OWLS HEAD, Maine — High overhead costs for bait and fuel and low lobster prices mean that scraping out a living right now is tough — and stressful — for Maine lobstermen, a Maine Marine Patrol colonel said Thursday.
But in the wake of three lobster boats being sabotaged on Wednesday at Owls Head and two weeks after a lobsterman was shot on Matinicus Island, Col. Joseph Fessenden said tense fishermen need to cool it with the violence, trouble and trap wars.
“Tempers are very, very short,” he said. “We’ve got to get the fishermen to figure out that this isn’t working. Cutting traps and making trouble is not working.”
No arrests have been made yet in the overnight vandalism that left two lobster boats, the Git R Dun and the First Light, sunk and the Miss Andrea almost underwater Wednesday morning, according to law enforcement officials. Fessenden said that if those responsible for the “serious felony crimes” are caught, they will face significant penalties, including the possibility of jail time. However, if the vandal is another lobsterman, as many in the fishing community suspect, the Department of Marine Resources wouldn’t be able to suspend his or her fishing license for the boat vandalism.
Area lobstermen said Wednesday that territory disputes over the Ash Point fishing grounds likely triggered trap cuttings and the boat vandalism. The community has been rocked by the sinking of the boats, said Jeff Woodman, a lobster buyer at the Owls Head Lobster Co. and a lifelong Owls Head fisherman.
“The whole town’s buzzing about it,” he said. “Fishermen are concerned. When you lose your boat, it’s $100,000 or more — and it’s a hard year with the price of lobster. Everybody’s a little on edge.”
The boat price for lobstermen at his company was $2.50 per pound Thursday, much less than it was before the 2008 lobster crash. An employee at the Port Clyde General Store said that the boat price there was even lower at $2.00 per pound.
“The price of lobsters dropped again today,” Fessenden said. “That’s not good news.”
No suspension planned
Fessenden would like lobstermen to know that his department is very serious about nabbing the vandals — even though his agency has just five officers patrolling the stretch of coastline between the mouth of the Penobscot River down to Thomaston and only 40 covering the whole coast of Maine.
“I think we’ve got a good chance of getting to the bottom of what caused this,” Fessenden said. “We’re not just taking a report and moving on to the next complaint. On this case, I think we’re all committed to putting a full court press on and find out who’s responsible for these sinkings.”
That would be a relief to the three fishermen who own the three vandalized boats, including Donald McMahan Jr., who said Wednesday that he had little hope that authorities would arrest the person or persons responsible for scuttling his Git R Dun.
“I’m worried the same thing will happen again,” McMahan said.
Fessenden thinks that the vandalism sounds like retaliation for some perceived wrongdoing, and that his officers have been fielding complaints for weeks about traps being cut in Owls Head. He’s keeping his eye on the area from Owls Head down to Friendship, another hot spot for vandalism, he said.
Officials from the Marine Patrol, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Maine State Police and the Knox County Sheriff’s Department — which is heading up the investigation — are meeting this morning in Rockland to determine how to respond to the escalating tensions along the coast.
One avenue they won’t pursue is a total suspension of fishing in Owls Head, Fessenden said, in contrast to July’s three-day suspension on Matinicus after lobsterman Vance Bunker was arrested for shooting lobsterman Chris Young in the neck. The only possible link between the two incidents is their shared violence, he said.
“If you do something, you get a lot of exposure,” Fessenden said. “There’s a very ugly side of that business that’s not good. We’re hearing a lot of that ugliness right now, and I’m bothered by that.”
Though a closure is off the table, he said that Maine Marine Patrol has stepped up patrols of the area and authorities may take other measures, including shortening the fishing day. The fishing day now lasts from a half hour before dawn to a half hour after dusk, and while most lobstermen are early risers, some choose to fish later in the day when it’s more isolated on the water, according to Fessenden.
“It would be an extreme thing for us to do. It wouldn’t be a popular thing,” he said. “When you’re fishing, it works a lot better if people are keeping an eye on each other. This trap cutting and vandalism is taking place when no one is around.”
‘At wit’s end’
Self-policing is nothing unusual in the lobstering community, said James Acheson, a University of Maine professor of anthropology and marine sciences who wrote the 1988 book, “The Lobster Gangs of Maine.”
“You have excellent compliance with lobster conservation laws,” he said. “They obey those laws and frankly make sure other people do as well.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Acheson said, lobstermen would indicate displeasure with each other by leaving a note in a bottle in a lobster trap, by tying two half-hitch knots on the spindle of a buoy, by taking the nylon mesh out of a trap or by giving “verbal warnings.”
“Sometimes those warnings are quite nice. Sometimes they’re not quite so nice,” Acheson said. “I’ve heard of being punched out and so on and so forth.”
But the severity of the recent violent incidences is “very, very rare,” he said.
“The vast majority of these people don’t get involved in any of this stuff,” Acheson said. “But you’ve got an awful lot of people on edge, stressed and anxious [now] … There’s a lot of people with very serious problems, especially younger people who have taken out very large loans.”
Boats can cost $300,000, traps can cost $40,000 and that’s not counting home or vehicle debt, Acheson said.
“I’ve talked to three bankers about this. They’re trying very, very hard to hold off on foreclosures. Virtually all the banks in coastal Maine have made loans in the lobster industry,” he said. “Loan officers are kind of a depressed bunch when you mention lobstering.”
A discouraged-sounding Fessenden said that he’s been thinking about a recent phone call from a lobsterman he knows who has been losing traps every day to vandalism.
“He said, ‘Look, Joe, I’m at wit’s end. I don’t know what to do … I don’t want to cut anybody. I’m trying to behave myself. But I’m starting to have evil thoughts about what I should do to protect myself … those guys at Owls Head who sunk those boats may be at wit’s end,’” Fessenden recalled.
“That bothers me a lot,” Fessenden added. “How many people are at wit’s end? How many people are getting close to the end of the line here?”