A working waterfront is like an iceberg: the visible part is much smaller than the subsurface mass that keeps it afloat. The parts above water that we see are the workings and machinations of coastal marine enterprises
– fishing and related piers and wharves where the catch is bought, sold, shipped, processed or auctioned off; traps and bait stored; fuel dispensed. There may be a transportation terminal for ferries and cruise ships; you might see chandleries, rigging shops, boatbuilding and repair yards or a Coast Guard cutter tied alongside. In a larger port, waterfront views might take in an oil terminal, container freight dock, or bulk cargo terminal. The appearance of working waterfronts seems remarkably unchanged, so much so that people have come to know, expect, and in fact like what they see there. But Mainers and visitors to our coast might be surprised and even dismayed if they could see the goings-on beneath the surface that threaten the iceberg’s stability.

A lot goes on behind the scenes. There are the essentials of maintenance: of cribwork, decking, pilings, ramps and floats. There are pollution and contaminant concerns: the water is cleaner (good), so marine worms are back in the pilings (bad). Maintaining depth at the pier is critical to a wharf owner, yet dredging considerations can consume literally weeks of productivity attending meetings. If you are a large commercial operation, you have to stay on top of rents, vacancies, changes in demand, changes in management. There are oil spill preparedness meetings, and local zoning meetings to attend because you want to ensure that you don’t squeeze your bottom floor businesses out trying to accommodate second floor tenants. It’s a tightrope walk by any measure.

The commerce at any commercial waterfront is constantly in transition. For owners along Maine’s commercial waterfront, life is on a quiet, slow boil all the time. The camera-toting summer visitor strolling the waterfront fresh off the turnpike has no idea what it takes to sustain that beautiful harbor.

Roger Duncan knows about coastal character, both the real and the projected image of it, having spent decades cruising and writing about Maine’s coast and co-authoring the classic Cruising Guide to the New England Coast. Duncan observes without judgment the kitschy stereotype people hold of “Maine character” — the version we see represented in quaint miniature lobster traps glued to pieces of driftwood and sold in gift shops coast wide. “Tourists have a preconceived idea of what coastal character is, and they want to see it,” says Duncan. “We cater to that preconceived notion. Some people spend a lot of time carving those miniature lobster traps not because they see it as particularly romantic, but because they sell them to people who do.”

Duncan warns that vacationers’ sentimental “simple fisher folk” myth, which survives “from some time like the Revolution” is in danger of collapsing from over-appreciation. “They come down to see the `simple village’ and they see the backs of other people,” says Duncan. “The whole thing is submerged in gift shops and shore-dinner places.”

Maine’s Most Maritime Tradition

Fishing embodies both the image and the reality of the traditional Maine coastal community. Times have been difficult in commercial fishing over the past 15 years, as regulators put the brakes on fishing effort in order to restore seriously depleted fish stocks. Traditional fisheries — cod, haddock, flounder — were dangerously close to the point of collapse. The regulatory response was to restrict fishing in spawning areas, limit the amount of fish that could be landed in a single day or trip, and, most onerous of all, limit the number days that fishermen could spend at sea fishing. Nowhere has the squeeze been felt as tightly as in Maine’s small coastal fishing villages.

From Kittery to Downeast, fishing is far more than a way to earn a living. In these communities, fishing has been going on for so long that it has become genetically encoded in their culture. Everyone in town supports the boats, in one way or another. In Stonington during the peak fishing years of the mid-1980s, there were 14 gillnetters in the harbor, each one supporting five families. They bought gear at the local gear supply shop, and kept trucking companies busy with daily trips to fish markets in Portland and Boston. With each boat spending about $10,000 per year on groceries and supplies, they even kept the local grocery store in business.

From a community standpoint, fishing created more than a network of vital economic enterprises. It linked generations of fishing families together. In a town like Stonington, with a population of 1,152 resting on a massive granite slab out in Penobscot Bay, shoreside vocational opportunities are limited. A kid growing up there knew pretty much what the options were, and most of them led to fishing. Besides, it’s what great-grandfather, grandfather, and father did. If you took a reasonable catch, left the broodstock alone to grow and thrive, the ocean took care of you. Someday, if you worked hard, you’d have your own boat. That was the progression.

Today, Stonington harbor has no gillnetters. But despite all the bad things that have happened, many communities are fighting successfully to survive. Fortunately, many Maine fishermen have had a fallback: lobstering has carried the brunt of the displacement from other fisheries as regulations limited them or shut them down.

Community and industry organizations have sprouted up in places such as Cundy’s Harbor, Stonington, Monhegan Island and Portland, aimed at providing resources, leadership, and a voice for Maine’s coastal communities. They distinguish themselves from large corporate fishing enterprises in their links to community and to the resource upon which they depend. Terms like “stewardship,” “community,” and “future generations” are in the lexicon of organizations like the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, the Stonington Fisheries Alliance, the Saco Bay Alliance, and Independent Fishermen Investing in Sustainable Harvesting.

Now, as fish stocks rebuild far offshore and fuel prices climb to record highs, many large fishing vessels are finding economic shelter from the storm in ports to the south of Maine. Maine draggermen, forced to spend one of their precious allocated “Days At Sea” steaming from Portland to the Georges Bank fishing grounds, and another on the return trip, are finding it expedient to base their trips out of Gloucester and New Bedford as a means of trimming costs. That spells uncertainty for Maine’s shoreside infrastructure that lands, sells, processes and trucks the fish, services the fishing boats, and supports the industry. Fish are the apex of a complicated support pyramid involving all these businesses; without them the system gets shaky.

A half-century ago, dozens of sardine canneries operated along the Maine coast. Today, modernization and consolidation in the industry leaves Maine with two plants, in Bath and Prospect Harbor. Rockland’s working waterfront, once geared to servicing fishing and fish processing, has largely made the transition from industrial enterprises to more recreational harbor services.

Few may pine for the heyday of those smelly, gritty waterfronts, when fish rendering plants and the like heard nuisance complaints from downwind residents. The nuisance complaints still come, only now they come from newcomers with a different attitude about working waterfronts. “When Southwest Harbor was an open sewer, everyone turned their back to the shore,” recalls Ralph Stanley, who owns and operates Ralph W. Stanley Inc. Boats in Southwest Harbor. “It was good enough for me to work on,” he adds jokingly. “When the harbor got cleaned up, everybody decided to turn their houses around and face the water.”

Stanley has observed a change in attitude. Summer people looked at things differently at the turn of the 20th century, according to Stanley. Most notably, he says, they tolerated the working waterfront. “Today they come with an unrealistic perspective of things,” says Stanley. “They look at it as if nobody knew anything before they got there. When it comes down to the real nitty gritty, they don’t like the dirt, confusion, smell, noise — that sort of thing. I can see it now, if somebody built a vessel up in Somesville today, with caulking mallets ringing, sawdust over the harbor, saws and planers going — oh boy, what would people do?”

Zoned Out

Stanley started building his first boat, a 28-foot lobster boat, in 1951, and became one of the state’s eminent designers and builders of wooden boats. “When I started building boats from scratch I didn’t have much, and people helped me. I made noise and mess, but people encouraged me, loaned me tools, extended me credit. Today, a young fellow starting in — boy they’d boot you out in a minute. The zoning wouldn’t allow it.”

In fact much of what people appreciate about coastal character today is the very diversity of interests along the waterfronts that would not be permitted under today’s zoning ordinances.

John Hanson, Jr., has observed this convergence of history and waterfront zoning firsthand. As publisher of Maine Boats and Harbors magazine since 1987, Hanson casts a professional’s discerning eye on the shifting trends on the coast of Maine. Maine Boats and Harbors rents wharf space and floats in Rockland on a dock that services daysailers and yachts, and houses a boat show and harbor services. It also houses Grapes restaurant, a replacement of the Black Pearl restaurant that inhabited the site since 1950 until it burned down at the hands of an arsonist.

“The modern usage of this dock we’re on symbolizes the multi-usage system in wharfage in this transitional, modern-era in Rockland,” says Hanson. Noting that a restaurant would not be permitted in this waterfront location under current ordinances — Grapes restaurant is permitted as a “grandfathered” use — Hanson says, “You have to be careful about zoning. You want vitality, not an industrial wasteland. To have vitality, you need a Fisherman’s Friend, a Becky’s, lobster shacks, and Grapes.”

Inspiration’s Cost

Ralph Stanley recalls a phone call from the town assessor few years back, suggesting he move his boatyard inland. “He said I should move into the woods and build boats, I didn’t need to be on the water. I said I needed to be on water for my inspiration. And if we need to step a mast, we have a dock. That makes being on the waterfront convenient. We’ve just got to pay for it, I guess.”

“Paying for it” doesn’t come as easily as it used to when Ralph Stanley started out. High waterfront property values lead to higher taxes, and many waterfront businesses, be they boatyards or fishing wharves, can’t afford the inflated prices. If they sell out, the result is an increase in pressure on public piers and wharves. Public waterfront facilities comprise only a quarter of Maine’s waterfront access and are already stressed from balancing commercial uses with increasing recreational pressure. In a 2002 survey of 25 coastal towns, the Maine State Planning Office heard two thirds of them say waterfront access was already a problem. The most intense pressures on working waterfronts were the triple threat of recreational uses, high property taxes and real estate development. Those pressures continue to intensify.

The North End Lobster Coop in Westport created its own solution to the problem of taxes and access. In September 2002 a group of 13 lobstermen bought a four-acre property with two old piers. Today the coop hovers at about 20 members, with their own dock, travel lift, and boat shop. Dana Faulkingham, one of the founding members, says the coop was able to prove that the difference between the boat price and the middleman price for lobsters was enough to cover payments on the property.

“There isn’t one of us that could’ve done it on our own,” says Faulkingham. “We could pool our resources and purchase the property. Once it’s paid for it’s ours, and it’ll be paid for in no time. We were lucky — if we’d waited we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I’m not sure you could do that now.”

Asked to define the essential ingredients of coastal character, Faulkingham casts his eyes out over the coop waterfront. “Here’s what it is. It’s where you see a dozen moorings, with workboats; a few nice skiffs tied up, a bait shed — all whatever it takes for that fishery to work. Some natives running around there with a few `Ayuhs’ and it’s Maine. Maine character.”

Dozens of small, private docks along the Maine coast offer that same experience. It isn’t an image. Or, if it is, the image is still real. But Faulkingham is keenly aware of its fragility. Using lobstering as an example, he ponders the future of Maine’s working coast. “If you look downstream, what if everyone sold their wharf and decided to cash in? The guy that’s got the two million dollars to buy it isn’t the local guy, he’s not from here. If two, three, or four say they’ll sell out, where do all the boats go, where do they work out of? If we lose any more, it becomes a scary situation. We have to be protective of it, and somehow lock those properties in. We have to have them if we’re going to lobster or go groundfishing and bring product in. That millionaire doesn’t want stinking bait holders and boats firing up at 4:30 in the morning all summer long.”

Union Wharf Synergy

One way to “lock in” a working waterfront is zoning. Portland underwent a defining moment when it held a referendum on conversion of commercial waterfront to residential development in 1987, sparked by the conversion of Chandlers Wharf to condos. The working waterfront referendum passed, barring non-water dependent uses from establishing a beachhead on Portland’s waterfront. But the restrictions proved too stringent, harkening back to John Hanson’s warning about zoning. Much of the real estate on Portland’s Commercial Street waterfront remained vacant for lack of tenants that complied with the “water dependent” restriction.

It took five years before Portland’s ordinance was amended to allow non-marine dependent tenants to locate in upstairs waterfront properties. That is when Union Wharf finally was able to get its first upstairs tenant. Charlie Poole, whose family runs the wharf, says the rent those businesses pay subsidizes other operations on the wharf that could not bear the high overhead costs of maintaining commercial marine infrastructure: lobstermen pay $8 per foot for berthing space instead of $12. “One of our greatest assets is the businesses that want to lease upstairs,” says Poole. “The waterfront will prosper and flourish if we allow these types of tools. Because it’s very, very expensive to take care of wharfage, to dredge and drive pilings. Last winter, the cost of snow removal alone on Union Wharf was $12,000.”

Since it was built in 1793, Union wharf has been a working pier whose uses evolved with changing times. When unloading groundfish waned after the 1980s, the Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC) came on the scene looking for a location to dock the MAINE RESPONDER, flagship of Portland’s oil spill response capability. In addition to MSRC, today Union Wharf hosts Maine Life Raft, Brown Ship Chandlery, Custom Float Services, Portland Pilots, CBS Lobster, Maine Lobster Direct, Portland Trap, Cozy Harbor Seafood, the Bait Lady, and a several lobstermen. And that’s only at pier level. The four-acre Union Wharf functions as a kind of commercial ecosystem — a microcosm of businesses located to conveniently take advantage of their surroundings. Lobstermen buy bait and unload their catch there, the lobster is shipped or processed, and chowders are made from the leftover lobster. “When you lose a component, you feel a void,” says Lee Kresbach, owner of Maine Lobster Direct, a high-end seafood shipping company located on Union Wharf.

The two elements essential to keeping private piers alive are depth at the pier, and a road to the Interstate. “These piers will die on the vine without those,” says Poole. Buildings on the pier house tenants that pay rent, but without water depth and convenient transportation links, a pier loses its functional use.

The 2,000 cruise ship guests disgorging from the CARNIVAL ECSTASY onto Portland’s waterfront are easy to spot: they’re the ones toting fanny packs and cameras, taking snapshots of the piers and working boats and bustle of a busy waterfront. Chances are they don’t stand dockside musing whether the depth is one foot or 11 feet at mean low water; they’re appreciating the view.

To remain stable, the iceberg they admire relies on the proper right conditions beneath the surface. Maine’s long-standing relationship with the sea has always relied on a well-founded working waterfront. As Roger Duncan put it, “It’s got to pay. If it doesn’t, it isn’t going to live.”

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This is the first in a series of articles on the importance of Maine’s working waterfronts and the many threats they face.