big rig on the road, learning to get to and haul traps, dodging large swells from distant tropical storms, rigging up more gear.

So I'm simultaneously getting more competent and burned out from total immersion. I start to set and haul pairs of traps for the first time. These guys can do it blindfolded with an arm and a leg tied behind them. For me it's quite a challenge. Setting pairs I quickly found out how easy it is for rope to get into a wretched ball. These hopeless tangles are a lot harder to deal with when there's two traps to haul up instead of one.

Pairs are also a lot harder to get into the boat. My first few efforts are a freak show. I'm grateful that no one is close enough to see how slow and clumsy I am with this.

Last night, today was forecast to have 5 to 15 knot winds. I should have checked this morning. Now as I'm listening to the radio and heading out, there's a small craft advisory for hazardous seas- by which they mean towering offshore swells that hatch monster breakers in places I only vaguely knew had shallow places. On top of the big waves- which are no big deal as long as I'm far away from ledges, shore or shoals- there is a robust chop from the gathering Southwest wind. After 4 hours or so of being sloshed and tilted and slapped around by the wind and water, I surrender for the day, slowly steaming back to the harbor through the very dark green water and slate blue-gray sky.

Towering waves, uncertainty about the winter, certainty of one more horrid financial gap. I've committed to the boat. Here we go. Yippy Ki Yay.

9/22

Today started actually last night. Remembered to call a friend at bed time who'd left a message at dinner. Friend advised me of a faux pas on my part. A bunch of them, actually. So I got in my first stew even though I'm hardly up to speed on any aspect of the business.

In the meanwhile, I'm taking care of the year's worth of the island's property tax calculations for the year. That piece of work always hits in the scurrying season with frantic fishing and panics that set in during September when we realize it's September, which means that winter is coming on fast.

It rained all day, and I dove into paperwork, bill paying, property taxes, gathering related signatures, rigging a few buoys and toggles, trying to keep busy enough to stay ahead of doubts and creditors. Off to sea tomorrow.

Sunday, September 25

I set 30 beater traps in dense fog and an unfamiliar area. I really love my radar. Not only because it keeps me from running into other boats, channel markers and ledges, but as a second visual navigation tool. The more time I spend on the water, the comfort level gradually comes up and the rush from learning how to navigate, learning how the boat behaves, reading the current, tending my gear with the amazingly powerful hydraulic pot hauler. So many new moves, motions, angles, sounds and smells to keep track of.

What makes it so special is that it's all been taught here, by my neighbors and friends and aside from the lobster apprentice program and one day coast guard safety course, completely unregulated. No driver's ed, no practice, very minimal instruction on the ONE Afternoon when Clayton and I brought the boat across from Rockland. The liberty to learn, challenge myself in nature without layer upon layer of restriction and constriction is precious.

September 27- At 6:15 or so this morning, I disentangled my skiff in the dusk of the wharf, rowed around the corner to face the harbor and was stunned by the sight of the harbor on a flat still morning, brilliant in the orange gold of the sunrise. The flatness amplifies the effect. This was an extremely unusual day of brilliant sunshine and no wind to speak of- very unusual in September.

I took out ten traps that had been in very close to the shore and put them into pairs with 25 fathom warps off to the norred, short version of northward. Had some tea while steaming over to the days work to the easterd, short for eastward. Am I lucky today? Yes. Unlike the first time I hauled these traps, I can see. Last time around, the fog was so thick I wasn't sure my eyes were really open at all.

What a lucky man I am to work on a boat in September in Maine.

Day 1, Again- How Many Does This Make?

2011-10-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Saturday, September 3.

The new boat, Close Enough, awaits me in the harbor. She's ready. Me, not so much.

Wee hours held many half awake, vague bad dreams about how I was possibly going to mess up driving the new boat. Some of them were comical, some plausible. In that nether state, I somehow believed that if I thought about it enough, I'd have experience that I do not have- I'd know what do do without ever having done it.

I anticipate all the steps- starting up, unhitching, working around the ledge and boulders, docking with the Liberty Risk for bait, get turned around and out of the harbor and heading out to get some work done.

Deep down, I am confident of my ability to learn this newest alien activity, to safely go out, work and come home dry and alive. I am also deeply aware of how little I know and how catastrophic a mistake can be. This isn't a sturdy slow 300 pound wooden boat powered by hand. I won't be just a few paces from the shore.

The other unwelcome night and dawn visitor was the wind.

It's now 7 am and I haven't found anyone to go out. I'm terrified of just getting around the ledge in the harbor and tying up at the bait boat, much less going out into the open ocean and hauling traps for the first time. I go out to the boat anyway, and start organizing. And agonizing.

I open the hatch to turn on the electrical switches and fire up the motor, but can't make my hand push the button and do it. I'm frozen. I'm also having a parental voice in my head saying that despite my probably making an idiot of myself, it is wise to have a second person aboard on this first time out.

I paddle back to the wharf and make a call, leaving a message for one guy and then convincing Craig to come out. This security and company makes all the difference.

We go out in some substantial chop and break me in and introduce the boat to Matinicus lobstering. Every move is unfamiliar. The wind is robust and the waves slosh us around. I manage to haul a handful and feel like that's enough for today.

Every transition is new and tightens my insides. My saving strategy is to go super slow. I approach the bait boat, the mooring, the dock with glacial slowness. Other guys bring in boats to the dock like snowboarders swoosh to a stop at the lodge. Not me. Water is very slippery compared to pavement, gravel or fields, where I've operated big equipment in the past. The water is slippery and boat hulls and docks are very heavy and unyielding.

Craig grabs the mooring for me and the boat is once again safely tethered to the bottom of the harbor.

The next day, I figure I'm heading out for the first real work day; I'll start making some money instead of spending like a congressman the way I have been. Note the "I figure" phrasing. I'm warming up the engine and feeling all captain-like when I notice the voltmeter is low. In instrument panel design, red is bad and green is good. My voltmeter is not in the green happy place. I stop, make calls, stop people in the road, talk to Joe in the harbor. Under 12 volts is not good enough. I decide to try it for a while thinking maybe when I rev the motor, the volts will come up. Think again. Even though the voltmeter keeps slumping further away from Green Land, I get to haul a few pots and catch some lobsters.

Further consultation with the island brain trust leads to the conclusion that I need a new alternator. I head out Monday morning with my handy U.S. Navy manual on the motor and get 95% of the way through removing the alternator- my first introduction to the cramped, awkward, knuckle skinning realities of engine work on a boat.

After loosening and removing the bolts, I smugly move to pull the alternator out, and there is a tug back from the dark recesses. There's one more nut to remove. I can barely fit more than a couple of fingers in there. There are a couple of hoses in the way. When I can get a glimpse of the last item, it looks crusted over with rust and grease. And very hard to reach.

I try open end, box end and socket wrenches. I try liberal amounts of lubricant. I try very liberal amounts of profanity. There is a single 3/8" nut between me and making a living, and it is successfully thwarting every idea, angle, heave and tool I can come up with. I try to fit a hacksaw blade in the space. I try a chisel. Morning turns to afternoon.

Eventually, Weston shows up. We spoke this morning and he told me it was "a ten minute job."
Weston sees something behind the nut that I didn't see and after a couple of "oh this is nothing" remarks that morph into "oh, no wonder you've been on this all day, it's a total pain in the ass," he gets pliers on one part and a wrench of the other, and turns until the bolt fatigues and melts itself into two pieces. The alternator is out. Along the way, I manage to mangle the wiring plug, and will need to get that ordered as well.

Unfortunately, getting the dead alternator out does not put the boat back in working order. Today is Labor Day, so I'm not getting a new one today.

Tuesday morning, Clayton advises me to remove the pulley off the front of the alternator because the new one won't have that piece. OK, I say, thinking that I'll pick up a couple of tools, apply them to the job and remove the pulley. Note the "thinking that I'll" phrasing. After an hour of wrestling, I feel as though I have as much chance of bending the doors on a wood stove with my bare hands as I have getting that pulley off the alternator.

It's a contest of getting a wrench on one part, and holding the rest of it securely. Actually, it's a matter of having an impact wrench. Silly me. I don't happen to have an impact wrench. And at this point, I don't even know I need one.

I'm near tears at this point because I manage to do 95% of the tasks, but get completely stopped in my tracks by the last 5%, simple things like old corroded nuts or things that need an impact wrench. I am ignorant of the world of diesel engines and rusted nuts and bolts and impact wrenches. I can't do the simple parts of these jobs. I need to start making a living starting last year and have been disabled by little rusted parts and things I don't know how to do.

I am in way over my head. Again.

Afternoon comes, and with it a shiny new alternator with no crumbling, rusted bits. The reinstall is a lot more fun than the removal, although I'm haunted by the fear that I have misdiagnosed the problem, and when I start the motor, the voltmeter will still be in the red place of worry and failure.

I feel I've invented cold fusion and won the Nobel Prize as I push the start button, start the motor and watch the needle majestically rise well into the green.

All is well.

This is Why

2011-10-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

'Why keep the church open when nobody comes?' -Summer visitor.

"This is why" said Suzanne as we all sat together remembering a friend. Not an employee of a service provider. Not a delivery person. A part of the community. We gathered as we gather when there are other losses, weddings, holidays. We gather as a community the likes of which I've experienced nowhere else. There is shared experience, hardship, aggravation, conflict, disagreement, joy, celebration. Shared. We are not hermetically sealed off from neighbors, knowing more about Jennifer Aniston's acquaintances than we know of our own. We shared unrehearsed and unpolished thoughts of our friend, Don. We sang. We prayed. We gave three cheers.

The same thisiswhy is why we tolerate the vicious weather, constant unpredictability, financial precariousness and isolation. The ass-kicking. We do it because the rest of american culture seems deadened by factory food, cubicle jobs, antidepressants and a thousand other life-sucking blandifications.

We live. It's not safe. It's messy. This is why.

I Want to be Bored Now

2011-10-06T09:20:00.001-07:00

First and most important, Don is family to us, like all the Penobscot Island Air folks. In addition, what happens to anyone here happens to everyone. It's close like that on this island. I am sad.

It also feels as though the mainland just got a lot further away. The wind is cold and dry today. The long winter telegraphs its punch way too soon. I am afraid.

I came here for adventure. I want to be bored now.

Breaking the Silence

2011-09-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, so some explanation is in order. Sweet Pea and I are no longer an item. I'll probably never love a boat like I love the peapod, or have as much wonderment lobstering as I have poking cove to cove and rock to rock, up close, quiet, one with the seals and birds and porpoises.

I came to the wrenching decision to make a change earlier this summer. I believe passionately in what I did. I wanted to prove that traditional boats, solar power and hard work can create a small scale, super sustainable commercial fishing business. Solar power works! Don't believe the negative hype.

I also proved that it would be a great seasonable job for someone with no children who also has other seasonal work, or a college student. It did not produce the revenue our family needs. There were about 2 really good months both seasons. Not enough season or money.

After reaching that decision, the next question was- what am I going to do? Poor economy. Gappy resume. Eccentric credentials. I did a lot of networking and outreach that went absolutely nowhere.

Then my mind took a big leap in what seemed like the whole wrong direction. Maybe I should just go with what I know. Maybe a proper lobster boat. Instead of getting a haircut, straightening up and flying right, pleasing the people my people have to defend me to, I'll just dig myself in deeper, dangerouser, and precariouser financially. Great idea!

I may get back to the peapod some day. I may try and electrify a small, but bigger boat. Right now, I have a very deep hole to dig out of and an extreme accumulation of stress that goes with that condition.

Here's the journal of the beginning of the next phase:

September 2:

My new boat, Close Enough, came home yesterday, 2 weeks to the day from when I first checked her out. I waded into the virgin rainforest of purchasing a commercial vessel two weeks ago, weaving together my feeble negotiating skills with insurance, coast guard documentation, marine surveying and business loan processes. I had to learn my way through many terms and ways of doing things that were completely unknown to me. Meanwhile, I am racking up expenses flying back and forth, driving around, buying safety gear and repairing a few things, and am not earning any money.

Then after a seeming eternity of blundering and lurching through the various hoops and getting the vessel purchased, she slips in the water at the Rockland boat launch. Then the easy part is done and I'm bluntly aware of how vulnerable I am, how little I know about boats with 210 horsepower diesel engines and no brakes, hydraulics, marine wiring and electronics. I'll find out even more sharply in a few hours.

After pulling away from the launch pretty smoothly and wending my way across the harbor to O'Hara's north, my first docking experience does NOT go well. Throttle and transmission controls suddenly seem extremely confusing. I can't get it right and thrash and bonk my way to a stop at the wharf. After I've stopped hyperventilating, I realize that the throttle and transmission controls are catching on each other and contributing to my lack of coordination.

While Clayton's off doing errands, I try to lube up the controls. They move more independently and smoothly.

I'm in a large maze of lobster buying, big heavy commercial boats up on land for work, shrink wrapped pleasure boats, and a large charter sailboat operation. I love it in all directions. People here do more than push e-mails and sell lattes. They get to move big boats around, fix broken things, get them back in the water. Stuff goes on here.

As I get ready to pull away for the big trip home, all is chaos, the transmission lever won't take the boat out of reverse and the boat is hard against the pilings. We shut down and Clayton figures out that the throttle and transmission cables aren't secured to the controls. My lube job worked well in helping identify a significant malfunction.

The next adventure comes partway across Rockland harbor when the temperature alarm goes off. Clayton lifts a couple hatches and we turn around. I'm out my head with panic at my leveraged position, ignorance and an alarming malfunction. I get a quick lesson in changing an impeller in the water pump for the cooling system, and we head across to my home without incident. I manage to get to the dock with no big collisions which is amazing to me because I've never done this before, am fighting a nasty GI bug and had a couple brews on the way across. I feel like I'm driving the Queen Elizabeth after my peapod. And I didn't take drivers' ed for this.

We're home. It was a long time lost on the mainland.

Turning the Corner

2011-08-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

Hurricanes make you pay attention. Not in the cable tv drama, ooh our power might go out way, but in the holy shit way, like I could lose all my traps because I fish up in the rocks and coves where big storm surf crumples traps like pages of bad song lyrics. All my fall income, all my spring maintenance work.

Of course this was the week that my seemingly bulletproof ox of a winch picked to die. I thought it must just be my homemade wiring job or a switch that corroded. I checked all of those things with my handy tester thing. Not the problem. Then I opened the winch housing, a very sturdy metal affair with a fat rubber gasket. Made for salt water crab fishing. Only thing is- it's not remotely water proof. There was rust on everything and a translucent gray gel all over the motor that I later found out is what happens when aluminum gets lots of salt water on it. The winch insides were caked with bad looking trouble. I craftily took a motor off another winch, but it was about a quarter inch too long to fit in the space.

I tried coordinating with friends to help me move some traps and get them away from the shoreline and jaws of doom. They were all scrambling too, so after a lot of hawing and hemming, I decided to go out and haul, lengthen lines and catch a few lobsters without the hauler.

At least I had the outboard, which now didn't have to share the battery and solar panel with the winch. Except that something happened and the battery was half flat even though it had been charging unused for a week. I got a few jaunts out of it before I realized I was not moving.

Funny how quick we become dependent. I thought I had to go in because there was no winch and no motor. Eventually I realized that rowing and hauling by hand were not dealbreakers, but were exactly how I started the whole thing to begin with.

I haul and lengthen out a few traps, make a day's pay. Irene comes and goes.

A few nights later, I'm wearing a film plastic grocery bag hat over a layer of plastic wrap over a layer of mayonnaise on my head. One of the kids had some lice. This triggered a frantic household emergency management response of vaccuuming, bagging up clothes, bedding, pillows and stuffed animals and the mayonnaise treatment.

On this evening, it's just before 10 PM on a Monday and I'm washing up the dishes and surfaces from the mayonnaise intervention. Wildfire comes on, an AM radio hit I used to hear from the bunks my Dad built in the shed.

In the summer, we'd sleep out there, listen to sox games on the radio, news and pop songs. Then it hits me as I'm remembering the 2x4 I wrote my name and other sentiments on in the bunk- Dad had to build those bunks. One tiny project out of the thousands that Mom and Dad did for us. It is so easy to forget all those things.

It'll be easy for my daughters to forget the mayonnaise I plastered on their heads, the plastic wrap that went on top and the thousands of other efforts, often done through half awake eyes, veils of stress from a thousand other things, financial worries, agenda items.

Maybe it's just the plastic wrap around my brain making me sentimental. Thanks Mom and Dad.

Off Course and Loving It

2011-08-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

After a great rocking show at the Maine Lobster Festival, I was hoping to get back out aboard Sweet Pea today. The wind forecast was for 5 to 10 knots. The actual wind arrives at 16 knots, so I'm off the boat for the day. My mind immediately shifts to: how do I get some slow-down? I've been hauling hard or flying, driving to and from performances for weeks and would like to just take up space for a day. Other plans are presented, so Ryan, Fiona and I set off for a very soulful old empty house off the beaten track on the island. It has an enormous chestnut tree that we like to climb and hang around in.

Before we get there, we're drawn to raspberries and end up picking a quart of them and going home with a pint or so.

The big mama chestnut tree is there waiting for us in the overgrown yard behind the farmhouse. We climb. Here's the thing: my fears are weaker these days, and I am having more fun. I took a spontaneous opportunity for a radio interview yesterday. Wouldn't have done that. Jumped into a songwriting contest. Wouldn't have done that. Went swimming in the river in Bowdoinham, reached out to others, taken some leaps. It's some middle aged peeling off of layers of intimidation. Or possibly, it's my bleached hair. In any case, I decide to climb as high as I can get in the tree. There are many points of vulnerability in climbing a big tree- gaps between good handholds, awkward places where I have to get around to the other side of the trunk, commitments that need to get made before the security of the next resting place. Even with all the zinging inside that comes from heights and climbing, I keep going and emerge from the upper part of the tree, higher than the chimney on the house.

After an hour or so of climbing, talking and daydreaming, we three decide to head off into the woods to see the cool old 1960's era Impala, Rambler and pickup truck decomposing in the forest, then come out behind Watkinson's and go up the road for a donut. We've done this ramble before so I was surprised how much it had grown in and how much the old cars had deteriorated since our last visit. We had many yards of head-high (on me) brambles to thrash through. We managed, and found some early blackberries along the way to spice up the earlier harvest.

I don't think we ever got more than a quarter mile from home, but it sure was a nice adventure; each part starting from an intention and going in some unexpected course.

This Was the Day

2011-07-29T03:57:00.000-07:00

This is the week where it all happens. Rain, wind and fog pushed the start of my season way later than I or my creditors preferred. The early season was a good ride because of the lobster price being higher. Appointments, music performances on the mainland, vehicle breakdowns and the omnipresent tug of war with wind all kept throwing off the rhythm. The catch pulled its usual July slump.

This week was different. Somewhere in all the obstacles and unpredictable interruptions, the operation got streamlined and functional. Which is hard considering I very often feel there isn't enough room for both my feet in the boat by the time all my stuff is aboard. Trap flipper, battery, motor, winch, oars, gaff, lobster crate, safety and legal stuff, cleaning tools, bailer, bucket, sail, trap repair kit, radar reflector, radio, lunch, banding tray. Any time I need to change one thing, it feels like I need to upend and rearrange everything. So when it all starts feeling smooth and functional, I am amazed.

This week was productive. Even with a few windy, wavy times and taking time out to take Dennis and his camera out to haul, I managed to haul all of my gear and catch a pretty good quantity of lobsters.

Several times, I left in the morning planning only to do a partial day and wound up staying at it 'til late. Tuesday morning was gray and windy. The water off the north end of Wheaton Island was particularly steep and choppy, but Sweet Pea was not bothered.

Yesterday, though, was It. The fourth hauling day in a row. Flat-ass calm as they call it. Dazzling blue sky. Only enough hint of a breeze to put a hypnotic grid of ripples almost floating above the water. Blessings in every direction. I had to holler out praises in order not to get either giddy or some kind of greedy gold fever from the lobsters. I had to remember to bless the lobsters and the bait for giving life for my and my family's lives.

I hauled 50 and headed in for more bait and to get the lobsters back in the water at the buying station. I couldn't believe six hours had already gone by. I rowed out to Whales Back Ledge, where my traps are most distant from shore. In the brilliance of the day and the mesmery of sliding through the space between blue and silver water and sky, with my hands stiff and sore from rowing, my back tired but as strong as it has ever been, I had the realization moment. One person in an old fashioned boat, so small and far from shore, covered in seaweed, algae, snails and modern solar gear. This was the day.

The wind came up just as I was finishing the most productive week since the project began last year. The battery had just enough life to glide me back to the harbor.

Today the wind is moving faster and I'm moving slow. I'm at home with paperwork to do and other commitments to prepare for. Yesterday is permanent.

Accidental Vacations

2011-07-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

I kick off my boot. It goes a foot and a half further than I expect because it's heavy. It tips over and discharges a quart of black water, spruce needles and leaf mold. Being barefoot is more comfortable as I pull the slime covered spruce limbs out of the water and toss them over the row of holly bushes. I'm barefoot on the quartz outcrop. I'm soaked with mud from the waste down. It's suffocatingly hot, but nothing like what they're coping with on the mainland. It seemed like the right day to wade into the pond, cut up the tree that fell in there last winter, then haul it off. I'd stay cooler with the soaked clothes and mud pack. Still seems hot, just soaking as well. And filthy. I'm back. I have mojo that's been elsewhere among all the worries.

I'd had a perfectly delightful accidental vacation except for feeling the dangle of waiting to hear for how much and when I'd have my trusty minivan back after its unexpected sabbatical. My 30th class reunion convened on Saturday after a trip up to Hallowell to see friends. The band and I enjoyed our outdoor show on a perfect July Sunday night.

Thanks to the bum aftermarket starter, I spent several extra days in Bowdoinham hanging with sister, nephews, bro-in-lo, kids and Ma. Swimming in the very warm waters of the Cathance River, hanging out in my old kindergarten classroom, now the town library, staring across the yard at the chipmunks and birds busy with their business. It was lovely. Except I'm not working. Especially 'cause I'm not working.

I got back to the island as my neighbors were in varying states of recovery from the plane crash. I am in awe of the four aboard the plane and all those who went out to pull them from the sea, care for them and get them all medivac-ed to the mainland. You are all made of some very tough, fine material.

So it has been a very full week. Not very full of lobstering, though. The alligator wrestling match of getting a mud-embedded spruce tree out of the ornamental pond snapped me back to feeling like myself. Taking a chainsaw into a pond seemed a little crazy. I was never, ever adventurous as a young person. Really the opposite. Now, however, I need something challenging, physical and crazy to feel alive. I do not know why.

One on One Time on the Boat

2011-07-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

The hauling rotation this year works out such that I have a short day after two full days. These are good days to take company along. Lydia came out and did a beautiful pencil sketch of a lobster. We had lots of time to talk because there isn't much else to do on a 15 foot boat besides work and visit. Then I took Lisa all the way around to the far west side of the island. Aside from Alaska-esque wild scenery of the north shore and west side, we had lots of time to visit. Yesterday Fiona crewed for my jaunt out to the Whale's Back Ledge. She was good luck for me.

The common thread, aside from wanting my family to know what it is I do in my very unusual work environment, is that we get precious one on one time. We often seem just a wee tad fractious and overly lively when it's all five together. Five sets of priorities, directions and schedules gets overwhelming. Pair time is an important, relaxing and enriching way of staying connected.

The lobsters are napping now, getting ready for the big stampede. I'm bleached and sunbaked outside and in, feeling the wear and tear of the early season push and needing a slow-down before the really long push to the end of the season.

I've added another solar panel graciously donated by my friend John, and fitting as neat as can be right behind the other one. After the disintegration of my charge controller, I had to work for a week or so on just the battery charged at home. Getting the solar system reinstalled, I was aware from the first day how much that slow steady charge extends the work capacity of the boat. Instead of limping in after 75 traps on a dead battery, I did the whole day, zipped back in, then went out the next for my short day with Fiona, then took the family over to Wheaton Island- all without any household current.

This ain't powering a laptop or radio. This is solar power doing very heavy work.

Molting time, as discouraging as it is from the fishing perspective, is a great time to enjoy the island. I took Fiona and Ryan fishing with proper fishing pole, line and hook. I've been wanting to do this for years, and always felt too hurried and fixated on work to pull it off. We tied off to one of my buoys right at the opening of the harbor next to Wheaton Island, where we'd dropped Lisa off to do some gardening. Our line wasn't in the water for 5 seconds before there was a bite. Ryan and Fiona both landed several pollock in short order. What a thrill it is to feel that tug and see the pole bending down.

Ryan and Fiona are both chafing hard today to get right back out and fish some more. I'm dragging my heels and points north, hoping to breathe and slow down. Thank heavens for no-haul Sundays.

Just Lobstering Business with a few nerdy Star Wars analogies

2011-06-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

The Sweet Pea and zero carbon lobster project is very much an idealistic and day dreaming sort of adventure. An adventure designed to showcase old and new hardware and methods of fishing, alternative energy, slow food, sustainable fishing and such. Despite the pie in the sky-ness, it's also my job. Thanks to good prices for the catch, a year's more experience and a whole lot of help from some key conspirators, it's also my job these days, and that has to be the coolest thing of all. I'm actually making something of a living. Go figure. Me and my pipsqueak of an operation.

I'm keeping much more data this year as well, such as how many traps and how far I run the engine on a battery charge, what kinds of fish come up in the trap, and how many pounds on the scale at the end of the day. Yesterday, there were three butterfish in one trap. One grayish green one, one pink one, and one really outrageous, audacious neon pink one. They come in bright blue, bright green and black as well. Why the butterfish has such a zany color menu I don't know. Lots of flounder this year, too. They're the most fun to throw back, because after the first confused juddering motion, they take off like the Millenium Falcon making the jump to light speed. Flounder are very quick like that. But the ocean doesn't rotate and go all streaky like in Star Wars.

In the "marine environment is tough" department, the solar panel and charge controller simply stopped working, so tomorrow, I have to parse out the chain wherein photons become worker particles in my galaxy to identify where the breach is. The happy yellow charge light was gloomy yesterday, so, being in doubt, I ripped it out and tomorrow will isolate the problem.

May the photons be with you, for electricity, hot water or beach enjoyment.

Wooly Mammoth Hair

2011-06-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

I got up dutifully at 5 ish AM and looked out to see leaves moving. That early, I don't want to see any leaves fluttering, especially a whole tree's worth. I went anyway and rowed several miles around to the west side of the island to start my day of hauling traps. In Burgess Cove and in front of Little Island, it was pretty tranquil, because the woods and shore were nearby and the wind had no fetch to create large waves.

So the first 15 pots were more or less normal working conditions. Then I ventured around West Point and started my pep talks. "It doesn't matter if it's slow, don't compare what's happening today with how it's supposed to go. Just do the job." That works for about a half an hour of clawing forward through a 15 knot headwind and a few knots of adverse current. As soon as I stop rowing, the boat makes an instant wake back from when I came, sluicing the wrong direction.

After the pep talk wears off, there is lots of demotivational cursing. Then I decide to switch to the motor that I've been stubbornly avoiding using, wanting that boost to be available later in the day. So be it. After a couple of pots, the water is shimmering with stiff wind from the north northeast. The chop appears to double by the minute. The boat starts to swivel any way but into the wind. The wrestling match turns into a rodeo event where staying on is the objective.

I decide to quit. Without the motor, I would've needed to beach, or get towed in, or spent half a day rowing in 4 inch increments back to the harbor at the expense of tendons and nerve function.

Once around Northeast Point, the head-on turns to side-to, and the waves get large and steep. Sweet Pea loves the rollercoaster, and I love her for being so happy even in very rough water. I also love my electric motor for getting me back to harbor.

I'm coming in with tail tucked, surfing into the harbor, feeling my day is over at 10:30 in the morning. I'm also realizing how little I know about compass bearings and geography, because it is instantly evident that a couple of coves are perfectly sheltered and cozy from the NNE wind. Sliding through the harbor and out the Gut, I'm in a sunny and tranquil world that doesn't appear to be even in the same area code as the shimmering, sloshing, wind blasted place I just came in from.

I almost make a day of it after all. In the afternoon, the wind flunks out completely and so I stuff a few more bait bags and head out.

After a great round 2 start, I meet a challenge worse than all the wind, rain, pain, inexperience and all other obstacles to date. Let's call it "Wooly Mammoth Hair"- a whole stampede's worth. This long, fine, stringy, brownish purply plant wraps around my ropes by the bushel. It all piles up on the trap end of the rope and weighs enough that those mammoths wouldn't have been able to move if they got wet. It also severely destabilizes the boat. I have to wrench the trap part way up with one hand and try to tear the hair off with the other and not fall overboard or capsize. It is the end of my day. Those traps are now inaccessible without hydraulic assistance and a multi-ton hull.

After all the ups and downs, I end up with a solid day's pay after all.

I wake in the night with a lump in my throat that soon comes loose in the flood. This life is really hard on the family. And my body. I'm searching for straight jobs in a tough economy while running down the mountain ahead of the financial avalanche and willing myself not to stumble.

Oz and Never Neverland are dazzling places to visit.

Up and Running, "Shopping"

2011-06-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

The upstairs of the barn got warm as uspstairses of barns do. Especially with 50 or so people sitting close together on a Saturday night in June. This is a special barn. It has bamboo flooring, wall hangings, a full kitchen downstairs and some very tasty homemade pizza set out. Andy and Jeff Chipman are with me, playing our original songs to maybe the best listening crowd we've had. As the nearly drowned fisherman in The Secret of Roan Inish said on waking in a warm barn with several women looking down at him said: "So this is heaven, then?" It certainly was.

After the intermission, I gave the first public presentation on the zero carbon lobster project. I had a powerpoint slide show and thankfully paid little attention to it except for the pictures. I can't tolerate presenters who read their powerpoints, though I've done it more than a few times. The content is meant to be digressed from, embellished and so forth. I hope to give many more talks on the project. I'm pretty confident about what I'm doing, which for anyone who knows me, is an extremely rare circumstance.

I'm coming off the first week and a half of hauling gear. The experience is thoroughly different from last year. The pain, money, stress and blunderment are all way more tolerable this year.

I've been around to the west side, out to the islets, around Whale's Back Ledge. The catch is pretty skimpy, but the price is up, so a day's work is bringing a day's pay.

Last June, I'd been hauling for a few weeks, pulling wire traps up from the sea floor by hand. Realization was stark. I could not possibly haul enough that way to make any kind of financial contribution to my family. My wrists, back, neck elbows, shoulders felt like glass ready to splinter. The despair and panic lead me to wish I could give the boat back to the builder and do something else; what I did not know.

Then came the winch/battery/solar panel idea. It took a number of weeks to pull together. I set up the battery panel on a styrofoam veggie shipping tray from Lisa's store, put the battery under the seat and the winch on top of the seat. I took a couple of nylon cinch straps from a life vest that washed ashore and secured the winch so it wouldn't winch itself down overboard, but would instead winch the traps up and aboard.

After the bugs were worked out, that arrangement changed everything. The solar panel always kept the battery at 75% or better. My body was saved. My spirit was saved. I started making money.

This year, I've added a motor which changes the show as thoroughly as did the winch. I had no idea how to operate a motor boat. Especially where, instead of oars in the middle of the boat pulling it forward, the motor is mounted on the back, so it's a bit like pushing a pencil where you want it to go and only touching the tip to do it.

Holy wow, though, does it make life easier. I can zip between clusters of gear and then switch to rowing from trap to trap. I can get out to the start and back from the finish. I can multitask while cruising 'cause my hands are free. It does not care about wind and chop.

I feel almost (but not) guilty about how much easier it is to work with my solar team. I still know I've done a day's work, but I'm not feeling shattered when I come in.

The motor draws on the battery pretty hard, and I've had to charge up on household current a few times if I wanted to go hauling on consecutive days. Even at our very high electric rate, it's less than a buck to charge the battery from flat dead. So far on one charge, I've gotten a day's hauling and cruising plus a ride for our wonderful school teacher and his wife the next day. Not bad that I can fill my fuel tank for less than a buck and get more than a day's work out of it.

The bottom line is that I now have a fully functional solar/human/wind powered fishing operation that is beginning to make money. This is not a solar setup for charging a laptop or making coffee, but heavy duty physical work in a tough environment. My bones and tendons can tell how much hard labor is done for me courtesy of the sun.

I won't send kids to college or pay for braces with this setup, but I have a model and an understanding of the interplay between solar charging, weight and work effort. Now, as with every fisherman since probably forever, I say: just need a bigger boat.

Shopping:

I spent almost nothing to get ready this year. I bought some stainless steel and ferrous hog rings, a quart of paint and a few bundles of oak runners. Not $200 I don't think.

Bait bags, buoys, trap vents, bungee cords, cleats all litter the shore and are free for the scavenging. I climb along the rocks and walk the cobbly beaches and come back with armloads of trash that then gets installed on my traps and returned to production. Plastic trash converted to money I don't have to spend, and money I will make with my gear. Ah Hah!

First Hauls, Alternative Energy and O Rings

2011-06-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

The first half day back to hauling was pretty encouraging. Not the weather, but the lobsters. It was foggy and dismal as had been the case for many weeks. I baited up the afternoon before, realizing that I can bag bait even if it's blowing 25, but there are only so many calm hours to be rowing and hauling traps.

My first half day's worth of gear was pretty close around the island. I started behind the breakwater, worked around Wheaton Island, into Old Cove and Back Cove. I poked around in the fog, staying very close to shore, enjoying the boat, freshly painted trap flipper and solar charged winch- all the things that are now in muscle memory, but which were either totally unfamiliar, or which did not exist a year ago.

It was a knuckle cleaning, tendon wrenching, obsenity and despair filled few weeks at first last year as I discovered the set-in-stone limitations as well as painfully acquired some boat handling and trap pulling skills. I tell myself the same thing now when I'm doing something clumsily, which never seems to happen when nobody's watching: I am primarily an entertainer. Flailing around, messy moorings, bonking into my skiff, goofy almost balancing acts. Those are all part of the show. I got to skip all of that for the first day back. Besides, it was too foggy for anybody to see the stage.

Yesterday felt like vaulting from April, over May and June into July. I was hot and a little stifly as I started at West Point after a refreshing 42 minute paddle. I hauled a full day's worth of gear working back around the islets and ledges. I also feel as though I vaulted over the first few months of last year. I immediately took up where I'd left off in September. The setup worked. I seemed to remember how to work as well. I hauled 75 pots and scooted back in with my new motor. With the motor, I feel as though I'm sitting on the ledge of a convertible and should be waving as I putt along at a stately pace. It is regal, or at least like the second runner up at the sardine festival parade.

The motor, battery and I are still getting to know one another. Being that the winch is essential while the motor is a regal luxury, I can't run the battery flat with the motor early in the day. I don't have a battery gauge any more because the battery case marketed by the same company as the motor has corroded into nothingness in less than a year. As a result, I am starting out being very judicious with the motor, limiting its running time to official monarchical and regal occasions, or when I'm tired and there's a ways between strings of traps.

What the whole solar experience reminds me is how potent petroleum is as an energy form. I'm capturing photons a few at a time and a few hours at a time while oil is millenia of stored sunlight metabolized by plants, little algae in the ocean that died and piled up on the seabed in very large numbers.

The alternative energy experience has also helped highlight electrical and mechanical challenges in the saltwater environment. Every single time I've been out setting traps or testing the engine or whatever else, I come to an inevitable point where an electrical connection fails. Not just any electrical connection. Clayton helped me see to it that most of the gear is wired to open boat saltwater tolerance. There's this one particular connection that forever vexes me. The positive battery post on the "waterproof" trolling motor "power center," or plastic box that keeps the battery dry. I have sweet talked, dirty talked, taken apart, cranked back together every nut, bolt and ring terminal in this part of my photon supply chain EVERY SINGLE TIME I've come in.

As I was getting ready to haul my second trap yesterday- after the 42 minute warm up row- I hit the switch and listened to the gentle lap of wavelets instead of the hearty hum of my winch. The connection went again first thing, way out from the harbor. This stupid little thing was going to end my first real workday before it began. I decided to hardwire everything straight to the battery and use the box cover as a hood. The whole works was way more frisky with a solid connection. zzziinngggg!

That battery post was my o-ring, that little part that can disable an entire system. Since I don't want to spend any money on a new saltwater box until I'm actually making some money, I'll rig the box and bypass the external terminals altogether. I will zip about, waving as the Peapod Crown or Clown Prince of The Isle.

Sea you there.

Frustrations with Arithmitick-Amps, Watts, Volts and Hours

2011-05-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

The new motor is a game changer. I slid out of the harbor several times after spending a while playing with it. On the way back in from the 3rd load, the battery quit. It is an 80 amp hour deep cycle marine battery charged by a 20 watt solar panel.

So the new motor is a game changer as long as I only want to work about an hour and a half a day. I started doing some remedial algebra in hopes of monkeying the variables. Batteries hold amps. Solar panels deliver my beloved photons turned electrons in watts. The battery gives volts. Motor draws 50 amps at full speed. The unhappy conclusion of my math exam was that a full charge takes days for the solar panel while the motor only takes an hour and a half of full time operation to drain the battery. Then there's the winch that also needs photons.

'Twar the winch who deceived me at the outset. The winch growls and generates huge torque for easily pulling traps up to the boat. I used it for many full days last summer and never seriously dented the photon bank. The battery never registered more than about 25% depleted. I figured that if the winch could work that hard and not run the battery flat, then the motor would perform similarly because it is so quiet and turns in the water, rather than growling up traps. Not so.

Now I have to either have at least a couple batteries charging and swap them, bring the main one in and charge it on household current-losing my zero carbon credibility- or not run the motor much. Too bad, 'cause it's so fun. And easy.

Breaking the Logjam

2011-05-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post the actual progress for a while and stop trying to find meaning. I've gotten things rolling with setting traps out for the season. I'm up to 35 after being at it a day and a half. That would take an hour or so in a conventional boat. The weather, tides and other circumstances have made it a challenge.

The good news is that the new electric motor, charged via solar panel, is a game-changer. It is very handy to slide along with a load of traps and not need all the space that 8 foot oars require. I found it strange to get places and not exert myself. I feel like I'm riding an aquatic powered skateboard. It is to my liking.

The less good news is that the same company that sells the motor also sells a "trolling motor power center"- basically a box to keep the battery dry and provide external electrical connections. The problem is that the box is wired with components that stand up to salt water about as well as do wheat thins or kleenex. The works were highly corroded- inside the supposedly waterproof enclosure, from last year. Clayton helped me rip out the rotted tissues and replace a circuit breaker. The other problem is that the external posts corrode together miserably, requiring pliers and threatening to shred the wires attached to the post.

The end result is that the motor can't get power out, and the solar panel can't get photons turned into electrons. I really need photons! They're very helpful to me. Some marine grease is probably called for. LPS 5 or something.

The other report is that solar-electric boats work, at least so far. It's a little early to tell how well the panel will keep up with both the winch and motor.

There's a hummingbird outside the slider. The feeder is empty. I need to find out how much sugar, water and red stuff to put in.

Held Over: The March Hare Show

2011-05-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

I want to work. I've waited for good conditions. I've stewed til the stew is stuck and blackened on the bottom of the stewpot in my soul. The mortgage is coming due. The rain, fog and wind seem eternal. My family and I have been away for most of the last month with one thing and another.

This morning there was a 20 minute window of favorable trap setting conditions. That's been it for the last I don't know how long. Unfortunately, I showed up at the harbor after that period expired. As a result, I got a grand total of 5 traps in the water and got thoroughly drenched in the process. It's pouring. I've got other commitments in the afternoon.

Many other frustrations leapt at me. The inner harbor is pretty well useless unless one is parking large skows there and running lines in every direction from them. I installed my mast, sail and radar reflector yesterday and discovered, as I was trying to load traps in the rapidly filling and very congested inner harbor, that I can't get a load on with the mast in. Take it out and hurl the whole business on the banking, along with many verbal unpleasantries.

All the variables are aligned perfectly against me being productive. If you see me, stay clear. I am mad as a March hare when there's been three months' worth of March.

The Return of Sweet Pea

2011-05-18T03:25:00.001-07:00

It's a good thing we've had two Marches and swapped May for an extra April. The very tardy transition to warmth, sunshine and calm waters around the island would be making me crazy except that I've had so many other crazinesses and obstacles and unexpected opportunities- yes, let's call these little surprises "unexpected opportunities"- that I hardly noticed that everything is a month behind. I have no traps in the water yet, which puts be behind last year, when I knew not me arse from me stern. The gardens aren't going in. The blossoms aren't coming out. There's hardly any recreational firearm discharge at all coming from the isolated ends of the island.

Among the UO's was a chance to visit at the Carpenter's Boatshop for several days last week. I got to play with boats, recharge in the spirit, and be extravagantly well fed by the same organization that made the whole project possible by delivering Sweet Pea into my family here on Matinicus.

Less fun last week were unexpected road trips, appointments, gambling on being able to stuff the family into a Cessna between fog and showers, and how, right in the middle of the crazy scheduling and coordination, out falls a big chunk of one of my molars.

I found out yesterday that photons take years to escape the sun's core from whence they are liberated. They have to bounce, get absorbed into and then escape many, many times from nuclei of other atoms before they head to earth to jump into my solar panel and charge my system aboard Sweet Pea. The 96 million mile commute is apparently no big deal after ten years inside the sun. I feel as a photon this year, having to collide with and then extricate from all manner of things that take me off the island or away from my work.

It is no small wonder, then, that Sweet Pea is actually ready for salt water. While Lydia was home week before last, she helped clean, sand and refinish the interior. We put a bit of bottom paint on and now just need to borrow a trailer and something to pull it.

There can be no more optimistic smell than linseed oil, turpentine and pine tar on thirsty wood at the beginning of the season. The before and after video appears below.

Me and my photons are outtahere! Pretty soon. I'm figuring. Depends, I guess.

Spring Color

2011-04-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

Between last week's rope and this week's buoy work, the grass turned green. Virtually overnight. That's the visible spectrum. On the tactile plane, air temperature and wind are still irksomely lurching between February Fresh and March Miserable. Sunday morning sees winds over 60 miles per hour- the winter gales' welcome long worn out. If it's sunny and there's a sheltered spot and I have a hoody under my Carhartt coat, it's tolerable working outside.

During those interludes when sun and air agree with each other, I paint buoys. This task is the most high gratification type of gear work. There can't be a much more optimistic sight than a hundred or so feet of rope strung between apple trees hung with freshly painted buoys. New paint goes on shiny and smooth over bleached, abraded, barnacled veterans from last season.

On one of the days when sun, wind and rain could find no basis for agreement, I worked in the barn, rigging up 80 new buoys from the seemingly endless pile of junk gear in the back yard. Every time I dig up a bunch of dirt-caked plastic and styrofoam junk and turn it into useable fishing equipment, every time the junk pile gets a little smaller, I am a happy fellow. These new/old buoys are every color and are hardly showroom condition. Many have been hacked up by propellers, scoured against the rocks, and puckered from being pulled underwater too far. They're all different shapes and sizes.

It's a motley, sad collection until the new paint goes on.

Learning the Ropes

2011-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate as a young person to work on a farm owned by Malcolm and Lucille Jewell in Bowdoinham. It was hard work from the beginning, but with great love and humor and the best kind of character leadership by example. One of Mal’s jokes was about losing money on every hay bale, but the volume keeping him in business. Farming and fishing share a common delusional optimism, a certain level of denial being necessary to overcome what common sense will otherwise tell you. The unit costs don’t even begin to account for weather, broken equipment and other variables. Which in turn leads to another joke about the fisherman (or farmer) asked what he’ll do with his lottery winnings and replying that he’ll “prob'ly keep fishing/farming until the money’s all gone.” Thanks to Tim Sample for that one.

Back to volume. My inside-out version of Malcolm’s joke about volume is that my profit margin is sky high on all 27 lobsters that I caught last summer. That is to say volume isn’t happening so far. I have no fuel bill and no expensive repairs, insurance or boat payments. I also don’t catch much, especially when I don’t get up to speed until mid July and get skittish with hurricane warnings in late August. Accordingly, my short and longer term goals for the project involve scaling the operation up. This year that means two hundred traps instead of 150. It also means getting them out and having the operation flowing before July.

After making the list entitled: Things That Need to Get Done, But Can’t Possibly Get Done in Time, I started with rope. My operation is amateurishly small compared to proper lobster businesses. Since I fish in close to shore, my trap lines are very short, 15 fathoms being the longest compared to the 55 fathoms and longer commonly used on bigger boats. I only need 200. compared to the guys with 800 traps in the water. Even with the small scale, there are still 12,000 or so feet of rope to be checked, cleaned, mended and untangled. I had to make 55 new 10 fathom lines with red paint at the mid point for whale-proofing, 7 fathoms of sinking rope, 3 fathoms of float rope and a toggle buoy.

I dug through an impossible baby elephant sized pile of tangled abandoned rope and buoys in my back yard to get toggle buoys, those small floats fastened partway down the trap line to prevent the line from fouling. It was like wrestling a groggy Jabba the Hutt because the rope pile had long ago melded into a single obstinate mass. Maybe a dog leash business makes more sense. Short pieces would be easy.

My hands were winter dainty, having had gloves for any real work. After a couple of days of rope work, I was chafed and leaving my own red marks on the rope. This will insure that if a whale wanders into my front yard, he’ll avoid the rope pile. ‘Nother story there. Anyhoo- my hands are getting tough love or perhaps just plain abuse.

The rope pile is done. Nice neat rows of warps in bundles of five. It had been spread out all over the front yard where I’d measured and gridded the pieces out to keep them organized. I was left with only a tiny pile of scraps for recycling. That seemed good. Now to just prepare 200 buoys, fix 200 traps, refinish the inside of the boat, put fresh bottom paint on, and rewire everything. Then it’ll be time to set gear. Then I can start work.

You Know It's Time to Get Going with Gear Work When...

2011-03-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

When it's 3 something on a Tuesday afternoon in late March and I find myself washing off toothpaste tubes and toothbrush handles, I know that it is really time to move on to the next phase of the year's workflow cycle. Not that it was an existential make-work placebo task. The dental care drawer in the bathroom was several years overdue for a little refreshment.

The drawer preferred not to close as a result of overcrowding. There were enough toothbrushes for a public high school graduating class. They were caked, stuck together. Then there were the toothpaste tubes, ranging from 90% to about 40% used up. There were two dozen or so of these "pre-owned" units, as they say in the car business. Not all the way and then thrown out, but just most or part way used before a newer tube proved more appealing to the brusher and the remainder was left for the next person to squeeze and roll up neatly from the bottom. This would not have created such a mess but for the fact that the caps were left off all of the deselected tubes.

The geology of the drawer was that as new pre-owned tubes were deselected for service, the next layer added pressure, especially when the tired person scrunched the drawer closed. The resulting matrix consisted of a solid mass of old toothbrushes, tubes and caps. Toothpaste gets pretty stubborn when it's had three or four years to sedimentate and metamorphose. I needed a soup can lid to get a bunch of it dislodged from the drawer.

Now you can see why, because of the length of my description, if from nothing else, I needed to get going on outdoor, fresh air, hand chafing lobsterman work. Everybody else seems pretty far ahead. I'm used to that sensation. I also have the same queer feeling of doing very familiar basic gear work, but in the context of a crazy new-age riverboat gamble of a concept: zero carbon lobster harvesting out of a tiny boat with bockety old used and salvaged fishing gear. Familiar and hare-brained. I know this work well AND what the ---- am I doing?

After unpiling all my things and sorting them into new piles and checking my safety items, I'm starting with rope. Going over the stiff and winter- crusted coils slopped together in a hurry before Hurricane Earl and then in October. A few mends here. A new toggle there. The simplest of tricks for a spindly old dude trying to haul up traps partly by hand- a knot a couple of feet from the trap end, which feels as though it makes that last heave about half as difficult as without the knot.

Then there will be work on traps that strangely are in worse shape than they were last spring, which was not that great. More rust, holes, broken vents, torn heads, missing runners than I remember seeing last spring. Buoys to paint and whale proof. Solar power to reconfigure and rewire. Figuring out new ways to keep everything I need on board and still have room for both feet. No sense getting too drove up about it, 'cause it's going to snow tomorrow.

***

We lost Ronnie last week. His lengthy career in the theater of Matinicus received mixed reviews, but he always took the stage with a flourish- by sea flying a non-tongue-in-cheek Jolly Roger jigger sail, by land in dump trucks, excavators, cranes, tractors, and by air in his spotless J-3 Cub. His oil truck had murals of two of his cats on the sides and "meow" where the last 4 digits of the phone number would normally appear. I will miss his word-play and humor and commitment to the island as a living community instead of a seafood strip mine. Glass raised.

Running out of Winter, but not soon enough

2011-03-01T16:46:00.001-08:00

I tried to skip out on half of February by playing beachside bars, exploring reefs full of Pixar fish, driving on the lefthand side of the road and generally living as a drunken sailor on St. Croix. Many, many thanks to my host, chef, guide, booking agent, manager and good friend and honky-tonk piano dude, Tugboat Tommy.

Fishing looks similar in that the boats and gear are well worn and look dubious if you're seeing them for the first time. Fishermen go out in small boats with outboards and dive for conch and lobster. They sell by the side of the road or at parking lots right out of the boat on a trailer.

I had fresh coconut water, hydroponic lettuce, all manner of bananas, passion fruit, papaya and some kind of drink made from tree bark, all from the open air farmer's market. Curry, conch stew and collaloo came from out of the way places that had that authentic taste as though they found the perfect pans to cook in 30 years ago.

The trip seemed endless, but perversely made the stateside portion of my February seem 13 weeks long. We've had the most robust winter I can remember since President Carter was in office. Many of us are short tempered, swinging between furious busywork and apathetic lethargy. The year-round Matinicus Island lifestyle requires just a little too much together time, if you're asking me this week. And last week. We better turn the corner before we (I) go all Nicholson in The Shining.

The other side of the problem is that I feel I'm already late for the early summer fishing season. I added up all the rewiring, refinishing, repair and problem solving I need to do before the first trap goes over. Hard seeing all of that fitting in with town meeting to crunch numbers for, tax season, left over winter work and kids to enjoy. Last year I designed a solar charged winch rig to go with the rest of my quirky little fishing operation. One of many problems was that I did not know the first thing about solar technology or marine wiring. Aside from the occasional zing in my finger when the business got wet, there was the matter of it cutting out and not functioning. So I need to rewire the whole works and make it waterproof.

There are many other things that I limped by with last year that need to be refreshed or completely redone. Then there are 200 traps which were a little past their prime last year, rope to groom and buoys to paint. Safety gear that needs testing or replacement. All kinds of things I still don't know much about but will have to figure out, improvise or fake my way through. That sounds like life generally.

Winter needs to go. Spring needs to be long and slow. That's all I'm askin'.

Lobsters on the Scanner

2011-02-09T19:07:00.001-08:00

I didn't have any of my own lobsters, having been done hauling from Sweet Pea in early October. My gracious host in St. Croix wanted some lobsters and shrimp to remind him of the taste of cold water temperate zone seafood. The good stuff. Lobsters with proper claws on them. Shipping? Apparently not a viable option. So I stopped in at Jess's Market in Rockland and with their expert assistance happened upon the solution. 2 pounds of frozen shrimp cooling 2 live lobsters inside a little picnic bag. The gentlemen in security screening in Boston were amused. The Rockland guys have probably seen it enough that there was no surprise value.

I'm going away for a week and a half to St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. I'll play some tunes and explore and visit with some of the Mainers down there.

I was pretty well panicked about leaving Lisa and the kids on the island in the winter for such a long period. I've never been away anywhere near that long. My guilt took the form of obsessive focus on firewood, chimney cleaning, heating oil transfer, neurotic floor cleaning and other silliness. I guess some of it was useful.

Now I'm sitting in Logan trying to learn how to wait in a chair in a brightly lit waiting area when what I really want is to be sleeping. I did pretty well at first. I sat in a Dunkin Donuts courtesy seating area and did almost nothing for 2 hours, watching people, staring, breathing. It was a good exercise. Especially when on the road, there seems to be an impulse to always try and be productive or eating or drinking or viewing, consuming, moving. The staring was a good experience. For a couple of hours. Then I had to play some tunes. A bunch of instrumental acoustic guitar and a private funky version of Use Me Up by Bill Withers.

My air travel for the last 11 years has been at a maximum altitude of about 2,400 feet and a duration of 14 minutes or so from the gravel hill sloping to the shore on Matinicus to the Knox County Regional Airport. There was no internet, no taking off my shoes, no chatting with family, checking email. None of it. Laptops, Portable Devices and earclipped cell phones are attached to almost everyone. Me included at the moment.

I went to St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands when I was 5 and never got over it. This is the trip of a lifetime, and at least pretty close to the two far-distant points on my life line. I have always loved to go places for little more than the stimulation of being Somewhere Else. I guess I'm getting that. Lot of sitting though, considering how far I'm going. Better walk around a little.

Chainsaw and Keyboard Season, Hallelujah

2011-01-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

My hands don't make an oar shape lately. I've forgotten what bait smells like. I owe a seafood favor to someone and will have to acquire the goods elsewhere and then hope they stay frozen and TSA personnel don't confiscate them for looking like a menace to air travel. I guess St. Croix USVI is a hard location to ship fresh lobsters or shrimp to.

I finished an interior job and started a chainsaw project yesterday. Formidable as is the Stihl 211, I felt like one termite in a very large forest of tangled and blown down spruce trees. Taking a break, I looked across Matinicus Roads, past Ten Pound Island and the Hogshead. All the outlying ledges and islets were sharp white against a blue black ocean. Everything else in every direction was gray, so the black blue and white had a glow of their own, appearing hemispheres removed from the way the area looks in summer. We are Spitsbergen and a summer island paradise depending on the calendar.

I've also been working the sit muscles pretty hard and going back to law school in a manner of speaking. I've started legal research work. I was never the legal analyst, so this is a good chance to fill some gaps in my education. Lots and lots of screen time and ass time only broken by feeding the stove and school children.

That's the beauty and the peril of this life. I'm able to do a bunch of really different things as long as I don't mind being cold, inhaling urethane fumes, dodging falling trees and hardest of all, using my brain while sitting still. As long as I don't mind always being half a step ahead of delinquency notices and calls from customer service professionals who may monitor my call for training and quality assurance.

So today, the snow was whipping and my sinuses pretty well malfunctioning and I decided not to flog myself. What a luxury. I've had many years of dragging myself through court, correctional facilities, sterns of commercial fishing vessels and school while very much under the weather.

On one occasion, I was scheduled to be in front of a superior court justice who is now a federal prosecutor. I was scheduled to be in 2 courts at the same time, which is a fact of life for criminal defense counsel. I was sick as a dog, but apparently indispensible to the justice system and sorely missed by Delahanty. Neither court would accommodate the other, so I went to one and then the other. The judge called me to his office and assembled an audience to watch the verbal horsewhipping. I knew full well that on docket days there is infinite flex in the schedule and that no business made my presence a critical requirement. I guess he had a bad day, for which I feel long term gratitude because I decided that day to stop taking those kinds of cases where I wound up broke with holes in my shoes and a sour disposition. Thanks for helping me along the way, your honor.

We have time for our kids, mindless media entertainment and mid week jammy days. We make up for it the other 11 months. Like Lisa says, this is what January is for.

Chapter 2, Cellar Stairs

2011-01-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1 appears earlier in the blog.

The next morning, Patrick opened the cellar door and better understood the lack of evidence of the tenants’ departure. The bottom of the stairs was under an avalanche of black plastic bags. The adventurers discovered one of the island realities left out of waiting room magazine pieces: there’s no place to get rid of anything. Properly, at least.

There are, however, plenty of woods and ocean bottom. Combustion gets rid of a lot. Refrigerators shoved down one of the steep bluffs often beached themselves in storms the following winter.

Patrick’s own early visits in the summer mingled the sea fog and beach roses with smoldering plastic and damp paper fires. Some times it was just a few things burned in a fifty gallon metal drum with air holes punched in it. Sometimes it was a massive upside down dumping into the sky of a black oily column of former rope, styrofoam, vinyl siding scraps, insulation and anything else inconvenient and combustible.

When he was sterning for Ray Moody, one trap came up full of jelly jars, catfood or tuna cans and a plastic Bart Simpson head. When he first had his own boat, one of the playful and properly pedigreed fishermen left him ice teas and beers, nicely chilled from the ocean bottom and giving refreshment along with the little chill that goes with being reminded who’s in charge out there.

Trash was a different matter here. You learned how much stuff you create just by living in the 21st century and adjacent to the United States of America. You learned that washing out meat trays with hot soapy water because the recycle program will take them was a lot easier than not doing it and having the smell and mess and attractiveness to pests. You get good at punching down cardboard boxes, nesting cans and doing every other trick to work the volume numbers more in your favor and have a little more living space for yourself. It is a part time job that on the mainland Patrick and family, along with most of the republic usually delegated to holes in the earth and waste trucking companies.

There were only actually 8 bags trailing up from the bottom of the cellar stairs. Pat would huck them up into the kitchen, sort through, wash what needed to be washed, haul it to recycle and compost, toss the animal products- if there were any- on the rocks for the gulls, burn a little, bag a little to haul back to a proper garbage receptical on the mainland.

He’d done it before. His own. Summer renters’. Dumpers’. Sorting through, trying to clean up and organize, trying to help things find their way along. When Patrick was practicing street law- criminal defense, child protective and divorces for poor people with no stocks to fight over- a crusty old DA, constantly in the news for blunt and intemperate remarks had told him “I’m really just a gahbij collecta. A human garbage collector. That’s what I do.”

Patrick on the other side of the courtroom aisle, and with 20 years’ hindsight hoped that when he did that work, he was more of a recycler, helping along those mixed up souls at the bottom of the cellar stairs of society.

---

---
Conversation deep underground. Rock. Aquifers. Magma. Motion. Rolling old green mountains with thick coats of dirt and trees. Inland to ocean waterways. Large lakes. Drier. Unclothed rocks. Brown corduroy rolling hills. Prairies with barbwire fences poked into the frozen ground. All talking around their table, passing the ancient message. It vibrates up through the soles of human feet separated by thousands of miles. In a courtroom in Montana.

Snow Cover

2011-01-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting on a dry dead spruce limb. It's frozen into the pond. My 2 younger kids are crazy for ice skating, so here we are, lacing up on the frozen pond. We explore the inlets and coves and islets within the little island within Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine. There is the sunset. Over there is the hut, collapsed and almost consumed by the woods at the far edge of the pond. Here we are. Lucky. Privileged to be in this natural wild windy fresh place, twirling, gliding.

I've never been to a rink. Only ponds. Dark murky mosquito-y places in the summer. Silver gray places in skating season. We're here 'til dark. All week.

I'm thoroughly out of touch with the water. The ocean and ocean's work is all consuming, until it's done for the year, when it ceases to exist. Now there is the computer keyboard to tap and the woodstove to endlessly feed. Future work to plan. Inside fix-ups. A long trailing list of tasks at least a quarter of which will be on next winter's list unless their malfunction presents some emergency. One thing on the list was a pair of bedrooms.

The two younger kids roomed together in a cozy, basically big closet sized room. The 34 clowns coming out of the vw beetle have nothing on those two. Conventional figuring of cubic feet provides no explanation how all that stuff could fit into such a tiny space. The contents of that room took up the entire rest of the upstairs while I tried to prioritize, give away, strategically save and distribute all the thousands of items- toys, puzzle pieces, disembodied lego heads, fourteen thousand crayons/pencils/markers, long lost jammy bottoms, remnants of smuggled candy and fruit, homework and, of course, a couple of dozen socks that probably were originally sold as singles.

When spring comes, the some of the other single socks will emerge from the dead grass around the yard.

I'm nowhere near ready for that. I need Snow Cover. I need time to catch up and I need the limits imposed mercifully by the season.

Old Fisherman Goes Zig-Zagging Home

2010-12-27T15:44:00.000-08:00

I've stayed awkwardly late at the party. I'm waiting for a bus or ferry that already left. It's the weekend after the semester started and I'm still watching the stars through the top of the cabriolet while she drives the twisting peninsula roads leading from the harbor town of my summer job. It's Boxing Day and the traps aren't up.

The road that was muddy is now frozen to concrete and I'm really enjoying the super heavy socks inside my rubber boots on my walk to the harbor. The same walk where I'd be swishing mosquitoes away and marveling at the dawn chorus of songbirds. I am Held Over. Held over past the time that things are supposed to change to the next phase.

"You'll be cold." Rick tells me from the porch as I walk past. We have a proper blizzard in the forecast. Almost everything is some shade of gray. The wharf concrete. The water. The sea smoke. The clouds to the east, however, are not gray. The band of clouds where we are heading are black. Not like a thunderstorm which is isolated, but a solid band. God is coming kind of black. Old Testament God. Windy and Cold Testament God.

Zig: The clouds and chop and temperature are frightening to a timid person like myself. I am afraid. I want to be back in my jams for Boxing Day. My family was very comfy when I left. But I am a fishermen, even if an inexperienced wussy one. I love it, so I am here.

Zag: The clouds go over us and it is not so bad. The wind dies down some. I am coiling 55 fathom trap lines or "warps," the first of 19,500 feet to be coiled today. I learned how to coil rope much faster this year. What good for a man with 3 kids being a superior rope coiler is, I do not know. But I am good. I do not get behind. I am not afraid. The temperature inside counteracts the temperature outside. I am grooving. We go in with the first load of 50. Captain Clayton says something about thinking we might not get the third load into the harbor.

Zig again: "I don't like the way this wind is coming up. I think if we come back out here it will be some nasty." I hadn't noticed. I certainly notice when we take a wave and a 400 pound barrel of water and lobsters and a tier of traps go sliding to port. Now I have rubbery legs and a tight gut. It gets uglier in a hurry. I see the slate green frowns with white spray crinkled foreheads and knitted brows, all glowering right at me.

On the way in, the trap load keeps fidgeting, but always ever so slightly more to port. I get visions of the load, which is locked together and lashed to the boat upsetting the center of gravity. A surly wave will push us over and its bullying friend will roll us. There will be no time for immersion suits or radio calls. We are far out from land. I am cold. My fingers are soaked and numb. I am not afraid. I am terrified. Probably because I don't understand how stable lobster boats really are. Fear doesn't have to be rational.

Then the traps get trucked. Even though we only got 100 of the 150 we planned on, it's getting dark by the time we're done. 100 traps, 120 or so buoys, 19,500 feet of wet rope.

Zag again. Home is never so sweet and inviting as when I'm cold and nervous on the water. Even with stir crazy kids still in their jams.

***
Tonight as I write, we're in night number two of the blizzard. Sticky snow, rain, more snow, always copious amounts of wind. Snow is glued to the northeast sides of the tree trunks. After feeding the birds and bringing in wood this morning, the kids and I built the traditional snow fort, but topped it with a matrix of sticks and bows that held the sticky wet snow perfectly. We now have a stick and snow-stucco hut big enough for 1 and a half people or 2 kids to crawl into. Tonight it will certainly freeze solid. Life is good.

Trying to Make a Living in Paradise

2010-12-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-6XgfpZQjE

Pretty much showing it like it is. This is the saltwater rock music video follow-up to "Haul Em' Up!" Thanks to the fabulous Steamboat Wharf dancers, the old fire truck and the never ending inspiration that is Matinicus Island.

Right now making a living consists of taking up traps, which, tomorrow is likely to be a frosty enterprise, odd painting and carpentry jobs and law geek stuff over the winter. It is all part of the adventure. I need to remind myself of the adventure element when I start getting mopey.

Here we come a wassailing among the leaves of green. Love and joy come to you.

One More Name on the Memorial

2010-12-13T12:51:00.001-08:00

The wind seemed heartless and indifferent this morning at around 2. I woke knowing that beyond the walls of my house, past the spruce trees and fields, the rocks and outer barrier ledges, across 30 miles of pitch black December-style Atlantic ocean, the Coast Guard was searching for a man who went overboard 14 hours earlier. The boat was a 77 footer out of Rhode Island, working 50 or so miles offshore.

The marine forecast called for 20 to 30 foot seas as I turned in last night. I'd not seen such a prediction in the 5 years we've been here. The tv news weather graphic showed a boiling swath of precipitation stretching from off the west coast of Florida all the way up to New England.

It doesn't make sense to impute cruelty to the wind or the sea, but that was how I felt when I woke up thinking of that man, his mates and captain, family and the coast guard men and women out there trying to find him. It's cruel misfortune to work a lifetime on the water, get into one tangle with the wrong trap line, and get pulled overboard. After that, according to the Bangor Daily News, David fought back. He cut himself loose successfully in the midst of the mayhem and got a hold of a life ring. Then he let go and sank.

I'm still a newcomer to deck work, and not a newbie in any way other than that. I came to this work figuring that if a hand goes overboard, he can just tread water for a couple of minutes, even if it's cold, until the boat turns around and comes back to scoop him up. All the reports I read and things I hear say otherwise. Much of the time, falling overboard is quick and final.

I don't really know what to make of it when these tragedies occur. David was obviously out there out of necessity, but probably also because that is what he loved doing. I'm old and lazy enough to think that a lot of boats and crews are under too much pressure to go out and stay out in poor conditions. I'll probably always be a lubber. I can't see myself compulsively going out or staying out when the conditions are rotten. I'd rather make a little less money. This attitude would get me flogged in a real fishing operation. Then again, I understand that once you're out, you want to make a trip of it. There is also the primal truth that a rotten day on a boat is still better than a nice day in other work situations.

I'm also timid enough that I don't worry about flotation compromising my manhood. New vests that inflate when the sensor is more than 4" under water and closed cell foam work gear could save lives or at least provide some relief to families.

When I was a kid, I'd never seen a color tv or a bike helmet. Now they're everywhere. Fishing will always be the wildest, most fun, most real occupation, even with a vest on. And it will still be plenty dangerous. And make great color tv entertainment.

Let us pray.

Fisherman as Villain

2010-12-06T05:15:00.000-08:00

When the zero carbon lobster project got some media attention last summer, I should not have read the comments. Some were very positive. Some were just nasty. One stuck with me.

" There is no greater destructive

job to the planet than that of the fisherman." -Comment in Huffington Post.

Really? I suppose so as long as we don't consider mining, manufacturing, oil drilling, mountain top coal extraction, box stores, forestry, highway transportation, commercial agriculture or beef, pork, chicken, and soy bean production.

There is no shortage of professionally crafted persuasive and fundraising messages insisting that fishing activity has brought oceans to the brink of mass extinction. Fishermen are portrayed as ruthless pillagers of the oceans. Grisly photographs are shown; the kind we don't usually see in connection with other food production where chicken seems to have come into existence skinless and boneless in a styrofoam tray. Vilification of fishermen also diverts attention from ocean acidification, agricultural, home pesticide, road and industrial runoff, military, cargo vessels, and cruise ships (where does all the, ya know -stuff- go?), and of course grounded oil tankers and exploding drilling platforms.

Perhaps industrial scale fishing, like industrial scale food production of any kind, rapidly depletes resources and causes other degradation of the home we all share. I offer a few points of comparison between fishing and other food production, particularly concerning smaller boats where the catch rarely goes into an intercontinental shipping container.

Fishing works with the natural environment instead of against it. Fish live wild until they are caught. With the exception of methods such as bottom dragging or dynamiting a coral reef, the surrounding environment is left intact. The creatures know when the moon is full. The move about, eat and reproduce as they please. The ecosystem maintains her rhythm.

Contrast this with, say, soybean production, the foundation of so many vegetarian and purportedly green-friendly foods. How much acreage is plowed up? How many trees are removed? How many smaller plants, animals and microorganisms are displaced? How much water is diverted from its natural destination? What quantity of chemicals are introduced into the earth and the oceans?

Food production is a big source of trouble and potential. More local production and marketing means less transportation, refrigeration, processing, preserving. More small scale local production means a broader distribution of economic opportunity and benefit.

Small, local food production means making the most effective use of what your environment is good for. For those of us blessed enough to live and work on the ocean, our contribution to a web of environmentally healthy and economically vibrant food production originates here.

The imagery of the rapacious fisherman is ripe for a little public makeover. We can keep the eye patches for when we really need them, say, Halloween and regulatory hearings.

Chapter 1

2010-12-04T06:08:00.000-08:00

The winds were gone. They came in October and stayed until they went somewhere else in April. The wind could have been blowing all over the Gulf of Maine or the northern hemisphere, or just off the shore and only tormenting those on the island, the big wind face hanging off to the northwest all winter.

The winds were replaced by green. Over the course of a week the great climatic dimmer switch faded the gray brown into the kind of bright light green promised by Easter Bunnies and yellow hatchlings.

The ledges and islets were granite one week and emerald scarved the next. The horizon was perfect geometric abstraction after being crinkled by temperature and light distortion all winter. The ocean was flat, blue, inviting.

Yards with rows of lobster traps frozen into the ground and grass stubble reaching out of the ice now had crews mending gear, painting buoys, listening to the radio, talking trash.

Lights were on at night up and down the island and around the harbor.

Fourwheelers raced the dirt road. The some-years detour on Carrie’s Hill where the road turns to truck eating mud pot was a go this year.

Recreational gunfire popped off on the south end in the afternoons.

A truck carcass was pulled from its cocoon off the side of the road, leaving a brown socket that would vanish in a month when every growing thing went rampant. The truck was towed down the road, around Carrie’s mud pot and toward the harbor for loading onto the ferry.

Loading entailed pushing, pulling, bashing, smoking tires, scronking metal, whatever was necessary to get the vehicle onto the boat and off the island. At one point when there wasn’t enough side of the road, yard space, room at the quarry or other dumping grounds, there were something like 125 vehicles heaped onto a barge and hauled to the mainland.

He could have taken the plane out and had a 12 minute ride instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes on the steel and diesel ferry. The first real ferry of the year was rolling gently and topped off with lumber trucks, summer vehicles with furniture, groceries, kayaks and other toys and a new crop of “new” island vehicles destined for short tenures in motion and long dormancy in their own cocoons. What seemed a good deal on the mainland was usually well into its second hundred thousand miles. A couple of hundred- or dozen- island miles would do it in.

Coming around Northeast or No-theast Point was a better sight than it was when Patrick and his family had moved here fifteen years earlier. The green on land and blue of a gentle ocean welcomed him back. That day fifteen years ago had been all shades of aluminum and brown-green-almost-black.

Patrick walked off the ferry with his one bag.

“Well!” What is this?!”
“Hello Art.”
“Hello. What’re you up to?”
“Just coming to check on the place now that the last batch of em is out of there.”
”Yeah, I don’t think they were much trouble. Christ, they weren’t here much after the first month or so last fall. They came and got their shit a couple weeks ago and that was the first I’d seen of them for a long time.”
“What’s new and different here?”
“Not a fuckin thing. Stop by later.”
“Oh, definitely.”

The house looked no different. The tenants did a decent job of clearing out. He walked through each room, the chill and emptiness and echo keeping him safe from actually being touched.

He walked into his favorite upstairs room. There was no southern exposure or vista, but a handsome horse chestnut tree brushed the windows and allowed in a bit of the open northern light peculiar to the island. He turned and faced down the upstairs hall. Then he could hear the pain and anger. Patrick would definitely need to stop in at Puff and Quaff Lane later.

Some of the islanders had fun when the state implemented the new E-911 address system. Puff and Quaff lane was one such location.

In the back yard, the apple trees were budding. “Too late to prune ‘em now” he said to no one.

These New Winter Blues

2010-12-02T03:47:00.000-08:00

I am rolling toward a cliff as the brake pedal smoothly and easily meets the floor. Bills and expenses are the gathering downhill momentum. The cliff is the end of lobster season and income. The brakes just aren't. White knuckles don't make anything slow down.

I am not alone on this ride. Riding shotgun is my old pal Johnny Self-Loathe. "What're are ya doin'?" he says with a grin.

"You're living in a wild and crazy place you don't belong. You've been completely financially derelict without even having any gambling debts, girlfriends, power boats, motorcycles or expensive chemical recreation to show for it. You have a law license and a lobstering license and work 360 days a year and can't make money, can't get health insurance for your kids. How do you pull it off?!"

Johnny sings in a shiny gold jacket with his eyes closed behind the black shades, one hand on the microphone, one fist chest high pointed upward, elbow knifing down. He sings These New Winter Blues.

December 1 is warm. It looks no different than the end of November which was also warm. Knowing that we are into December brings mixed emotions. Confused yet terrified. Discouraged yet panicky.

I took the last 6 potatoes from the garden, together with a handful of chard and one lovely little onion. That's it for this year. It is hard not to feel like it is the end rather than a recess. I know the land needs to recharge, but I'm scared.

I think winter began scaring me when I was in middle school and we had a Glenwood kitchen woodstove in the kitchen as our sole source of heat. Winter felt like a prison sentence with execution stayed until daylight savings ended. Confinement, constant cold. All my memories of those years appear as night time. I came to truly dread winter. Spring felt like clemency.

Some years later I realized that the only way to beat those blues was to get out into winter. It was not macho fear-facing, but just a realization that neurochemically, it's happier to be outside moving around in the cold and warming from the inside. Eventually I came to really love running in the cold, even in wet snow or winter rain. The feeling of cold outside and sweating inside was pretty much a cure-all for the staleness and depression of those months.

Now there are new blues. Uniquely tormenting to a sternman with a wife, three kids and a mortgage is the finality of the end of a lobster season. That's way worse than seeing the last 6 potatoes and one lovely onion. The end of the lobster season means a sternman with some attachments has probably banked 36 hours' worth of winter survival money.

The New Winter Blues will require some remedy. I do not know what it is. Flight? Grow up and get back in the box of a mainland job? Winter fishing jobs? Hunker down, pray and eat spruce bark and boiled leather? Johnny's a great performer and a lousy mentor. Love the jacket and shades, though.

Pick Your Pounding

2010-11-23T03:52:00.000-08:00

The wind and waves are into many weeks of consecutive irksome uncooperativeness. Eventually, financial pressure and domestic friction force the fishermen to choose the least bad next day. We had two.

One day was unpleasant, the next offensive. The similarity ends there. Sunday was cracking cold, blowing hard from the north, high glare and harsh brightness. The next was damp and blowing harder from the Southwest.

Sunday wasn't that rough because the mainland is a mere 20 some miles to the north and the waves can't get enough fetch to grow large.

The problem Sunday was the sandpaper cold on my face all day, the creeping chill in fingers and toes that never went away. I normally cannot get cold if I'm working. Not so on Sunday. On the way out to the back side of the Wooden Ball Island, I bagged bait turned sideways the whole way because the wind picked up water and garden hosed it over the port side at a height coincidentally similar to me from head down. The tv meteorologists make much mention of wind chill. They haven't developed a measurement for when you add salt water to the wind and temperature coefficients.

Monday there was plenty of fetch. The 10 to 15 knot forecast seemed short by about half.

Up two stories, down sideways. Tipping and rolling. What is horizontal or level becomes meaningless. I am peripherally aware of the rapid appearance and vanishing of water pyramids, the boat at all angles while my equilibrium is only related to the deck. Despite the wild swinging of the horizon and other normal references of balance, the boat hull is evolved such that it orients itself to the waves by swinging and rolling so my center of gravity gyroscopes along with it. Staying up is relatively easy considering the range of motion. I swing like a spindle top.

My main goal is to stay on the boat, surfing weightless then multiple G-force moments. There is some detachment, not of rotator cuffs, but between the crazed orientation of the boat and the simultaneous routine of me just doing my job. It seems impossible to a short term mariner like myself that the boat isn't flipped, rolled, or folded in half. It just sort of glides up and down, occasionally offering the unexpected snap and sudden tilt. The movement is fine when I'm in the open. I ain't no gymnast, but the autogyro seems to work pretty good except when hard objects with corners do not share my ballet of motion and gravity.

Got to get out of the house sometimes.

Vacation, Staycation, Throw it Awaycation

2010-11-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

The wind slows down a little today. Maybe tomorrow, Clayton and I will be back on the water. By my count, we've had 2 nice days since early September. The kind of days where I work with 2 feet on the platform at the same time instead of doing the try to stay standing up dance. What would have been impossible conditions aboard Sweet Pea become normal as fall fades into winter.

Two days ago I flew into town. I kept thinking we must be flying really low because the waves seemed so big. I had no trouble at all locating the wind direction as the tops of the waves were all smeared very straight and long across Penobscot Bay. The plane ride back was fine except for the last 500 feet of elevation, which was only terrifying except for the last 100 feet when it got really tilty and I panicked and grabbed the woman's knee sitting next to me. I apologized immediately. She seemed to understand completely. I'm glad it wasn't a tough sternman sitting next me. That could have been really awkard.

My staycation turned into throw it awaycation. I've wanted to clean out the extra bedroom/dumpster for a couple of years. The junk and clutter offends me almost as much as the lack of space for art, music, and hanging out as well as being utterly embarrassed when offering a place to stay to our friends. Or being too embarrassed to even think of offering any accommodation.

The upstairs hall was just as bad. Hand me downs that were outgrown before they were handed down. Lots of paper from school, doodles and unknown origins. About 172 mateless socks jettisoned by my almost always sockless children. You'd think I'd see them running around all the time with one socked foot judging by the number of singletons I found in the rubble.

After several days of bailing stuffing and hauling (being a sternman was just the training I needed for this) there was a nice, startlingly spacious extra room. A free addition. Probably should get a padlock on there.

3,080 Pounds of Carbon Dioxide

2010-10-21T18:19:00.001-07:00

A hundred times in the last month, I've thought I was going to get back aboard Sweet Pea and haul more traps, or try out my ultra cool electric backup motor. Storms have threatened, good days have gone to making some cabbage for the long, poor winter. One thing or another has kept Sweet Pea sitting awkwardly on the grass instead of swanlike in the harbor.

Today I started pulling the operation apart and bringing the pieces home. Solar panel, winch, safety gear, trap flipper, bait bags and iron, oarlocks, oars. The boat will come tomorrow, though I really have no idea how to accommodate the craft inside my congested and tiny barn.

It's a lifetime of 5 months ago that the boat was towed into the harbor. There was no winch, no trap lever to help get the traps aboard. The sail was still a curiosity I'd found in the barn. I had no idea how to sail- still really don't even though I've done it a few times. I had no idea how to row, how to approach buoys, how to haul traps, judge the weather, moor the boat. I had no clue about any of it.

The boat arrived in Matinicus harbor not only lacking proper oarlocks, but having been sent with only one that fit the socket. Great for rowing around in a small circle. I rowed for weeks sitting down, trying to learn the approach to traps, hurting my neck, and, really, everything else. Wind was an invisible bully. Waves and rocks terrified me as I tried to gauge how close was too close without finding out. Pulling up steel traps standing in this very small boat was the hardest physical challenge I've ever experienced.

By far the most stressful element I can share was the financial realization that poured over me cold and abrupt as a bucket of snow melt. On the worst of those early days, I came home very sore and $25 or so richer. The emotional impact and panic around making the thing pay was far worse than the rowing and pulling on ropes. Shame. Guilt. What have I done!? What will I do now!? How do I get out of this?

It got better. First the standup oarlocks finally came a month later. Then Clayton rigged them to the proper height. Then Dad, bless him, bought me an electric winch. The number of traps per day rose. The time out on the water came down dramatically. I got more comfortable staying out of the breakers but getting into rocks. I sailed. Lobsters were plentiful. The price was decent. There were many beautiful and profitable days on the water, at least for a few weeks after the operation was up and running properly.

Though I'm sure they had their own conversations, incredulous and laughing, the fishermen never stopped helping and advising and checking on me out on the water.

All told, I brought in about 2,800 pounds of Maine lobster this season. Based on a boat using 25 gallons of diesel per day for 250 traps that yield 2 pounds per trap, my harvest saved about 140 gallons of diesel which, according to the EPA, saved about 3,080 pounds of CO2 emissions.

Sweet Pea is done for the year. She did beautifully. The boat was the one thing I could absolutely count on every day. Here's to the Carpenter's Boatshop and to the design, evolved right here on tiny Matinicus Island.

Next time, I'll look at next year, the evolution of my operation, the bigger issues of food, environment, economy and community as well as marketing and logistics.

Thank you for reading!

Why Would You Want to do That?

2010-10-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Good question as I'm doing the staggering drunk orange rodeo clown act in the stern of the Samantha J.

During a particularly absurd sequence where the boat jumped and rolled in many directions simultaneously, I thought I'd be clever:

"Bull riders only have to stay on for seven seconds or something."

Captain Clayton trumped me instantly:

"Yeah, and they get to sit down!"

Why indeed? It's a good question on a day when it's blowing 25 out of the northeast. Not many boats ventured out of the harbor this morning. It's starting to get cold. Norah Jones's warm sleepy soft flannel voice sounds wicked out of place here.

The deeper question is why not? Many of the comments on articles about what I'm doing, many of the conversations I've had and a lot of the obvious unstated points all ask why I would quit being a lawyer and work as a stern man. I have felt disapproval and bafflement from close points in my life and from people who do not know me. Aside from the fact that I never made much money as an attorney, my question is why is that kind of work respected so much more than being a sternman? Like being a lawyer is so great. I've come to realize how much status has to do with it and how stupid status is.

Call me crazy, but I am at least as proud of learning to work on the ocean as of getting through law school and handling cases. Working on the sea has unique challenges and its own language just like the law. Well not just like. Fishing is fun. And it hurts a lot.

"He was just some stern man. They all look the same to me." Lisa and I have heard this a number of times.

Sternmen do arrive here with tattoos, scars, conditions of release, varying phases of opiate dependence, and garnishment orders for child support, taxes and medical bills. That's not all of them and that is not all there is to them, either. I've also found them to be generous, extremely hardworking individuals with surprising amounts of specialized skills and knowledge. There is that status thing, though.

So again, the question is, why would I do this? I was trying to answer it for myself this morning, while also trying to admire the gray wet desolate beauty of the ride out to the westerd (local variant of westward). Then onto the stereo comes Desperado, by the Eagles, that somewhat hokey but extremely well crafted song about a guy who makes life hard on himself out west somewhere. Way out west where they would not know what "westerd" means. I am not a desperado, but the answer to the question came to me while the song was playing.

Somewhere around 1978, the Eagles released a live double album with Desperado on it. The song is preceded by a beautiful string section intro that reminded me of wilderness. Mountains, streams, valleys. I loved that intro. I loved reading Edward Abbey. I also was living amidst some turmoil at 16 , but if I was in the woods, or out in a field, I was happy. At ease. The nagging, itchy square peg divorce kid feelings did not follow me there.

So that's basically it. I like being outdoors, and always have. Status or no. Why give up status and security? Why be so hard on my body? Shouldn't I be doing something respectable and letting my body rot from the inside in a chair or car and then trying to make up for the inactivity in the gym? Won't I have to pay the piper? Oh, probably. Definitely eventually. This day looks like at least an installment on the piper payment schedule.

Salty Hell and Feisty Sweetness

2010-09-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

First, I didn’t think we were going. It was blowing hard. Undersides of leaves showing on bowed over shrubs. That kind of wind. Blue gray sky. Really? We're not going, are we? Maybe the phone battery quit.

I walked to the wharf with a slight headache which had all day to grow into a vicious octopus of pain, all tentacles and beak inside my skull. Large seas and sharp chop below Matinicus Rock enhanced the experience.

I’ve been out in rough weather occasionally over 5 seasons. The waves grow, and pile up unexpectedly when you’re carrying a trap or walking around a corner. The lobster tank or bait box digs into the lower back or rib cage as the deck tilts suddenly. Traps fall off the washboard. Knees drop out by reflex to keep the center of gravity inside the boat.

I’ve been out when I personally was many points below a hundred percent. Kids up all night, viruses, one hellacious case of poison ivy. People don’t call in sick in this business.

After 160 or so, I kept thinking I needed to pull the cord and ask to be taken in, something I have not done in 5 years in the stern. I kept thinking and hoping the weather would settle down, or the headache would ease, or that I was just seasick, and it would pass. My head was a bundle of very highly functional pain receptors. I kept thinking I was going to toss into the bait box. My knees got rubbery. After an hour or so of that, stubbonrness gave way to the need to be horizontal. And dry and quiet. At the end of the 18th string, I made the call. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to take me in.” Capt. ‘Brook never hesitated or scowled. “It happens” he said.

I’ve never been through anything like that. Kind of stupid I waited so long.

Apple Festival 2010

A growing season we have had. Apples are no exception. Matinicus Isle from the air looks about 90 percent wooded. This was not so back a few generations. The island was almost all pastured, gardened, or otherwise wide open. Places that seem very removed from each other now were easily visible. And there are apple trees everywhere. Side of the road, front yards, tucked in the woods. For a couple of weeks now, on slower afternoons, the kids and I have wandered around with a shopping bag and a gaff, then made lots of applesauce, apple crisp and 16 jars of genuine island apple jelly.

Wild apples are a lot less uniform and photogenic, and a lot more flavorful. Humble a dish as it is, the applesauce has a zing and depth to it nonexistent in jars from the mainland, from trucks, factories and fluorescent lit retail environs. The flavor journals all the sun, fog, wind, rain and feisty sweetness of the place.

Sweetgrass and Saltwater

2010-09-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

Sweetgrass is an excellent movie about sheep herding in Montana. One particularly striking scene showed the flock on a bright green meadow, moving for all the world like a school of fish as the dogs tried to keep them moving in the right direction. The camera was located high above the flock and gradually zoomed out to show how tiny the group of sheep, dogs and one guy on horseback were in the Montana wilderness. As stunning as the scene was, it was the soundtrack that hit home. In the midst of the visual grandeur, the herder was having an all out tantrum because the sheep were trying to move up a rocky bluff where they shouldn’t go. The herder was fit to be tied, and trying to come up with stronger and more obscenities.

I have done this very thing.

Surrounded by hypnotic beauty, interacting with nature and mad enough to split in half. With me it was probably the wind, waves, my ineptitude, lack of lobsters, sore everything. Muttering sometimes, yelling myself hoarse other times. Resisting the urge to smash something. With my luck, that kind of tantrum would probably leave a big hole below the water line.

Since I’m now back in the familiar and comfortable role of sternman, the highs and lows are gone. My few traps have been undisturbed, at least by me for my two days off the Samantha J. The wind has been going and there is big towering surf from Hurricane Igor. As with Bill last year, it’s sunny from horizon to horizon, yet the destructive surge erupts over shoals I didn’t know existed and in great unzipping curls off the ends of the islands and ledges. All of the islands and shoreline are glowing at the margins, fringed in aerosolized salt water. Highway sized trails of foam extend from the lee shores of islands, rocks and ledges.

Beautiful and forbidding of a man in a small rowboat. I stay on shore and have no tantrum today.

Motive power converted from solar energy is coming to Sweet Pea in the next day or two. It will be an experiment.

Sweet Pea Returns, Classic Rock Too

2010-09-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

September 10, 2010-

Today was the first day back out on Sweet Pea after Hurricane Earl prompted me to haul her out onto the grass. Yesterday, I got inspired to drag the boat across the grass, then got into the gravel road and wondered if I'd get her across or gouge up the hull, or be tying up the main access to the wharf in my stubbornness. She's way too stout for me to move by myself, I find. Then I rolled the boat with buoys under the keel. After that, Eric and Kyle helped me get her the rest of the way into the water.

I ventured out this morning and found 4 of my 19 remaining traps gone. Caught a few lobsters and a bunch of big fat crabs which became supper for Ryan and myself. Rowed around Wheaton and the harbor. Hauled up gear and rowed back in a frisky headwind. Me, the boat, the wind, the water, and the lobsters.

September 13, 2010

Clayton has somewhere on the order of 3,400 songs on the official Samantha J IPod, which works out to a random assortment of 1,700 or so, being that I can only hear one side of the stereoscopic field. The IPod vapor-locked 1 second from the end of Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton. Strange because classic rock songs seldom come up in the random mix. Stranger still because then we were stuck with classic rock via old fashioned FM.

These tunes are what I grew up with. I taught myself Band on the Run, Sweet Home Alabama, and a lot of songs in that vein starting in the 5th grade. The problem with this radio format is that it takes a tiny cross section of artists and songs and plays them incessantly. It's a buffet with 200 kinds of mac and cheese, varying only by how mild the cheddar is. I don't prefer to hear 4 Journey songs in one shift in the stern, thank you. Bob Seger has an extensive catalog, but this station thinks he had only 2 or 3 songs to his credit.

Damn the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing unprecedented media consolidation and giving rise to monolithic radio conglomerates all pouring out the same tired playlists of Classic Rock. I love these songs, and hate to see them ruined by franchisement. Business-wise it makes perfect sense. Keep people listening to the same catalog and you don't have to develop new material or fresh takes on the older stuff. Play the song, condition the response, deliver the listeners to advertisers having only enough brain function to pull out the debit card and buy the advertised goods and services.

As much as I'd rather not hear songs that remind me of youth and keep my brain in a soupy mushy place of familiarity, but rather songs that expand my palate and make me look ahead, I work repetitively, so I guess the repetitive format is OK. I sing. I swing traps around. They swing me back. The deck sways-gently today, which is nice.

Tug O' War

2010-09-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

I saw the ocean for the first time in many days today. Even though I've been working on a boat every day since Monday, Thursday morning, looking across Matinicus Roads at Ten Pound Island, I see the ocean. Ten Pound and the sparkling inlets around it seem empty without my traps there, even though there's no way I could ever see my buoys from here anyway. It's knowing that all the gear is in my yard, that I'm virtually shut down for the year, needing to jump back into the stern and make some winter survival money.

There were loud voices in my head all spring and summer that I wasn't making enough money, wasn't holding up my end of the bargain, wasn't delivering the goods. Those harsh words and the dire warnings about Hurricane Earl joined forces and panicked me. Now I'm back in the stern, and Sweet Pea is in the grass.

Last year, I hauled my own traps into November. I took lobsters to my daughter's school fundraiser in October. That was in a little rickety aluminum skiff and me with 5 traps and 0 experience. I ought to be able to stick with it for a little longer this year.

It is a nice day today. Sweet Pea is going back on the mooring. From there, we'll play by ear. There are still 19 pots in the water. The solar gear is working. Random weather, money pressure and landside commitments will be on one end of the rope, and little Sweet Pea on the other. Tug O' War it is then, for a while. I guess it usually is anyway. Dreams vs. practicality. Heart vs. security. Adventure vs. monthly statements.

Leave a comment about your Tug O' War if you like.

There Goes Earl

2010-09-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

It’s just before 4 PM on a Saturday in September and I’m intoxicated enough to be pretty sure what is important to me. I’m helped along in this understanding by what seemed to be taken away, and what I’m wanting to get back. You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone and you decide you’re going to get it back again. I need to back up a few days, before Earl helped me understand.

Matinicus dirt roads are frequently decorated with bright red and yellow-pink lobster and crab shells, full of calcium to keep down the dust. Right now, I’m crushing my eyes closed to keep out that dust. My eyes should know, because my teeth are full of the dust not kept down by calcium, or any break in the relentless sunny and hot weather. Samantha, good soul, saw me dragging up the road with the exhausted look all over and offered me a ride on her four wheeler, having known that look from her own experience. I’m crushing my eyes closed to keep out the dust, jarring my way home on the back of the four wheeler. I’m also crushing them closed because it’s all been too much. How many different boats, figuring out how to keep captain and sternman happy, how many mornings up early, how many unexpected and generous offers of work? How many days rowing and hauling on my own boat worrying about what a joke it is, but also working hard and realizing at the end of the day that I made some decent pay?

It’s all a dazzling, sunstroked conveyor belt of work on the ocean. Until Earl comes calling. Then it’s an alternating current of yes I must and no I don’t need to take up my traps. It’s all over. No it isn’t. I go from Ground Hog Day, the same endlessly long day repeated again, to thinking my crazy dream is over and back around everywhere in between.

Then I’m on Biscuit’s boat wrenching my gear out of all the rocks and cleaves I’ve come to know so intimately. Traps are stacked, ropes coiled, buoys now lifeless on the deck, no longer bobbing along to show me the way toward the magic of pulling the next trap to see what’s there this time. It all happens so suddenly.

I’m in bargaining mode the next day, hoping Earl will pass by, until Wes stops in and he helps me decide I need to take most of the rest up. The next morning, I’m all the way to noon hauling traps from the wharf, untying, coiling, and stacking them in the yard. The rich smell of algae on the rope I normally associate with the holidays now permeates the yard at the beginning of September. I never expected to be done so soon.

The next day, Earl is feeble. Not only that, he’s feeble over by Nova Scotia somewhere. Traps are stacked in the yard instead of gathering lobsters around the island. Sweet Pea is up on the grass between the Centennial Building and the power plant. It’s close enough to the anticipated end of the season that maybe I should just get on Clayton’s boat full time and be ready for next year with all I’ve learned of lobsters, waves, rocks, tide, bait, rowing, sailing, solar technology, wiring, wooden boats and the fierce love of a supporting partner.

I'm not sure when, but Sweet Pea and my green traps and blue and orange buoys will be back in the water. Feeble or no, Earl helped me see how important all of this is to me.

Back to the Stern, Part II and Sweet Pea Goes Solar!

2010-08-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, August 24.

I am the Black Lab just enjoying the ride in the pickup truck. The breeze is whipping. The Miss Madelyn is fast. The waves are bright hills of water here west of Matinicus. The wind tears the tops off the great heaving breakers that rear up over the ledge every couple of minutes.

Today is the second day aboard Miss Madelyn, another of the big-boy boats. Fast, roomy and catching many, many lobsters. Yesterday, day 1 on Miss Madelyn, was gray and wet and very rough. We worked the whole day behind “The Ball,” the Wooden Ball Island.

I’ve never seen so many lobsters in my life as I have in the last 4 days of Man Fishing on Cynthia Lynn and Miss Madelyn.

Being a sternman once again is fun. It is frenetic, and not so much like a hockey game as maybe basketball. I never played, but I imagine that when the team is flowing together- anticipating the others’ moves, keeping the ball moving, going where the ball is going to be- that it is like this. I never played sports, but the close, fast moves, independent and intertwined must be similar to this. Except they play for an hour or something and we start at 5:00a.m. and go til afternoon. And our court tilts a lot. And is splashy. Cold splashes down your neck.

What I forgot was: I really like this kind of work. The ocean. The action. The teamwork. The way the pace and the tilting blur together and I find a speed and grace and reflexes (relatively speaking) that no other experience brings out. The Wild.

At a different moment I realize that I’m looking at a fall ocean. Waves, wind and color are of fall even though it’s still August. I start feeling the need to finish up my project for the season. With this sea, sky and wind change and the financial and personal stresses that accompany the project, it feels like time to pull them up.

The feeling passes. At the end of the week, I’m back aboard my beloved Sweet Pea, catching a tiny amount of lobsters slowly, and paying tiny overhead.

Sweet Pea is now solar. The panel says it’s charging my winch battery. I obsess about my wiring and the solar setup as a whole, because I cannot really tell if the battery is getting charged. My amateurish marine wiring is very wet and covered in all manner of marine plant life by mid morning. The winch keeps on turning for the rest of the day, making my job exponentially easier.

The sunlight goes in the photovoltaic window, turns into electrons that run down the wires, through the charge controller and onto the battery terminals, then out into electro magnetic motor of the the winch that turns and pulls up the rope. The sun pulls my traps up for me now. How sweet is that?! Free photons for me and Sweet Pea.

Now for an electric motor...

Return to the Stern

2010-08-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

Some nights and early wee mornings, Papa just can't buy enough mockingbirds. No amount of rockabye babies, or hear the wind blow dears is enough. Feeding, reading, rocking, and walking will not do the trick. What really works is a drive in the car. Ahhhh. She's asleep at last. Internal combustion has the soothing vibration that all my daddy tricks can't match.

Diesel engines, especially when they first start up on a cold day, have a very comforting sound to them. Diesel engines, when they quit on a cold day, really make you aware that you don't know what you got til it's gone. Now I've said it. No matter how much my project is about working without internal combustion, diesel power has some things going for it.

I've been asked to sub on a few boats recently. Monday, I went out with June. She's got a 30 foot Repco, surprisingly steady on a choppy day. June teaches more than she realizes about bait, soak time, fishing strategy. She has an efficient operation and runs the boat and handles traps and buoys with deceptive ease. Steering the boat, gaffing the buoy, sliding it forward up the rail so it slides down the rail on its own instead of having to fiddle it out of a tangle of rope on the platform. She flips tiny fish off the washboard with a dustpan, reducing bycatch mortality and maybe paying in some karma. For comedic relief, she has me run the boat and the hauler for one trap.

I worked 4 years in the stern, then jumped to a totally different way of lobstering aboard Sweet Pea. Coming back to the stern felt very comfortable. I also learned from hauling with June in a much deeper way than I would if I'd never been in my own boat hauling my own traps. Duration, location, and luck. I went back to Sweet Pea for two days with those lessons in mind.

I thought I was a mighty fishin' man for hauling with June and then hauling all 150 of my own traps the next two days and probably rowing 15 miles in the process. I came home on Wednesday evening from my tax collector office hours with sand in my eyes and thoughts of a day off the water, a morning to sleep in, time to catch up on neglected housework, paperwork, play with the kids and maybe rest the spine for a day.

Then Robert called and talked me into hauling with him for a day aboard Cynthia Lynn, one of the big, fast, heavy duty boats. There are different tiers of lobster boats, though they all have more or less the same classic profile. I believe you could fit three of June's boats inside the Cynthia Lynn.

The hauling was of a type I hadn't experienced before. On this boat, it's a 10 hour hockey game with two five minute timeouts and no face mask, a dog fight and a wet, ocean debris-covered factory assembly line with a runaway malfunctioning conveyor belt.

Big, heavy duty traps come aboard. The fourteen inch hauling plates bring up a 20 fathom trap line in about 4 seconds. Travis gets the first one down the rail and whips a couple of fathoms of extra rope toward the stern, flips the door open. I get the old bait out and clean the kitchen and middle chamber and put new bait in, with a bait bag, pogey speared through the eye and a crab speared on the bottom, while Travis measures the money crawlers in the parlor. Then he loops out around me to take the first one down to the stern while I get started on the tailer- the second of each pair. I dance over the rope he has to pull around so it stays under the rail. Then he zips behind me to finish measuring in the tailer trap. In between, a couple of lobsters get banded and a bait bag or two get filled and tied shut. Then the tailer gets placed on the stern. The process takes seconds and happens 200 times in a day. It is a fast, long, hard day.

One day aboard Cynthia Lynn is such a frenzy and overwhelming physical challenge that I do not want to do it again. When Robert asks if I'll go the next day, my answer is "no," which means yes a short while later. It's easier the second day, with easier being a relative term. The day is impossibly long, relentlessly fast. We have 300 hauled by 11:30 a.m. It takes me til 3:00 p.m. to haul 75 by myself.

When we reach Northeast Point on our way in for the day, I tell Robert it takes me 23 minutes to row from there to the harbor. After taking a few precautions such as making sure the hose won't explode out of the lobster tank, Robert goes for it. Sweet Pea takes 23 minutes. Cynthia Lynn takes 1.

We hauled 800 furious traps in 2 days. On my own I haul 150 in that much time.

The incessant hurrying, slashing bait iron, spearing on pogeys and a crab, the frantic moves all catch up with me at about 12:30 Saturday morning. My left arm is being pulled apart inside, and poked with needles outside. For all the pain, the arm and wrist are simultaneously numb. Fingers won't do what I tell them. I wake up a dozen times to wake the hand up and ease the pain. In 2 and a half months of rowing everywhere, pulling algae covered ropes tied to steel traps by hand, doing everything "the hard way," I never had any kind of pain like this.

Let me see now, the two days from last week aboard Sweet Pea, then two days of 40 foot, 1,000 horsepower mayhem as a deckand. Counting my door-to-door sales from Sweet Pea. Hmm...

Secret Summer

2010-08-12T09:21:00.001-07:00

While hauling a few days ago, I looked across from Ten Pound Island to Condon Cove. The awareness was immediate. Our good friends' house had its white plywood shutters back in place. It seems only a couple of weeks ago I noticed the white plywood gone and someone inside the window opening the place up. The point was made a little more sharply this morning with our island fellow's departure on the ferry after 2 years of countless contributions, and generous, good humored service to the island.

People are leaving. Thoughts of school and woodpiles creep in. So begins secret summer.

The runup and passage of Labor Day weekend felt like an arbitrary boundary even before we moved here. Leaving the hayfields and sitting inside a classroom. As a parent, getting kids back into morning routines. Standing on the sidelines at soccer games. It's still summer dammit. It can't be time for desks, schedules and straight white lines on the grass.

Here the sweet weather, warm water, garden growth all stretch out far past Labor Day. Yet so many departures and a lot less traffic change the atmosphere prematurely away from the summer parade.

This is secret summer. The beach does not know of semesters. The grass is green with no straight white lines.

Not Endless Summer

2010-08-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

The ripening breeze so well captured in Jud Caswell's song Blackberry TIme reminds me that summer is not forever, though it may feel that way. I'm on the north shore of the island working from West Point past the end of the runway to Northeast Point.

The neurochemical cinches around my middle have loosened. I breathe easier. The work is hard, but it is work now, instead of all day panic and discoordination. I row. I pull traps in the boat. I measure lobsters and put new bait on. Baited, closed, over she goes.

The north shore of the island looks like it could be the Alaskan coast. Aside from the windsock, it's all cobble beaches with driftwood piles and spruce ranks behind. There are no houses or human activity visible. In the blue distance opposite, there is the mainland, low and miragical.

I'll paddle and tend my way around Two Bush Island, then go back to the harbor, splash the lobsters, get more bait and head back out for a few more.

The lobsters have dropped off a bit from last week, but it's still worth coming up here.

By the time I get out south of the harbor for round 2, the wind is thrashing from the southwest. Once a trap is aboard, I slide backward, gaining speed to the point where I need to row hard to keep from hitting the rock walls in Back Cove at 6 or 7 knots. I won't get in my 75 today. 60 will have to be enough.

I'll do live music tonight on the dock. This tradition began because state law prohibits hauling on sundays in June, July and August. Only three more concert/dance/party nights left this year. Then everybody gets down to business for real; hauling every day that the weather permits, putting in longer days. Then it's firewood and storm window time.

Right now, though, I'm warm clear through. It takes me til August. I cool off a lot quicker.

End of July Report

2010-08-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

July is down to hours. I've been out to haul 27 times. I've brought in 1,438 pounds of lobsters. I'm finally ready to start. For real.

I'm also ready to enjoy what I'm doing, though I'm a little superstitious that fishermen are supposed to love what they do, but not irritate the gods by being happy about it. Every morning now, and several more times each day, I'm sharply aware of how privileged I am to be paddling to work on the ocean. To be physically part of the environment. To peer down at the sand, the kelp forests, the eel grass. That big fish that just swam under the boat.

One of this week's lessons is that some things seem like they'll never happen, and then they do.

The oarlock saga-God bless Clayton and his machinist friend- is at an end.

I began rowed sitting down, looking over my shoulder, slow, laborious and obscenity driven as much as by muscle power. Then the stand-up oarlocks finally arrived from Oregon some time in early June.

I discovered a couple of things within the first few clumsy minutes messing about with them in the harbor. First, they were several inches too low, resulting in the hunchback sidecar pumping action, also requiring many horsepower worth of expletives.

I had been doing sort of a semi circle pattern where I bend down to plant the oars in the water, row up in a half circle and then way down to get the oars back out of the water. I must have looked like a strange bird trying to take off across the water.

My second discovery was that in spite of how comical and awkward the motion was, it was far superior to rowing sitting down. I could see just where I was going. I could steer very precisely without twisting around.

Many a fisherman reminded me daily that "your oarlocks are too low." "You need raised oarlocks." "Your life will be a lot easier when you get your oarlocks up where they belong." I had a fresh memory of how long the wait was just to get the proper oarlocks. The thought of starting over was too much. Veins pulsed on my forehead. Eyelids twitching. The pressure to produce a viable catch and make something of a living was strong enough that I just kept going; flapping across the harbor and around the island.

Clayton's friend produced a beautiful pair of stainless steel risers to make the oarlocks about 4 inches higher. We tried them out yesterday. The 4 inches entirely changes the rowing posture. Now I'm learning to row a third time. Now I am a swan. Or at least not an injured herring gull.

July is down to minutes and I finally have the rowing setup I had expected to start out with in May. I finally have all this year's traps in the water. My winch is on the boat waiting for its first tour. The light is green. In a month or so, the light will turn yellow and I'll have to reverse the whole process.
***
One of the continuing lessons is that when I'm doing something no one really does any more, in a way no one has ever done it, there will be many little problems without a fix waiting at the marine store. We have a thousand accumulated little handy fixes for simple problems. Getting a cork out of a wine bottle is really hard without a corkscrew. Loosening a phillips head screw is hard without phillips head screw driver. We take drain plugs for granted until we don't have one that fits. The wrong sized battery won't be any use. Keys open locked doors. A car with no steering wheel or spark plugs is almost all there and yet completely inoperable.

So it is with my beautiful peapod lobster boat with the wrong oarlock positioning. So it is as well with other aspects of fishing in a discontinued style and a modern adaptation. I can't just go to the marine store and buy a trap flipper or brackets to hold my winch to the hull of this boat or a roller to direct the rope through.

Update Friday- July is even smaller ahead of me. Today was day 1 of rowing standing up. I made it from the end of the breakwater to Northeast Point in a leisurely 23 minutes. Then Weston gave me a tow to West Point. That took about a leisurely minute and a half.

Today was also day one of learning to run the new 12 volt trap hauler. This addition to the boat came about because in the cold-sweat-oh-s--- weeks when I started hauling, pulling the wire traps up by hand was excessively brutal. Harder than anything I did when I was 19 or 26 or 36 or 46. It was not like the old days with wooden traps. One late night conclusion was that I could not pull up enough traps barehanded to make my quota. Or to save my wrists from early gnarlalysis and clawfinger. It hurt a lot. Even though I'm quite a bit stronger and much more comfortable with the task, the hauler will allow me to work longer and pull in more traps and make the numbers work. I'll run it off a solar-charged 12 volt battery.

Another new task that I'm clumsy at. Another construction and installation job that I know nothing of. I've never done any kind of automotive or boat wiring and only the simplest household work.

I never got past the clumsy phase. The winch worked spectacularly until about trap number 6. As I was trying to learn to avoid riding turns where the rope backs up on itself and gobs up the whole works, the thing went unnhhh.... Nothing.

Every previous feeling of failure, foolishness, frustrated rage poured back into my brain and belly instantly. All the progress seemed for nothing.

A little fiddling revealed that a wire connection was loose. Of course. I know nothing of maritime electricianing.

I found the loose wire and tightened things up back in the shop. How many traps next time, I'm wondering. (Turns out, a whole days' worth. Major improvement)

The standup rowing left me considerably less exhausted and crumpled over. It felt lazy by comparison with the previous configurations. I roved around the north shore, Two Bush Island and over almost to No Man's Land. Planes landed yards away at one point. Banks of fair weather clouds never got here.

It's July 30 and the operation is pretty much in place. Lobsters are present. Large ones. Weather is spectacular. La la la. Whistle, whistle. Probably should complain on ceremony just to not be boastful or irritating to the gods.

July 31

I haven't seen any in a while, but offices once had doors with rippled glass windows to allow light and color through, but maintain some discretion for important meetings and office functions. At the Northeast end of Condon Cove, the water has the same shape, but on the other side there is magical green sand and eel grass instead of filing cabinets and coat trees. Polarized lenses on my new sunglasses enhance a view that Pixar can't approximate. Silver blue July sky above, aqua green below. Perfect globe shaped school of baby fishes. Overwhelming beauty.

Snails and Seizing the Moment

2010-07-24T02:58:00.000-07:00

This summer has been a good one for ground snails. They climb up plant stems. They make elegant dust trails on the road. I think some of Lisa's many garden casualties- lovely sproutlings snipped off all in a row- may have fallen to these dijon colored organisms. Hmm dijon... Maybe there's a new culinary and commercial opportunity crawling over every soggy square foot of Matinicus Isle.

These snails presented me with a reminder of how fleeting childhood is. It has appeared especially swift and merciless this summer, as we're going 90 miles an hour all the time.

One struggle with our life here is providing kids with structure and healthy activity while also trying to patch 7 or 8 jobs and businesses together to pay bills some way other than with a credit card. Answering the phone, working on fishing equipment, keeping the laundry going, cajoling kids into chores and projects, stopping to run to the airport for store deliveries, explaining that no, you haven't gotten to "it" yet- one of the 3 dozen nagging "its" on the list. Of all those personal chowder ingredients, the kids not getting enough input is the guiltiest.

So one morning, Ryan and I spent a good 45 minutes making a very fancy paper jet. He had his heart set on something a little more sophisticated than the folded triangle kind of paper airplane. We cut, creased, glued, recut, recreased, reglued and created a snappy orange fighter plane shown in the book which should have been titled- Extraordinary Paper Planes that Won't Look Like the Picture. Or fly. All the same, it was sweet, focused time with Ryan at our kitchen table. Precious time together.

A few days later, I found the plane being dismantled under a forsythia bush, by a half dozen or so snails. Snails- Messengers of the finitude of our lives.

In other news, all my traps are now in the water. Some spots are looking pretty good. Others are not.

Ignored by Seagulls

2010-07-08T03:15:00.000-07:00

In 2000, a few musician friends and I were lucky enough to fly out to McCall, Idaho to perform over the Fourth of July Weekend. Some time after we took off from Chicago, I looked out the window and saw fireworks from above. They zoomflated outward, looking much more spherical from above.

Seen from the mail plane, seagulls do the opposite around a lobster boat. They hover around the boat more or less spherically until the stern man dumps out old bait. Then they implode to one point. The baity point in the water.

Seagulls are not welcome around lobster boats. They hover, dive, harass, crap on the crew, make a racket and occasionally beat you on the head with a wing in the frenzy to get that morsel of rotten herring.

This never occurs near Sweet Pea. They sit on the rocks watching, but do not follow, do not approach the boat, screech or come after the bait I throw out. I am curious. It’s the exact same food. If anything, my boat is smaller, quieter and less threatening.

My theory is that it is conditioning, mini-evolution, newly formed instinct from 50 or so seagull generations being trained that food comes from big boats with loud engines.

I like Lisa’s theory best. She thinks the oars look like wings and frighten the seagulls away. The boat’s hull is bright white and not thoroughly un-seagull like, so maybe they think I am their Seagull God, to be revered from a distance. There’s another good supporting detail. Sam’s trick, which I learned my first year in the stern, is to wave your arms like wings. The seagulls all shrink back 50 or so feet. For a while.

Others think it’s because I don’t throw a sufficient quantity of bait out often enough. I don’t agree. Seagulls are so ferociously hungry for every bite, I think they would fight over my small bits the same way as around the 38 footers.

I probably should not ask this question because if I do start getting aggressive seagull panhandling, there will be no relief in the tiny Sweet Pea. That would be unfortunate because everything else is getting better. The number of traps in the water creeps up. The catch creeps up. I get more comfortable micronavigating in and out of the rocks, rowing and sailing. I watch weather fronts angle across the great sky. Seals visit. The wind and waves are more benign. Our patch of ocean is full of life.

Bycatch

2010-06-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

Bycatch refers to things you get when fishing that aren't what you intend to catch. For me, it consists of snails, baby crabs, codfish, pickerel, flounder that shoot off like the Millenium Falcon when you throw them back, a plastic Bart Simpson head, strawberry jelly squeeze bottle, a full 12 ounce Bud Light and lots of kelp.

I'm squeamish about terms like "self-discovery," or "personal journey," so maybe I should call it "doing something to see what happens." From there, we get to some bycatch.

I've made lots of righteous declarations about the zero carbon lobster project being about energy and food and economics; being about ancestral wisdom, wooden boat evolution and the natural beauty of the ocean. The agenda items that emerge as bycatch include:
a. doing something really nuts to find what I'm made of;
b. doing something really hard to see if I can;
c. discovering things about my relationships with family, friends, community and fishermen;
d. learning not to bail on a good idea even though a lot of experiences and experienced people try to persuade me to come to my senses;
e. Learning not to bail on myself when I've undertaken something really ambitious that isn't really working, but sort of is working, and even though I may be the only one who really believes.
f. Not wanting to turn into a crackpot/novelty act.
g. Being mentally prepared and alert enough to bail when it really is time. If it ever is.

Neighbors, friends and loved ones look at me with sympathy, bafflement, exasperation, worry, admiration, humor and that look that says "I give up- you'll just have to wise up on your own." I have a keener appreciation and gratitude for what people say, what they don't say, how much they care about me even if I seem to be endangering myself for an untenable dream. I am closer to me-good and bad. I'm much more in tune with the people around me. If nothing else the whole goose-chase is putting me more into the middle of my own life. But...

I write all this as though the whole thing is just an exercise in mid-life rebellion. I should also add that I am catching lobsters, I am listening to the fisher-voice inside and to fishermen on the island, I am learning to work the Sweet Pea in very close to the rocks in a variety of surf conditions, I've produced healthy food that saved a couple of dozen gallons of diesel fuel. I get to sail. I am building a model of a truly sustainable commercial fishing operation

It's small scale. It's very tough going. I don't have a reality show, Gatorade endorsement deal or an endowment from a railroad fortune. I do have stiff hands. Someone just pulled up on a Bobcat Excavator. Only so many suspects for that. I'll go check it out. 'Later.

Father's Day

2010-06-21T03:45:00.000-07:00

I do not know what other fathers enjoy on Father's Day. I can skip it mostly. This year was extra special, so I'll add these items to a good Father's Day menu.

Start on Saturday night with music on the wharf. It is cold and windy, but people show up, in particular, a pile of kids. I do a bunch of Papa Goose songs and then a few Diesel and Driftwood tunes. The adult audience members take their hands out of pockets to clap and then hunch back down into the wind, milling about looking for a lee among the trucks and gear on the wharf. "Thank you. I guess we'll call it good on account of the wind and chill." I'm taking refuge indoors with friends when the first of the next wave shows up. My head out the second floor window, I tell them too bad for tonight, it's cold. They tell me otherwise. "We're here. There's more coming."

Playing with cold fingers requires some adjustment downward of the complexity of my playing. This much more so in salt air, which seems colder and finger-stickier, making it very difficult to do much more than strum chords. No matter. This crowd is having a good time. I was going to write that I haven't been anywhere where people would be so determined to have a good time in such uncomfortable conditions, but then again, one week earlier, Fiona and Lisa and I got soaked watching a three act concert- Keith Urban, Dixie Chicks and the Eagles- at Gillette Stadium. From this perspective, I'm honored that my little show with the one guitar and a couple of clip-on lights with colored bulbs goes so late into the night with people dancing, singing and smiling the whole time.

Then there is the more traditional, but just as delightful Sunday morning with me having the rare good sense to sleep in (after running out at 4 a.m. in my skivvies hung over to get the music gear undercover because I was wrong last night about it not raining).

Pouncing by the younger two kids. Fiona's 20 page book with 20 ways of saying how great I am. Ryan's hearts drawn on his own stationery.

Lydia and I do many rounds of Mario Kart. One purpose of this blog is to look at the tension between my Peter Pan nature with its selfish desire for adventure and exploration and things like parenthood, mortgage payments and the dangers of working alone on the ocean in a tiny wooden boat. I feel compelled to confess that Mario Kart, being designed for 9 year olds, is a hilarious, sensory overloading, silly bunch of fun. Extremely rapid and intense visual image changes combined with car noise, mario characters flying by and hollering and beeping at me, and hyper-speed recklessness from the safety of the couch.

Lisa and I get a rare chance to sneak off for some nature time.

That is pretty much the ultimate Father's Day.

When Lobsters Molt, Think of Something Else

2010-06-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

The molting, as I’ve written before, is a time of soul searching. It is a time of traps being heavier because there is nothing inside to eat or sell. Yesterday seemed like the beginning of the 2010 molt. Something like three quarters of the traps were empty, whether bait stayed on or not.

Early in the journey, I was sailing around Wheaton Island- a transit even quieter than rowing- when there was a solid fwushmmph behind me. I was startled and suddenly aware of the tiny size of my wood survival zone. Some sea creature had surfaced and disappeared, leaving an upwelling of water 50 feet behind me. Maybe seals and porpoises just sound a lot bigger in a small quiet craft. Maybe it’s like Lydia said: A Giant Squid.

The southwest wind at 5 to 10 knots called for felt a lot more like northwest 10 to 20. At one point, it was so laborious moving forward that I decided to give up and sail back to the harbor after finishing half my gear for the day. My sail trimming and steering skills are green enough that I slipped sideways and wound up at Two Bush ledge, where I decided to take the sail down before the boat struck rock. I stopped almost on top of one of my 5 buoys and, after a hem and a haw, decided to pull those since I was already there.

After crossing over to the Beach Ledges, I tied up to a buoy to reassess, give the lobsters a break by putting the crate overboard, pump out the boat and have a bite. The wind and waves seemed to have settled enough that I decided to go back out to Two Bush Island, where I’d surrendered earlier to have another try. It was a wrestling match because I left the lee and worked directly in the wind. Pulling up and tending each trapped allowed me to slip 50 feet or so downwind so I had to claw my way back each time. When those were done, I only had five left, very much in the lee, 25 degrees warmer and much easier work.

All these mini adventures had a common thread. Empty traps, one after another. The only real satisfaction was getting them baited, getting back to the harbor, cleaning up and putting things in order. Having brunch tied to a lobster buoy 50 feet from the easterly beach ledge on a summer day was pretty cool too.

Sweet Spot

2010-06-11T12:36:00.001-07:00

I feel obligated to report that: Today everything worked really well. The weather made it easy to haul traps and set them back without laboriously rowing back upwind after tending each one. Having traps closer together meant less “steaming” between strings. Stand-up rowing made it possible to cleanly approach each buoy and make corrections without having to stop rowing and turn around to see I’ve missed. The new oars don’t want to slide off the boat every chance they get. There were lobsters in good numbers.

The sum of all these variables means I made a decent day’s pay, had time to stop and visit with the school kids, teachers and Lisa on Markey’s Beach while they celebrated the end of school, and got into the harbor by noon. The wind started blowing just about the time I got home. Sweet! Now I’m tired.

Red light Green Light Red Light

2010-06-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve not had much to do with lobstering lately. This is because today is day 8 of not being able to haul either due to weather- Tuesday-Thursday, Sunday-Monday; or an off-island commitment- playing music on the main street sidewalk on Vinalhaven on Friday; or Lisa’s many work commitments; or three kids, one of whom just got back from school in Vermont.

This morning, I dutifully arose and flipped the coffee switch at 4:40-something a.m. and packed up to haul. The view from the wharf was not encouraging. I observed a brisk wind and large breakers around all the ledgy places that I’d be visiting. I turned back and worked on a legal project til about 8, then got back in the skiff to go finish my last winter job commitment. Had serious second thoughts about bagging because the sea appeared to be flattening out and the weather more welcoming. After finishing the trail work, I skiffed across the harbor and realized I had no vehicle to get my chainsawing gear home from the wharf. I tried not to make eye contact with people because of irritability cramps and frustration from wanting to get something doneand having to hurry home to be ready for school music after lunch..

At lunch time I decided it was lovely outside and that I’d go haul after school music concert preparations. Of course, by the time I was done at school, the wind was back up with enthusiasm. Well, maybe I’ll at least pump out the boat from another big rainstorm, mount the radar reflector and bag some bait for tomorrow. As I’m drilling the first pilot hole, *drip* in the harbor. Ugly wet gray wool approaching from the west. What I’ve failed to recognize up to now is: This is not a boat day for me.

I put the tools away, row back across the harbor. The pickup is full of cardboard from a large delivery to the store, so I rush to get that in the recycle shed up in the middle of the island before it’s papier mache sculpto-mush.

I’m dry at the moment which is as it should be. Everything else is pretty fetched up. I will vote in the primary and referendum, go to Latin America night at school and let today fall behind and tomorrow wait til the morning.

Rocky Bottom

2010-06-03T06:46:00.000-07:00

5/31

Rocky Bottom

Today is the first day of getting through all the traps in the water, except, of course, for the very last one which got stuck on rocky bottom behind Ten Pound Island. The wind is blowing hard and I am getting pushed toward the rocks, so I abandon that pot for a nicer day. The boat is very difficult to control as I try to round the corner in a cross wind. Aggravating, physically brutal and scary all at once. It won’t go where I point it. I am exhausted and a long way from the harbor.

Then the sail goes up and everything changes. It’s quiet. The boat wants to go smoothly to the harbor. I stick an oar over the side to steer and slide home with no effort at all. By the time I reach Old Cove and start taking the sail down, I have about 45 minutes’ sailing experience. 15 yesterday, 10 this morning and a 20 minute scoot across to the harbor. Every minute of that is pure magic. I’ve never even been on a sailboat, and now I have a working commercial vessel under sail.

That’s about as good as it got. Things went down hill steeply after that. I ended up being two hours and change late getting in. The afternoon turned to evening and the personal and financial realities started hitting head-on.

I fell asleep on the couch and woke to a muscle spasm in the back of my leg that felt as though it would tear all the meat right off the bone. That wrenching pretty well matched the anguish inside.

I can’t. I can’t do it physically. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The gripping on rope and pulling up a metal box from the sea floor. Every foot of rope requires every bit of strength. By the time I’m rowing into the harbor, my forearm bones feel sprung apart. Roofing, sheetrocking, farming, woodcutting, and being a sternman were all easy by comparison. And I’m a 47 year old guy waking up with a charley horse fit to tear my leg apart.

With all that effort, I’m not making money. Mortgage and power bill are due. I have a barrel of bait rotting on the float because the quantity I have to buy is more than I can use on my schedule. Money gone into the stink of rotten herring. Oh yes, and the boat is not paid for.

I can’t do it physically, financially or emotionally. Now I’m awake in the wee hours wondering how to get the boat shop to take Sweet Pea back. My question to myself is: Is it dumber to give up and bail out or dumber to keep trying?

I hope this is rock bottom.

6/1

The next day, Wes and I are sitting in the kitchen. It’s foggy and drizzly on the other side of the slider. I tell my woe and he tells me- again- that, yep, it won’t work. You’ve got to get rid of that boat. “I’ve got thirty years into this. I’ve seen the boats change, the gear change and the business side change. You can’t do it the way you’re trying to do it.”

Then I tell him how great it was to sail on the northerly breeze in the morning and the southwesterly in the afternoon. Then he grins and laughs. “You know, it’s really pretty cool what you’re doing. Let’s go set the rest of your traps right now.” And we do.

Bagging bait, loading 40 on the stern of Shameless, steaming out to Two Bush Island, slogging through rain which turns to downpour when we get in the harbor, getting the outboard stuck on a derelict buoy in the harbor. All of these things he put up with to help me.

That’s today’s lesson. Thanks to the Max, Peter, Frank and all the other predecessors who left tools and boat stuff in the barn. Thanks to whoever left the sail that fits Sweet Pea perfectly and makes me so happy every time I put it up. Thanks to the fishermen watching out for me. Thanks to Lisa tolerating yet another “adventure.” Thanks to Clayton for getting me into the water. Thanks for all the advice, even when it’s directly contradictory:

“You’ve got to get wooden traps. They fish great”
“Wooden traps don’t fish for shit.”
“I loved wooden traps. I bought 300 of them and lost every last one in a storm.”

I’m thankful and relieved to have 100 pots out now. I can visit more of them with a lot less traversing.

I’ve hit walls and taken them for granted, especially where I don’t know what I’m doing, there aren’t suppliers for key things I need and I get advice like “you’ve got to get rid of that boat.” It takes a good night’s rest to realize that I just need to look at the wall and figure out how to get over, under, around or through. The next big wall is getting those heavy wire traps up to the boat. I spent days getting the flipper functional to make boarding the traps easier. I know I can’t hand haul them without some help from Archimedes. Or a good 12 volt winch.

Day One, Take 3

2010-05-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

5/25/2010

Today is the next Day One. It’s my first day of intending to haul all 50 of my traps in the water. It also turns out to be Generosity Day. Biscuit gave me a ride to the wharf. Darlene gave me a ride back. Dennis gave me a tote of bait. Jamie gave me an electric winch (unfortunately unresponsive, but nice nonetheless). What great support I've gotten from these supposedly tough fisherfolk.

I didn’t catch as much as I’d hoped. This was partly because I hurried things, hauling half the gear on three nights’ set, intead of 5 like I should have. In typical exasperating fashion, some places the bait hadn’t been touched yet, some places it was gone.

My invention, the trap flipper also began its latest demise. One bracket that holds the rig onto the gunwale let go, causing the whole thing to rack around in a crooked fashion. The crookedness gradually chewed up the other bracket, and it collapsed later on. I tied the whole business together with green nylon twine I found in the great barn cleanout of last winter. It was ok for the day, but had to basically be reassembled after each trap. The lesson after another several hours reinforcing with plywood is that: A- maritime work beats the crap out of everything. My flipper-as tough as it seemed, being heavily screwed together out of oak stock, could not stand up to commercial fishing, could not withstand my mightiness. It broke. Lesson B: when you’re making something that nobody has made before, it will evolve by showing you what breaks next. Fix this, that breaks. Now I’ve made the brackets nuke proof with sandwiched plywood, which means one thing. Some other part will break next time. Even broken all over and held together with twine, it works better than pulling the trap over the rail.

Today’s other lesson is that although fog may come on cat’s paws, it comes very quickly. It’s a blinding hot and sunny day until I’m 41 traps into my goal of 50. By 42, it was time to head in. No radar reflector, no compass. Gotta go. Cold and gray in a minute. The harbor was beautiful in the mist. I sold off and despite not finishing, despite the mechanical failure and the short set, I didn’t lose money. After my first essentially full work day, I was no more wiped than I had been after half that many.

Staring Seal

2010-05-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

5/23

My hauling t-shirt has two big tears, one under each arm. Did I bust out from the rowing and hauling like the Incredible Hulk? I don’t feel that rugged. More like fishin’ E.T.

Today on the north side of Ten Pound Island, I was startled by a splash near the boat. A moment later, up pops a seal, staring. This seal looks big. Maybe it’s the size of my boat that makes him look bigger than I remember. He follows me for 10 minutes or so, coming up to stare every so often.

I’m on the last fifteen pots of the day, having started on the far opposite end of my gear. This was a big day. I did the two extremities of my territory at least an hour faster than last time. I didn’t miss buoys and have to lock the oars back in, go around and retry. The bait stayed on and there were lobsters present. The weather was nice the whole time.

Most importantly, I hauled two days in a row, which sets me up to do two things. First, haul all of the pots in one day next time. The bait and soak cycles will fit together. Second, after 10 days or so of hard, frustrating work and stumbles, I can take a couple of days off. Muscles can recover, other work will get done, home chores can be caught up on.

Oh, yes, there is also the healthy number of lobsters in my crate.

Little Increments and Little Obstacles

2010-05-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

5/18

Today was the first taste of what I had in mind when I imagined this venture. The sound. The quiet. The water and birds. I’ve never heard birds taking off from the water because of the diesel roar. The sortie was good, most of the way. By the time I got to the last ten, however, the wind was bullying me and I had to row home upwind. When I crawled into the harbor, one foot forward and 9 inches back for every stroke, my hands were screaming. Elbows didn’t seem to fit together any more.

I rowed substantially farther than on previous outings- to the back side of Ten Pound Island, then back past the harbor to Two Bush Ledge. My whacky looking roller and trap spatula worked very well, taking a lot of strain off the back and keeping the center of gravity in the boat instead of a foot out over the water. I hauled 5 more traps this time. Little increments.

I’m a big fan of Roz Savage’s book Rowing the Atlantic- Lessons Learned on the Open ocean. Savage was the first solo woman to complete the transatlantic rowing event from either the Azores or the Canaries, I can’t recall which, and Antiqua. All the doubts, malfunctrion, inexperience and growth seem pretty parallel. Except she went across the Atlantic. I don’t have to do that. I do, however, have to push myself beyond all my physical and engineering limits and then go home and try to be father, husband, lawyer, tax collector and community member. When I got in today, Lisa was in dire need of help with kids so she could open the store for the year. The junk metal truck man, Dan, had this one afternoon to get my scrap metal ready to go on the ferry tomorrow. I start hucking rusted pipes, gutters, mangle bike frames, bed springs and the like out to the road and helped load up. The ferry tomorrow also means I can get rid of the six banana boxes-300 or so- of video cassettes left behind here by our predecessors. OK, except that they can't be in banana boxes for recycling, and I have to remove all the cardboard boxes, stomp those down and bag all of the stuff up. Blisters and barnacle cuts are a distraction. There are dishes to wash, calls to return and laundry to do from 2 weeks ago. Even as I post this, it's 8 minutes before my middle girl's school starts, so I have to have an ear downstairs to make sure she's not late. I'm not getting any traps hauled because my son left the car door open and the battery is dead as a stump. It's windy again. Little obstacles.

I’ve read a few books in the vein of “I undertook a challenge and sorely tested myself and found out the real struggles were not what I expected.” All of those books appear to be written by singles or couples with no young children. In addition to sea peril, physical limitations, and the great one-two combination of too much age and no inexperience, I have Daddy Guilt. Like our family’s move to Matinicus, the children really did not get a choice. I am not yet fulfilling my financial duties to the family, and have doubts about being able to with this fishing business. What kind of role model am I? I like celebrating and modeling intelligent risk, adventure, growth and trying different things. I don’t like modeling recklessness and financial irresponsibility. The truth is, this project is full of both.

Autopilot Through the Darkness

2010-05-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

As I write for the first time since the Dark Days, I open my duffle, pull out my computer and see the videos I packed for the kids to watch. I haven’t unpacked from the road trip that began May 4, and it’s now the 17th. Since then, I’ve been back and forth a number of times to get the boat, not get the boat and then get the boat. Clothes, kids stuff books and travel necessities are all still sprawled on my side of the bedroom.

That explains, in part, why I’ve been so frantic and despairing. The Dark Days began a few hours after the boat came last Tuesday. The realization of what I was getting into hit all at once. No experience, tiny boat. Big Ocean. Cold water. Pep talks about rapid, cold and terribly uncomfortable death soon followed. Then I started taking the boat out on Thursday. The brisk southwest breeze spun me lightly around, pushing me, bullying the new kid. I hauled a total of 6 traps- a mighty wrestling match by itself- and then swooshed all over the place getting home, getting the boat moored, getting ashore.

The next day, I went out to haul again. Took some “suckerheads” for bait, thinking I was the sucker, later confirmed by others. Suckerheads are useless as bait. Live and learn. Hauling twenty traps was the most strenuous thing I’ve ever done. It didn’t feel very good thinking I was getting nothing back next time due to bait quality. By the end, every grasp of rope came with a gasp and grimace. Every trap resisted coming aboard and sorely tempted my and the boat’s center of gravity.

At this point the panic and shame set in full force. I wanted to return the boat and find a commune in Montana where I could get a new name. I knew the boat was not set up properly. I also knew that because nobody was doing this kind of fishing anymore, I couldn’t just go get the proper accessories in the local marine store. That meant expense. I haven’t paid for the boat yet, much less more gear. That no one sells. Then I’m thinking about solar panels, batteries and power winches, or better still a solar outboard. Or nuclear, maybe. That’s not really petroleum, right?

By Friday, I felt I had made a huge, expensive and utterly irresponsible mistake. What was I doing ditching my jobs and pursuing this idea? What kind of crackpot was I showing my children?! I hated myself. Fortunately, my autopilot said keep working on it. Go like hell. Lisa- bless her- reminded me that it was to be expected that I’d need to spend a couple of weeks getting properly geared up.

I started trying to design a ramp and lever device to take some of the strain and imbalance out of getting the trap aboard; one of the real vulnerable and strenuous parts of the process. I also started trying to create a roller to reduce rope friction and chafing and take some effort out of hauling the traps up. The trap flipper thing had worked really well on the Blue Note, my little aluminum skiff I hauled a few out of last year. Basically, it tilts the trap out so you pull it up a slant instead of deadlifting it straight up. My new version sucked. It tipped over on the rail, dumped the trap and was unmanageable. My new roller was made from a bike wheel hub. The box around it was also unstable. Next idea: fasten the roller and flipper together so they stabilize each other. By the time I’d confidently assembled this rickety, crude and Mad Max meets the Bayou looking device, it was late on Friday, so I couldn’t test it.

Saturday was very still and overcast- good for hauling. Right up until my boot sole touched Sweet Pea’s deck, at which time the fog instantly became clam-chowder thick and the wind, my new foe, had started. I wanted to go out anyway at least to test the new rig. I went out around Wheaton and started hauling. The flipper was marginally uselful but looking like it wanted to collapse any time. The roller spun well for about the first three traps, then got very reluctant. And tilted.

That day’s 20 traps also wrecked me, and projected a mental movie of my future either destroying myself physically for no money or bailing on the whole fiasco.

Autopilot saved me again. I obsessed and just about burned out my spatial relation cortex trying to design something that would work. I pulled out pvc pipe, vaccuum hose, toggles, a plastic candy cane, pipes, rods and stuff I can’t remember. I took a long walk, stewing, obsessing, visualizing, throwing out one idea after the next. Clayton produced the brass wheel that started things going in a better direction. Many more designs and layouts followed. Many trips across the harbor in the skiff, out in Sweet Pea, and back with a list of failures and another round at the drawing board. Late Monday, I came up with what I thought was the right design. The trap just popped up and in. The sun shone. The water was friendly. I got my first paycheck $42.10.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings. I guess I’m not going to the commune yet.

Wind Power- Good or Evil?

2010-05-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

Owing to exhaustion from hauling my own gear, sea testing myself and the boat, and setting 70 of Clayton's, I have to stick to the basics. I can't think of much in the way of good storytelling or life lessons. Today Sweet Pea and I were out a couple of times. I did haul a very few pots and caught a very few lobsters. Mostly, I tried to get used to handling the boat, breaking traps and dealing with The Wind. My new companion. The Pod slides along very nicely, patiently teaching me to row. When the southwest breeze puts a big shimmer on the water, I get a memorable lesson in hydro and aerodynamics. If one end is lighter, it must go downwind. Why did I not know this? Before I figured it out, there were 15 or so very tense minutes where I thought something was spinning me around just to torment. The rest of the expedition was spent trying to figure out where to put everything- oars, gaff, bait, measure, lobsters, trap, radio, accessories.

The terror and embarassment of going onto the open ocean in a jolly breeze and a petit-pod, hauling traps up hand over hand, getting them aboard and back overboard, clawing my way back to the harbor, skiff-jumping, tying up, swapping this and that from one boat to another- all of the jitters and gawkiness of doing this the first time will abate some, I hope. There were a few instants where I could just enjoy the beauty of the linseed/pinetar/turpentine ribs and planks of the curved interior of the boat and outside of that, the ocean.

I'm sure I amused and scared all those who watched. Sorry, Donna. I am home writing this, so that's good. Good night.

Boat and Trap Launching

2010-05-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

I can stand up with a guitar and pour out a Bob Dylan song comfortably. Or my own song, or James Taylor, Taj Mahal or something from the Great American Songbook, pop edition. I don’t think about every note. I don’t think about any note. I tip the pitcher and it pours out. That is because that 4 minutes or so of performance was assembled starting about 35 years ago. My knowledge is subconscious now.

Clayton takes me out to set my first 50 traps. I had planned on doing this all myself, and thought that taking motorized help was somehow cheating. Clayton is a good friend and doesn’t have a sternman right now, so I trade a load of his gear getting set for a load of mine. We zip off to Two Bush ledge, tie a trap to warp. Warp to buoy. A causal flip off his wrist and I give it a shove. Over it goes. One trap in the water. Why here? How will I remember? I didn’t plan on coming over here. Then it’s five in the water and another 5 behind the Beach Ledge marker. How will I remember? I didn't realize my buoys were so small and essentially invisible out here! This patch of ocean where I’ve worked hundreds of days for four years suddenly seems as foreign as parachuting into Siberia or the Amazon Basin. It’s so big. Everything is so far apart. I’ll never remember. I’ll never be able to see the buoys. I’ll never be able to set them back where they are set now. How does he know this. He seems so casual. Like I sing a song, he drops traps.

And so it goes on the back side of Wheaton Island, Old Cove and Ten Pound Island. It seems very exposed in a large, wild, open ocean. How did I think I was going to come out here in the wild in a tiny wooden boat that I don’t yet even know how to handle, dealing with finding buoys, safely hauling traps aboard, resetting them and getting home dry and intact? It’s completely ludicrous. These guys have decades of subconscious knowledge and centuries of inherited instinctual intuitive skill. Me, well, I’ve got an ok singing voice.

On the back side of Ten Pound, we drop off the last five in a rollicking westerly swell seemingly a few feet from stern, steep, jaggedy, intimidating granite formations. I don’t even want to come here in my little boat, invisible to the island, rolling around like a marble on a pickup truck bed, much less try to hoist traps in and get them out before the grouchy rock gods take a whoofle out of me.

Maybe my good friend is trying to scare the shit out of me to smarten me up. But there’s still that quiet voice saying the next great adventure of my life is underway. I’m going to Antarctica, Kazakhstan, the Congo right within a half mile of shore of the tiny island that adopted my family and I.

***

My boat was launched in Round Pond on Tuesday afternoon. The four individuals who built her got the first ride following the blessing by Rev. Ives. As though the water didn’t know the boat was there, it slid, surreal, the only disturbance coming from the dipping of oars. This is truly a magic design. The Boatshop crew has been nothing but enthusiastic, while also saying that it was a challenge unlike other building projects. Having two bows and no stern, planks could not be run long and then trimmed. Looking at the hull, I have absolutely no idea how our two dimensional brains can accommodate all those curves. Maybe it’s a fourth dimension thing, and that’s why the water does not even know the Sweet Pea is passing through. I take a paddle, disclaiming as I embark, that I have no idea how to row the boat. The boat seems to know and is patient with me. I’m immediately aware that this 300 pound, 15 by 4.5 foot boat moves much more easily than my 80 pound ten foot aluminum skiff. That’s the design magic that was created before humans even learned how to work with aluminum. It’s a better design. A much older design. And there we come back to one of the fundamentals of the Zero Carbon Lobster Harvesting Project. Progress really means that what’s better should be the measure of the future. Not necessarily what’s faster or bigger or louder.

Fishery Management and Dark Energy

2010-04-25T05:31:00.000-07:00

As the last sardine cannery in Maine closes for good, I regret not eating more of these humble, Steinbeckian, omega-rich and sustainable fish. One more line of work that uses what we have here and brings us closer to our environment is gone. One more local food source that doesn't require extensive pesticide, fertilizer, petroleum based transportation, processing and refrigeration is gone. I accuse the dark art of fisheries management science.

The parent company said it closed Stinson due to fishing reductions for atlantic herring. These reductions came about not because regulatory data showed fewer fish, but because of the discovery of a 5 year old contradictory computer model and data problem. Data for all the subsequent years was then revised to comfort those who didn't like contradictory computer modeling data.

Dark matter and energy appear to the lay person as astrophysical fudge factors to explain away contradictory and perplexing observations. Light from distant stars and galaxies is dimmer than expected, suggesting the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. It was presumed that the expansion following the big bang would be slowing and eventually reverse as a result of gravitational pull between objects in space. The light shift observations messed up this tidy conclusion. There must be some force to counteract gravity and make galaxies keep running away from each other faster. What we're seeing is confunding, so there must be a thing out there somewhere... Let's call it "dark" matter and energy. Stuff we can't observe or pick up a chunk of along the shore or use to power laptops and toasters.

On to fisheries. There are scientists in the fishery regulatory environment, in government and in the employ of nonprofit organizations. Leaders demand that policy and regulatory decision-making be based on "good science." What is good science, other than science I agree with, or that fits my agenda?

When computer models and data don't fit together in a pleasing way, we fudge the numbers, reshape the computer models and call it "science" as though that is the same as counting fish. Absence of good evidence becomes good evidence of absence.

Perhaps it is time for a new definition of science, especially in the regulatory environment.
When policy makers or advocates trumpet science being on their side, let's keep a clear distinction between measurement and observation and computer model fudge factors.

We might also find better ways of utilizing information from the empirical ocean observers- fishermen. Unfortunately, stimulus and other galactic scale federal bucks are going not to cooperative research, but instead to new offices for NOAA and to consolidate the New England ground fishery in favor of fishermen who never smell baity and who have more lobbyists than deck hands.

2010-04-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday because we're on the couch at 7 a.m.. The nagging sense that I'm already behind gets more pronounced as the song birds get louder, grass is suddenly green and pieces of wood keep getting added to Sweet Pea. At some point, I ought to get outside and put rope together, paint buoys, groom up my traps and get some clue about what I'm doing. My yellow pad with the last winter list still has many lines not crossed out. Winter things aren't done. Spring things getting in arrears in a hurry. Overlapping wedges of shoulds and wegottas. Perhaps it's best to just burn that page- ceremonially revoke winter's leasehold on the list cortex in my brain. These uncertainties are answered for me as I hear my son stirring.

Us and them?

2010-03-10T04:09:00.000-08:00

As the criminal trial on the Matinicus shooting unfolds in Rockland, there is a another quiet story playing out in Augusta. It’s a new version of an old story. The Department of Marine Resources seeks legislation allowing it shut down entire fisheries where there is conflict between fishermen and “a risk of harm to any person.” LD 1604. As with the shutdown itself, this law was pressed through the legislative process without the DMR making any effort to work with fishing communities to address the problem of violence between fishermen.

The martial law declared over Matinicus lobstering last year was implemented by sending out a half dozen armed officers, who announced that we were all out of work for 2 weeks, handed out copies of the rule and departed into the evening rain about 10 minutes later. There was no effort to work with fishermen or community leaders to deal with violence on the wharf. Despite the motivation of about 95% of the fishing families to maintain stability following a stunning incident, the department did not engage with the Board of Assessors or the fishing leadership to come up with any meaningful safety plan.

From the Commissioner's and others' remarks, it appears those officials believe everyone in the Matinicus fleet bore some indirect responsibility for the actions of the combatants. This was why the Commissioner felt justified in imposing such dramatic collective punishment and putting an entire community out of business to "send a message." Imagine closing a small town in Aroostook County to all farming activities in September if a couple of farmers got into it, or closing Piscataquis County to logging because a couple of loggers got violent.

My impression is that there is a mentality that the community of Matinicus Island deserved a crackdown from afar because of the unique enforcement challenges and frustration the Department has experienced. DMR wanted to "get its point across," and "send a message." I ask whether a similar act of violence between fishermen in Stonington or Vinalhaven have resulted in a quarantine of those fishing communities.

This typifies the relationship between state agencies and Matinicus- a lack of services and support, lack of interest, and an unwillingness to collaborate to solve problems. When there’s a problem, officials simply throw up their hands and portray islanders as out of control and lawless. The reaility is that the island self governs not by choice, but by necessity, out of the lack of having a partner in Augusta. DMR won’t supply resources to deal with ccriminal activity, but wants to, by remote control, punish the entire community and force the community to deal with the actual trouble makers.

The new law provides for a hearing in front of the Commissioner within 30 days. I believe the hearing should be before a judge or a qualified administrative hearing offficer not employed by DMR. I also believe that if the Department wants to wait 30 days to provide a hearing, it can suspend any closure until the hearing has been held and a ruling issued. That will make a hearing provision meaningful. Otherwise, it’s a joke. In poor taste. Boat payments won’t be suspended. Credit card companies won’t wait for the hearing.

In its currrent form, LD 1604 encourages arbitrary action from afar and lets the DMR off the hook for doing the hard work of dealing with a few individuals who commit crimes and think it’s OK because they’re fishermen. There are fishermen who’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars to gear and boat sabotage and are still waiting for a meaningful response from the government officials who have the power and responsibility to act. LD 1604 is no substitute.

The fundamental question is whether the island must self govern or whether state agencies can provide meaningful services and support in the role of partner as well as enforcer from above.

Carpenter's Boatshop Update

2010-03-02T05:42:00.000-08:00

I got some pictures today from the Carpenter's Boatshop in Pemaquid, www.carpentersboatshop.org. Simon, from Scotland, appears pretty well immersed in planking either at the stern or the bow. Since it's a double ender and I'm no expert, it's hard to tell which is which.

Zero Carbon Lobster Chronicles- Cleaning Out and Making Ready for Baby (Boat)

2010-03-01T04:01:00.000-08:00

Now it’s March, and I’ve been hiding from my impending adventure. I’ve been playing music, enjoying the winter rhythm, ice skating, playing electronic games and...cleaning the barn. There is a connection. My boat needs a place to winter and I need a workspace to begin preparing fishing gear for the season.

A paragraph to set the stage. The barn could be accessed by walking sideways, stepping over, crawling under a tangle of garden implements, power equipment, tools, kites, boogie boards, lawn chairs, carboard boxes we might want to use someday, flower pots, lumber in every length and width, just plain trash, a dozen or so rental bikes, strollers, hula hoops, lawn decorations and a waffer-thin after dinner mint. So far, just an average family stuff depot. In addition, however, lurking darkly under and behind the fluorescent plastic kid and family items, are an assortment of industrial wood and metal working tools from the age of steam when everything was built locomotive style. The metal behemoths are accessorized with many, many bushels of metal pulleys, wheels, rusted auto parts, broken and seized tools, scrap iron, belts, hoses, two engine blocks and lots of things I can’t identify.

Cleaning out the barn was a worthy challenge. Many days were spent carrying, skidding, prying-sometimes just for that next half inch. Remarks got uttered. This island of Matinicus puts one in touch with two conflicting priorities which make me a Distraught Fellow. First , you shouldn’t throw away that axle because you might need it some day. Second, there’s no leaving things on the curb for the recycling truck. The cheapness of things and the work it takes to manage an overabundance of them. The dearness of space to move and function.

The bandsaw, drill press and one of the lathes have homes now thanks to Craigslist, Uncle Henry’s, John Deere and R.K.. The larger lathe, weighing a ton and a half give or take a quarter, is still standing like Eeyore at the end of the driveway. The totes of metals are off to be recycled. The town recycling program has experienced a surge in patronage. Goodwill got some things. A practice burn pile got a little larger. I owe some big favors.

Just Another Friday on Matinicus

2010-02-26T12:11:00.000-08:00

The power was out overnight resulting from the most ferocious freightrain winds I've heard since coming here. Clayton said it hit 70 knots at his house, which was mostly standing still. Since the school couldn't open, we took an early morning excursion to see the big surf. Unforecast bright sunshine and warm temps made it pretty nice for the last Friday in February. Down at the harbor, things got a little stranger. The harbor bell, a 12 foot high metal can with a big brass bell, normally positioned a quarter mile outside the mouth of the harbor, was bobbing around right at the shore, wavering towards a couple of shops. It shouold be interesting to watch the Coast Guard retrieve it.

I stopped to check in on friends and helped refasten their metalbestos chimney, the top section of which flew off in the night. The brain trust figured out after a lot of times up and down the ladder that it would be easier to take out the next section down and put them together on the ground. It was easier until the time came to carry the now 6 foot section up the latter to reattach it. Done.

Ryan and I played tetherball with a mooring fender, flew paper airplanes and jumped when some cabin fever dudes dropped a string of firecrackers in the road. At 11:00 a.m.. In February. I guess it wasn't personal 'cause I heard more go off up the road to the north. I issued a hunting license, though I don't know what you'd hunt for right now.

Worked on music with the school kids. Singing, drums, rhythm and possibly the continental U.S's only school ukulele band. Their spring concert will be fabulous.

That's the news for Friday, February 26, 2010.

Hanging out a shingle

2010-02-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

I stare at the painted over plaster cracks while running the copier in a dark, 40-something degree building that was once the one room school. I'm finishing a legal project that's taken most of the winter. It's one page at a time. Slow. Wind and February-style rain outside. It's about as dismal and clammy as the hold of a freighter in the north sea. I'll haul wood, go check out a painting job, play some guitar, wrestle my children and do it again tomorrow. This is the way to practice. I'm the happiest lawyer in Maine. Shoes and trousers optional.