Ask a fisherman or dealer around Boothbay if he knows Leighton Cressey, and he’s likely to inquire if Leighton might be related to Butch. Everybody in the fishing business there knows Cressey by his nickname: he’s been in the fish and lobster business for over 40 years.
Being raised in Boothbay Harbor by his grandparents gave him the advantage of gaining the values of that older generation. (He lost his mother as an infant and his Coast Guard father was stationed in Boston.) His grandfather worked at the local sardine plant and Butch recalls at age four, in 1950, he and his grandmother walking there and carrying his grandfather’s dinner in a lunch pail.
He remembers the street where he lived being empty on the Fourth of July because 40 or 50 people would gather for a big boat ride, out three miles to Damariscove or Hen Island for a picnic.
Contrary to popular belief that Hollywood changed Boothbay Harbor from a sleepy fishing village into the tourist town it’s become, Butch said the town had always been a resort town. Asked what made the change, he replied, “Kennedy. J. F. Staying on John’s Island on vacation.”
“Russia sent up something in space,” he went on. “This was the summer of 1962.” Then a high school sophomore, Cressey recalled Kennedy giving a press conference the next day. It drew the media from all over.
The summer Butch was 15, he went into the fish business working with a whiting crew, processing and freezing the fish, also called English or silver hake. The next couple of summers he worked in a freezer and unloaded whiting boats at 100,000 pounds a night six nights a week. He has a gift for remembering figures and recalled, “The best summer, we did 4.2 million pounds.” For one two-week stretch as a “lumper,” he unloaded whiting boats from 4 p.m. to midnight, then went lobstering at 5 or 6 a.m. Not unlike many a fisherman before and since, he said, “I took a bath and fell asleep in the tub.”
That summer job helped pay his college tuition. He spent the first year and a half at West Virginia Wesleyan, got married while at college in 1967 and produced two kids, then finished at Gorham State College with a degree in history.
He went back to fishing for a coupe of years of teaching and then bought lobster for seven years. His first marriage ended in 1981. He remarried two years later, producing his third child, Megan, then fished for seven more, and has been in the lobster business since 1986.
In a typical display of Yankee ingenuity, in 1973, during a period of buying lobsters, his gas pumps only went to 49 cents per gallon. He said, “I couldn’t match the gas price. Gas was 60 cents a gallon, so I listed it as 30 cents per half gallon.” Eventually, his boss had to get a new pump.
The first time he tried managing the Boothbay Region Lobsterman’s Co-op it didn’t work. “I got fired,” he said, explaining, “if you’re there as manager, you don’t make immediate changes. I asked too many questions. You’re the boss. You’re not supposed to ask, you just do.” He said, “I was asking ‘What do you do in such and such a situation? How do you do this?’ ”
He sat there in his fish house on the wharf where he buys and sells lobster, explaining the job co-op manager Douglas Carter asked him to take over again a year later. That time he stayed for 16 years, during which Butch sold to several restaurants in town as well as wholesale and retail accounts. “If they could find us, we’d sell to ’em,” he said. The first year, he recalled, “We charged $75 for 6 pounds of whatever size or combination of sizes you want, shipped anywhere in the country.”
The co-op didn’t have a computer until Federal Express gave it one. Cressey recalled the Christmas before he got a computer, sending out 78 boxes with 900 pounds of lobster the hard way. He explained, “Fed Ex doesn’t show up till 2 or 3 p.m. You want em to stay in the water as long as possible.” He remembers the race to get those lobsters packed with hand-written labels and said, “At the end of the first six months, we paid Fed Ex over $46,000 in shipping fees.”
He got hired away by a private dealer in 2002, then changed jobs several times before settling at Little River Lobster where he buys and provides gas and bait for his small fleet of 12 boats. He buys about 125,000 pounds from his fishermen, about a third of which is shippable quality. He buys more than twice that amount from other dealers to make up what owner Michael Dalton sells in New York City to restaurants and small Chinese fish markets. The extra product he buys he pays more for because it’s been picked over, or “graded out,” so that he will be able to ship it to New York safely.
Buying from Canada these days presents no problem for U.S. dealers, he said. “It’s dollar for dollar. [The exchange] probably hurts them more than us.”
He said he isn’t able to ship local lobster to New York until the third week of August because the shells aren’t hard enough until then. He noticed a decrease in shell quality about ten years ago and said, “In the 1970s shell quality was a lot better. They were like rocks. Everybody fished with redfish, which firmed up the lobster. It was $3.50 a bushel in 1973. Now it’s $165-175/barrel.” Herring today goes for $110 a barrel and, he said, “They’re threatening $150 a barrel.”
As for pounded product, in the 1970s, he said, “Poundkeepers put herring to ’em the first four to six weeks, then redfish bones would harden the shells. Now, they buy “pound food” from Canada. It’s slack salted cod, basically the bones, no meat: calcium to firm the shells.” Now that lobstering is a 12 month-a-year, rather than seasonal, business, he said, “Hardshells are almost a thing of the past, they’re like a history lesson.”
With fuel costing $100 a day, a barrel of bait at $110, and a sternman at $125/day, a fisherman spends $335 before he leaves the dock. His first fisherman in that day hauled 212 pots that had been setting for five days and got 73 pounds. And that was normal. The average fisherman landed 1/3 pound per pot. It didn’t pay to leave the dock.
But in a few weeks Butch would go to two prices. He posted his first New Shell price on May 31 in 2006, and ten days earlier – May 21 – in 2007. He expected to go to two prices this year possibly by mid-May, explaining, “It’s a quality thing: if we go to two prices, we don’t have to charge customers so much. You’re trying to get the price down. (They’ve had travel expenses.) We get the junk out and get a slightly better price for good stuff.”
Demand Down
As for demand, it’s been down all over. For Little River Lobster, Dalton, selling in Manhattan, didn’t do half the business he’d done a year ago for the Chinese New Year’s market. Butch called that loss a direct result of the $15- to $17-dollar per pound boat price Canadian dealers charged last April when there were practically no lobsters to be had anywhere. Those record prices led many restaurants to remove lobster from the menu and replace it with Alaska king crab, shrimp and other seafood. They have not missed the hassle of having to deal with live lobster when they can get away with offering frozen crab or shrimp.
“Canada controls [the lobster industry] from December till June,” Butch stated, “then we control it in summer and fall.” But this spring it didn’t matter who controlled what.
“The last ten days, from March 31st through the first ten in April we had horrible weather,” he reported. “No fishing. Nobody cared. There were no calls for lobster. We couldn’t sell them.”
“The lobster business is in trouble,” he went on. “You don’t know who’s going to survive. Dealers in business for 30 years say they haven’t seen it as bad. In general, in the lobster business, it’s slow payment right now because nobody’s doing well. Everybody’s stretched out thin.”
Cressey summarized the current state of the lobster industry. Maine’s landings were down 21 percent in 2007. In the Boothbay area, Cressey’s fishermen’s landings dropped 17 to 18 percent. The whole Maine coast was off from 10 to 25 percent. Yet juvenile lobster settlement figures look encouraging. The animals are there, he said. The juvenile population is healthy and growing. It’s up to the industry to keep prices within the public’s reach.