At 4:30 a.m. on a muggy morning in June, Doug Scott swats at mosquitoes as he unlocks the building at Sea Horse Lobster in West Point, Phippsburg. The day doesn’t begin quite this early during the winter, but now, with the lobster season picking up, fishermen depend on Scott and his helper to be there with fuel and bait.
Lots of other people depend on Sea Horse, too, including tuna fishermen, groundfishermen, tourists who want to buy lobster for a meal or have it packed to take home, neighborhood kids who need a place to hang out in summer, fishermen who need to make small repairs on their boats, men who aren’t fishing in bad weather and come down to talk and sometimes play cards, retired fishermen who want to keep in touch, and locals and tourists who gather to witness the tuna auction.
The wharf is a micro-community. Without it, there would be a void. As Scott says, fishermen might be able to do without it – “I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be done, but it would be a lot harder,” he says – but the community would never be the same.
Shortly after Scott opens the building, the first lobsterman arrives. Scott and his helper haul out trays of bait filled from bins kept in a large cooler in the building. Using a winch, they lower the trays to the boat while it takes on fuel. While one boat is serviced, others wait nearby in Carrying Place Cove.
Scott, who has managed Sea Horse for owner Phillip Wyman for 15 years, buys herring or whatever is available from Purse Line Bait, located a few miles away in Sebasco, another Phippsburg village. In its earlier incarnations, the building at Purse Line housed an ice plant and a boatbuilding business. Before Jenni Bichrest opened Purse Line Bait in 1996, Scott negotiated with bait dealers from Portland and beyond, or bought directly from herring boats. The bait dealers, like Bichrest, would deliver their product.
At this time of year, some lobstermen outfit their boats for tuna fishing, and turn to Sea Horse for ice to chill down their catch – if they happen to be so lucky. When the ice plant was operating in Sebasco, Scott says fishermen would pick up ice there. Now, someone from Sea Horse, usually Wyman, drives every other day in summer to Portland or Rockland for a three- to five-ton truckload of ice. During tuna season, the wharf uses great quantities to chill down tuna to keep it in prime condition for auction in the evening. Groundfishermen also buy it to keep their catch fresh.
On summer days when tuna are caught, Scott and Wyman will be at the wharf until 8 or 9 p.m., sometimes later if a fisherman calls in to let them know he’s caught a tuna late in the day and has just begun to head for home. Fishermen go as far as 50 miles offshore to look for tuna, and the return trip can take hours. Someone has to be at the wharf to take care of the fish and get it into the tank of ice water, where it will stay until a dealer arrives or the wharf holds an auction the next day.
Sea Horse serves about 20 lobstermen and two groundfishermen, who own boats that range from a small skiff to lobster boats of different sizes and ages to the ETHEL B., a wooden trawler owned by Clint Richardson, to Proctor Wells’s two-year-old TENACIOUS, which is outfitted with the latest technology to make it user friendly for collaborative scientific research.
By the beginning of July, the wharf next to Sea Horse’s barn-like building is almost cleared of traps stored there by several lobstermen during the winter. They’ve cleaned the traps there and readied them for the new season. Other fishermen who trucked theirs home last fall bring them down and load them onto boats from the wharf. Some, like Wendy Wallace of Bath, who is sternman this year for her husband, Ken, painted their buoys on the wharf.
After the last lobster boat heads out in the morning, Scott settles in at his small desk and begins to plug away at the paperwork, but he is often interrupted. Dealers arrive to pick up lobsters, bait needs to be unloaded, an individual wants to buy lobsters. Sometimes he has help; sometimes not. He keeps all the books by hand, lacking the time and inclination to learn computer technology. Maintaining records which include reports required by various state and federal agencies in addition to fishermen’s purchases and sales is a formidable task. In 1998, when the Sea Horse building was destroyed by fire, all of these records, including bills owed, were lost. (The business had to move to temporary quarters at another wharf in West Point until Wyman finished re-building.)
While Scott tackles the paperwork, Wyman is constantly on the go. Often, he’s on the road to pick up ice or a part needed for a repair at the wharf or something new he’s adding, like the aeration system he installed last summer. The system became necessary when water temperatures rose into the 70s, reducing the amount of oxygen available to crates of lobsters stored in the large tank where fresh sea water circulates. This year in early July, Wyman and Scott were caught off guard by a sudden rise in water temperature after a period of abnormally low readings. They lost several crates of lobsters before turning on the aeration system again.
Often, there’s a bunch of people at the wharf, particularly on weekends and in bad weather. They lend a hand when needed. During one fierce winter storm several men watched the roaring wind and waves from the windows of Sea Horse’s doors, which face west, while they formulated plans to rescue an absent fisherman’s lobster boat. It had come loose from its mooring and was beached across the cove on Carrying Place Island. They successfully crossed the turbulent water in a small skiff – two times over and back because the boat’s battery was dead – and moved the boat before the incoming tide bashed it on the rocks.
Once school is out, kids are a constant presence. They fish off the wharf or from a skiff for mackerel, pollock or striped bass. They ride bikes and play ball in the parking area, and swim in the cove. If they get a project going, like building a fort beneath a neighboring wharf, they scrounge lumber and tools from Sea Horse. Most of all, they watch, listen and learn, and some hope to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. For now, they can earn money harvesting periwinkles (getting the same price, one man said, as he did 50 years ago), or hauling traps from a skiff.
Sometimes, they help out. Wet-headed, wearing swimsuits and boots, they shovel ice from the truck when tuna are coming in, or they push a cart with bait out to the wharf or help operate the winch. They are generous with visiting kids, show them how to bait a hook with a piece of herring and tell them the best way to fish off the wharf. If they’re lucky, they can grab a crab claw or a lobster from a batch Wyman has cooked, and crack it open with a rock, or pull down a piece of the hake he hangs to dry from lines strung up beside the building.
Around noon, fishermen begin to bring in their catch. Scott and a helper lower trays to the boats, raise the ones filled with lobsters sorted between soft and hard shells, with a different group two pounds and over, all of which pay differently. They weigh the catch and record the totals for each fisherman. Scott settles accounts with fishermen at irregular intervals – whenever they want.
Through phone calls to different buyers he sells to from Portland to Boston, Scott has determined the best price he can offer. The market, he says, is very competitive and changes drastically at different times of the year. After tourists leave, and the lobster stock builds along the coast, he turns more often to Canadian buyers who store lobsters in huge pounds.
If the current price is low, Scott says he can wait a day or two, but with limited storage room, that’s all. “The big thing is to keep the product moving,” he says. “We can’t just keep buying and have a building full of lobsters. The boats will still go out the next day.” Lobster prices have gone up, he adds, but not proportionately to the rise in cost of fuel, gear and property taxes.
Scott also buys Jonah crabs, which he sells primarily to local pickers and residents, or, if the crabs are plentiful, trucks to buyers in Portland or Boston.
Sea Horse’s two remaining groundfishermen, Wells and Richardson, usually bring in their catch by early afternoon. On board, they have sorted the catch according to species, which can include dab, gray sole, cod, monkfish, haddock, cusk, hake, or pollock. Scott weighs and tags the catch and someone drives it to the Portland Fish Exchange. Sea Horse earns a wharfage fee for its part in the deal.
In the years before Scott began to manage Sea Horse, groundfishing predominated and lobster fishing was a sideline, along with shrimping in winter and fishing for other species like scallops or urchins or collecting sea moss. “The wharf would buy anything they could find,” Scott says. “Now, if one type of fishing is poor, a fisherman can no longer stop that and do something else for awhile. It’s all regulated so much you can’t jump in and out.”
With the decline in groundfish stocks and increase in regulations governing entry into all fisheries, many fisherman downsized their boats and turned to fishing exclusively for lobster, with a few rigging for tuna in summer. Wells and Richardson still fish for shrimp, but because regulations allowed less than 30 days for shrimping and the catch was sparse during that time, the 2001-02 winter season was a bust for them and the wharf. “It was just a loss,” says Scott. “There’s nothing to replace it.”
This loss, coupled with the downturn in lobster prices after a glut in the supply resulting from shutdowns after 9/ll, the scarcity, lower prices and generally smaller size of tuna; and the diminished supply of groundfish hit both fishermen and the wharf hard last year.
Always, if one has a problem, the other does, too. Fishermen depend on the wharf; the wharf depends on them; and the community depends on both.