“We’ve got all day; we’re pretty relaxed,” said captain Julie Brown Eaton as we steam away from her Stonington harbor mooring aboard her 33-year-old 30-foot Repco. An understatement if ever there was one: unlike those fishermen who insist on being on the water by dawn, she left the dock on this perfect June day at a leisurely 7 a.m. She ties her orange barvel, or oilcloth-type apron, over her sleeveless tee shirt and knit pants, pulls on Bluette gloves and with that, she’s ready to haul the 200 traps she baited and set a week before.
Born and raised in Surry, Eaton, 44, started working on the water – under the water, actually – as a scallop diver on Vinalhaven in the late 1980s. She got her first taste of the water as a kind of therapy. Four days after her 23rd birthday in 1987, as she drove to work one morning, a cement truck crashed into her car. Months later, to the surprise of her doctors, she emerged from a coma, though unable to walk, talk, or do much of anything else.
She had graduated the year before from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she majored in Aeronautical Science and minored in Airport Management. She started flying at 13. “I could fly before I could drive a car,” she said.
Although she had no memory of her life before the accident and to this day remembers very little, she recalls her late father sitting with her at the dining room table and helping her form letters with an oversize pencil. She had to learn her alphabet and how to read and write all over again. She said she still sees everything in black and white, as children do.
As she recovered that summer, Bud Kilton, an older fisherman friend, thought taking her along on his boat would be good for her. He couldn’t have been more right. She loved being on the boat and said, “I just couldn’t wait to go with my buddy. My mom and dad would drive me down, and I’d go fishing.” She figures she then “had the mental ability of maybe a five-year-old.”
That winter, Kilton took two divers in his boat. She recalled running around the boat, “like a little kid, drying their faces when they came out of the water and trying to be helpful.” The divers tolerated her, everyone was kind, and she loved fishing. The following summer she became certified as a diver, which led to her scallop diving first out of Sorrento with Kilton and later, after harvesting the Swan’s Island area, she moved on to Vinalhaven where she lived and dived for the next 14 years.
Because fishing is Vinalhaven’s major industry (it didn’t hurt that she’s attractive), she said, “One of the guys gave me a chance to stern for him, and I loved it.”
After spending the following four years working as a sternman for four fishermen, each of whom taught her different aspects of fishing lobster, she bought a 23-foot outboard and fished lobster by herself for another four. Asked how Vinalhaven fishermen allowed her to fish their bottom, she said, “I wasn’t a threat to anybody.”
She moved off Vinalhaven when the house she had been renting was sold. “It was very difficult to find a house,” she said. “I knew it was time to go.”
She first found work at the Stonington dock and the Stonington Lobster Co-op, then got a job sterning for a Stonington fisherman, at which point she met her husband.
She’d known Sidney Eaton as a star lobsterboat racer. “Everybody knows Sid Eaton,” she said, “he’s a legend.” She called him to ask if she could race his boat, and, Sid, by then widowed, agreed. “He was my hero,” she said. “Sid was exactly what I’d like to be, if I had to grow up.” For Eaton, dating this Deer Isle fisherman and lobsterboat racer, even though he was 20 years older, was, to her, “like dating Mario Andretti.” Whether she learned from Sid, or did it on her own, she won two races at the Stonington Lobsterboat Races on July 13. She came in first in the diesel class A workboat, 24-to-31-foot, 235 horsepower with her boat, Cat Sass, at a winning speed of 24.4 mph. She came in second in the lady skippers’ race.
Her hero-worship notwithstanding, right after they married (they held the ceremony on her father’s pleasure boat) she said, “My husband looked at me with the most loving eyes and said, “Honey, would you like to go fishing with me?” She told him, “Not a chance,” and asked him if he’d like to go fishing with her. They each run their own boats. She credits the discipline needed to fish from her earlier experience, joining the Civil Air Patrol at 13 and going on search and rescue missions for downed aircraft and lost hunters. “It taught me a lot about leadership, taught me about flying,” she said. “It’s one of those organizations where the more you put into it the more you get out.” One of her teachers was a woman who, she said, shot a moose at 93 and taught her, ” ‘I can’t means I won’t.’ You’ve got to try.”
Marriage to Sid came with access to his family fishing bottom, and as she said, “Sid has good bottom!” Although Sid was born on Deer Isle, he comes from at least four generations of Stonington fishermen. (That Sid’s family came over on the Mayflower and hers came over about 15 years later leads Eaton to think their families may have known each other back then.)
During her first year of marriage, Eaton had Kelly Trundy stern for her because Sid worried for her safety, but she said, “I worried so about [Kelly’s] safety, I couldn’t think about my own.” She now fishes alone. Sid calls before he goes in to make sure she’s okay
Each day she fishes, she hauls 200 traps, hauling a string of five before resetting them. Fuel costs her about $80/day and herring $95/barrel.
She and Sid have started buying their bait from Bill Damon, who runs a smack boat out of Rockland. She said, “Damon’s brand new this year, but so far, we’ve had real good luck with him. He pays more [for lobster] and charges less [for bait] than dealers. Bait is a good deal.”
She uses a barrel each day. Her four-foot trap with its turquoise and yellow pot buoy carries two bricks and weighs about 50 lbs. It’s much lighter than the larger size weighted with cement runners, but still heavy.
As for the catch: “Right now,” she said, “I’m just happy if I can make my expenses; I know it’s going to get better.” To the wisdom of fishing now rather than waiting, she said, “For me, it gets me in the habit, the routine. It kind of shakes the cobwebs off, builds the muscles.”
By the time she’s hauled 200 traps, hosed and scrubbed off the boat’s accumulated gurry, delivered her lobster and crabs to the smack boat, and received her check, she’s had it. She goes home and strips off her dirty clothes and puts them in the washing machine, showers, then falls into bed. On days when she and Sid haul, they eat out. “I’m too tired to cook,” she said.
Except for losing her father two years ago, Eaton is a sublimely happy woman. She loves her work and she adores her husband. But she also adored her father. “People said, ‘Time will heal you. It’ll get easier,’ she said. “It doesn’t.” She did admit, though, that she’s getting so she can cope with it, thanks in great part to her husband and in part to her love of the ocean and the creatures that live in it.
At one point during the day we were out, she picked up a baby flounder from a trap and cuddled it gently before sending it back to the deep. She did the same with an unusual-looking small red fish with a flat sucker on its bottom. She tossed a herring to an eagle. She said she’d love to have a baby, but that giving up being on the water would be like giving up breathing.
She carries a camera with her each day, photographs what she sees, and has started to exhibit and sell her work. She put her photographs on view at Stonington’s Harbor Café and sold twelve within the first two weeks. The Terrell Lester Gallery in Deer Isle village will exhibit her photographs from August 8-22. As Eaton put it, “I love what I do. I hear people in the city think it’s a big deal to have an office with a window. I have an office with five windows, and the view always changes.”
For more information, go to www.thelestergalleryllc.com.