The Edge of Maine

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Now someone had to give way, and the Susan B. Anthony gave way to Never Again V, whose helmsman gave a manly wave of acknowledgment as he boiled past, and received a return salute, middle finger raised and pumping up and down. This was an old story, but every now and then its reciprocating plot components build sufficient pressure for a new story, such as unfolded before my family and me a few years ago in these very waters. We were aboard Skyfair, a thirty-five-foot Duffy & Duffy powerboat with the lines and handling characteristics of a lobster boat. We had chartered her for two weeks out of Bucks Harbor on Eggemoggin Reach, not far from where she’d been built. We were a week into our cruise and every day seemed better than the day before. We’d been ranging the coast between Cape Rosier and Schoodic, and on this day we had spent the previous night at anchor in Burnt Coat Harbor, on Swans Island, and we were entering Merchant Row from Toothacher Bay. We were in what is arguably the most thrilling body of water in the Gulf of Maine, which is to say in the world. Throttled back to a modest ten knots, we were making what would have seemed from the air like a drunkard’s erratic path through the obstacle course of lobster pot buoys. It was a bright, bright afternoon, the light coming brilliantly off the chop, and it was so good that we were laughing at nothing. I was aboard with Priscilla and Justin and Megan, Justin’s fiancée; we had bought from a fisherman a few hours earlier a piece of tuna that we meant to grill in the cockpit. All that remained to complete our happiness was a snug anchorage, and we had many to choose among. There are dozens of islands in this archipelago—Grog and Enchanted and Hells Half Acre and Devil and Wreck—and the pink and rose and orange granite shores are ornamented by dark evergreens. This is quarry country, the source of the granite that built the Library of Congress, the U.S. Treasury building, the Naval Academy, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the grave of President Kennedy.

  We chose McGlathery, owned by Friends of Nature and inhabited by woolly wild sheep. It was a Sunday night, and after we got settled several other boats came in, all cruising sailboats, one of them a windjammer. McGlathery has a lot of room, and everyone was respecting one another’s territory, and talk and laughter were subdued. A couple of sea kayakers had drawn their boats up on the beach. I don’t want to suggest that being at anchor in that place was like visiting a cathedral, but you see the picture. In the cockpit of Skyfair we had a couple of rum drinks, and about an hour before sunset we marinated the tuna and fired up the grill. We saw smoke curling in the light breeze from the transoms of a few other boats; the sea was flat calm, as it often is at that time of evening, so we had been careless about stowing our cruising paraphernalia: cameras, binoculars, plates and bowls, the rum bottle and ice bucket.

  Many lobster boats have business in these waters, so hearing an engine whine nearby wasn’t odd. This engine, though, was unmuffled, and it reminded me that the week before there had been lobster-boat races out of nearby Stonington. These are taken seriously by boatbuilders and the lobstermen, who devote great ingenuity and much money to setting speed records. Speed in a lobster boat is not a frivolity when you are racing competitors to market, and even sailors from away have respect for the enterprise. Now it seemed we were to see a fast one up close, because it was approaching at thirty-five, maybe forty knots. We expected it to throttle back to an idle, right now! It didn’t throttle back; the boat, red-hulled with gray trim, its name covered with a piece of canvas, came through the anchorage at top speed, the helmsman and sternman neither laughing nor frowning. They looked straight ahead, as though we weren’t there, and did a circle around us all and headed back where they came from.

  Nobody capsized in the surflike wake, but Priscilla was in the galley and a heavy pot of boiling spuds fell to the cabin sole and gave her an awful scare. We lost the tuna off the grill, and cameras fell from the cockpit table, and glasses broke, and dishes. And of course shouts of fury rose from the anchorage, and as the sun fell over McGlathery it occurred to us that we might not be welcome in these waters.

  This shouldn’t have come as a shock. I’m privileged to be an acquaintance of Proctor Wells, a town selectman in Phippsburg and the father, brother, son, grandson, and great-grandson of men and women who have fished out of the sea just about every kind of thing the sea provides. My elder son Nicholas has shipped out with Proctor during the past several summers, as a research scientist investigating lobsters in their larval and pre-juvenile stages, east from Boothbay to the Canadian border. Proctor’s Tenacious, a Westec 49 rigged for ground fish, tuna, shrimp, and lobster, for an investment of half a million dollars, is as well-equipped as a working vessel gets, and Proctor puts it to the service of scientific inquiry because he has no beef with science. His curiosity about how many fish there are—and where they go, and how much fishing they can sustain—trumps his sense of partisanship. He is a man of very strong feelings—listen with him to a Yankees v. Red Sox game on a radio tuned in from Roque Island—but he takes the long view. He worries about plenty of things: Are lobster hauls sustainable? Can cod make a comeback? Do federal courts understand or care that their rulings, sometimes capricious, put families out of work? He worries a lot—as a selectman—about waterfront. The Wells family has held since colonial times a priceless piece of property in Sebasco, near the mouth of the New Meadows River. Proctor’s mother lives in the big house, keeping watch over a large, working boathouse and a dock where she keeps (and uses) her tuna boat, and where Proctor and his brothers keep their boats. The value of such property to a rusticator must be dizzying to contemplate, but tax assessors sure know how to compute it. These taxes have ruined many a fisherman. Among the ones who sold out their shorefront land because they couldn’t afford to keep it, some continue to fish. They live inland, in a comfortable ranch house or maybe a double-wide. To reach their lobster boats they must drive to their dinghies, pulled ashore on some generous soul’s rocky beach. Scrabbling over these seaweedy rocks they earn a name—“kelp rats”—that I suspect they don’t find amusing.

  All of them can tell stories about those from away who have bought once-working waterfront land. Proctor tells of the lady from Chicago who bought harborfront property in Phippsburg, and after her contractor had torn down the house that came with the property and built a grander one, she moved in. The afternoon following her first morning on the water, she phoned her selectman to complain:

  “Is it really necessary for those fishing boats to make so much noise when they pass our house?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Proctor said.

  “Well, do they have to leave so early in the morning?”

  This was not the same lady who, having come to photograph the local lobster fleet, hanging off their moorings and facing southwest on a flooding tide, remarked to Proctor:

  “This harbor is so tidy! Such pride the boaters show, lining up their vessels so they all point in the same direction.”

  Proctor laughs about these events. And when blow boaters get in trouble in his waters, well, he figures, he’s been in trouble too. He tells of hauling a yar ketch aground on a ledge, dismasted, with its rudder busted, through the breakers to safety, but not before the sailboat’s skipper, hooking up the towline, said he’d like to save his anchor, hooked on the leeward side of the rocks. It was a valuable anchor, evidently, had been in the family for dogs’ years.

  “Cut it loose when I give her the gun,” Proctor responded. “Either you’re coming or your stern is.”

  Following our unhappy dinner hour at McGlathery, late the next morning, in dense fog, we motored to Stonington with half a mind to find the harbormaster there and tell him the evil that had been done to us. We picked up a mooring at Billings Marine and saw at once a Hinckley sailboat, the Salty Mistress, hanging from a mooring and rafted alongside a Coast Guard cutter. The Hinckley was in bad shape, with a jagged hole amidships. An investigation seemed to be under way, so we thought to leave our complaints to another occasion and get ashore in our dinghy, buy some ice and groceries and a newspaper, and maybe eat lunch. Stonington is a busy
waterfront, with many wharves and piers and docks, one of them owned by the town. We headed for it in our little ten-foot fiberglass bathtub, laden with the four of us, none petite-sized. Soon we were buzzed and nearly swamped by some teenagers in an outboard skiff, within easy view of the Coast Guard. Approaching shore we saw signs on the piers, variations of KEEP AWAY and NO DINGHY TIEUP!*

  Stonington has long had a reputation as a kind of Wild East frontier town. There’s still an active granite quarry on Crotch Island, mere yards across Deer Island Thorofare from the town. When quarrying was in its heyday years ago, paydays for the workers—many of them Italian—were rowdy days indeed. Collisions between fishermen and rock-cutters were epic, buckets of blood serving as impromptu boxing rings and more than a few whores as spectators.

  A couple of days later we read in the Bangor newspaper that near Stonington three lobstermen had been injured, one of them seriously, when their thirty-five-foot powerboat plowed its bow mid-ship into a fifty-one-foot Hinckley. The owner and helmsman of the lobster boat had been injured, treated, and released from Blue Hill Hospital; his son, as the newspaper reported, “received severe facial injuries that will require plastic surgery.” During the following few days, many people we encountered on Maine’s waterfront had the inside scoop on what had happened in the fog three miles from Stonington. Both vessels had working radar, so they could be presumed to have seen each other before they hit. Depending on the viewpoint of the teller, lobsterman or yachtsman, we heard a story of blithe incompetence or of stubbornness exacerbated by rage. The captain of the lobster boat was said to have a violent temper, and because it was agreed that the collision occurred at higher speed than the conditions licensed, it was said by some that he had rammed and stove in the sailboat. Another version held that the sailboat captain, “from away,” didn’t know how to use his radar or steer his boat, and wandered into the path of the working lobster boat.

  A few years later, while rooting around in some old Bangor Daily News clips from the winter of 2000, I came across another story about the captain of that lobster boat. A year earlier, in January and with high seas running, two miles south of Stonington, that captain had been among a posse who rescued a clammer stranded in freezing weather on a nearby island. The weather was so awful that the rescuers, pelted by freezing spray, couldn’t look straight ahead to search for the unlucky clammer. Yet they kept at it till they found him. He was grateful: “It helps to have locals willing to go out there.”

  And the following account showed up in a Connecticut yacht club’s winter newsletter, relating the outcome of the correspondent’s summer cruise around waters adjacent to Stonington. He had put his sailboat hard aground on a ledge, and the lobster-boat Nigh Duck happened upon him and pulled him off. In the confusion of this success, Nigh Duck took off to resume fishing before the cruiser “could properly thank him for his good deed.” Having returned to Connecticut, the rescued fellow sent a letter of thanks, together with a check made out to cash to “The Captain of the Nigh Duck,” care of the postmaster of Stonington. A letter came back from that captain, Bill Baker: “If it makes you feel better, I pulled three boats off that ledge and a fourth not far from where you grounded. I enjoy ‘rescuing’ people. I didn’t expect to get paid, but it will come in handy this winter.”

  There’s no moral to be drawn here. I’ve got advice, though: If you’re sailing through Merchant Row in the neighborhood of Stonington, keep a weather eye open for ledges and angry faces.

  CRUISING: SEGUIN

  We sat long at table that day, and when we went on deck about three o’clock it was raining. And the wind was beginning to blow pretty hard. We made sail at once in the direction of Boothbay, but in the course of a couple of hours the wind rose to a gale. The sea grew very rough, and almost every minute a wave would break over our vessel and, sweeping along the deck, deluge the cockpit with water…. The air was so thick with mist that we could see nothing but the raging waves around us, and could not tell where we were going, though the sloop was plunging along at a fearful rate, her bows almost continually under water and her mast opening wide cracks at every tug of the sails. There was considerable danger of the mast’s going overboard. In that case we should have been completely at the mercy of the waves, on a coast every inch of which was rock-bound, so that, if our vessel struck, she would be pounded to pieces in ten minutes.

  We drove madly along, the grim old Pilot at the helm, and the anxious Skipper, arrayed in oil-skin to shed the wet, clinging to the mast and keeping a sharp lookout ahead. Suddenly the mist rose and rolled away before a sweeping blast, and then we saw Seguin lighthouse, and knew where we were. It was a superb and terrible sight—these wild reefs with the waves foaming and flashing over them, directly in our course. It was growing late, and the gale was on the increase. The sea was white with foam on the surface, but the great waves, as they came leaping and roaring at us, had a black and angry look not pleasant to behold.

  —ROBERT CARTER, describing a day cruising the Maine coast, 1858

  Gulls nest on the cliffs on the west side and on the northern ridge [of Seguin Island]. From this grassy knoll the poet, the painter, and the philosopher can perhaps take a sane and objective view of what otherwise seems a mad planet.

  —The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast

  Context is everything. Sixteen years after our family misadventure and rescue in the waters surrounding Ragged Island, I had an opportunity to think long and hard about another famous Maine island, Seguin, a corruption of the aboriginal word sutquin, meaning “place where the sea vomits.” At the mouth of the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers, seven miles southwest of the entrance to Boothbay Harbor, Seguin Island has America’s second oldest lighthouse, commissioned in 1795.

  My son Justin and I were approaching Seguin five years ago. This was our first landfall following an overnight passage from Provincetown, again aboard Blackwing and again wrapped in fog. This time we were sailing with Loran, radar, and two GPS units; we had rendezvoused with sea buoys along the way—hitting them right on the nose—and at dawn (such as it was) we were giddy with self-satisfaction. Cocksure that we knew where we were—because we were there when we thought we were there, at Mile Ledge red bell at forty-three degrees, forty-one and five-tenths minutes north by sixty-nine degrees, forty-five and three-tenths minutes west, less than a mile south of Seguin—we paid no more attention to our electronics, relying on our utterly reliable compass. A few minutes later we heard the moan of Seguin’s foghorn and imagined that we could make out, above the rocky shore just over there to port, the stone foundation of the light. We set a course for Boothbay Harbor, following in the wake of the wet and frightened Robert Carter who had sailed these waters back in 1858. Something wasn’t right. The tide was flooding into the rivers, but we reckoned ourselves to be well to the east of Seguin Ledge. We weren’t. First we heard surf breaking and then we saw the ledge dead ahead. Just in time I cranked the wheel and fell off the wind to deep water. After I gave the helm to Justin, I studied NOAA chart 13293. I had to squint to read it, but written in purple on the chart, right between Seguin Island and Seguin Ledge, and just at an outcropping called Ellingwood Rock, was the declaration LOCAL MAGNETIC DISTURBANCE (SEE NOTE). I found the note: “Differences of as much as eight degrees from the normal variation have been observed in an area around Ellingwood Rock for approximately one nautical mile in all directions.” You might ask, what’s eight degrees between sailors and ledges? A lot. Enough to haul you up on Tom Rock or The Sisters or Black Rocks or White Ledge or Jackknife Ledge. Relying on a compass in this case is about as reliable as a hunch. I consulted my electronics again, and left them blinking and buzzing warnings at us until we were moored at Boothbay Harbor.

  In the interest of commercial shipping crossing the Atlantic and sailing the coast to and from Portland, a light was called for to mitigate the Seguin neighborhood’s shipwrecking perils. Local merchants petitioned for this light, and it was ordered by President George Washin
gton at a cost of $6,300. It was even more impressive then than now, rising 186 feet, the highest light in Maine. The first keeper, a Frenchman who served against the lobster-backs in the Revolution, was paid two hundred dollars a year—a good deal more than Abbie Burgess’s dad got much later for keeping Matinicus Light, but a good deal less than Seguin’s keeper felt he deserved. He had a point. In his first year at the light storms broke up his two boats and a canoe; the larger of his boats was valued at three hundred dollars. A short time later, history records, John Polereczky died “penniless and boatless” on Seguin. The damp, mildewed, and maundering wooden structure—beset by fog and storm-driven spray—began to rot and collapse as soon as it was erected. In 1842 it was replaced by a stone structure, now painted white with a black lens-house and attached dwelling. In 1857 Seguin light received Maine’s only First Order Fresnel lens, the most powerful light on the coast. Fresnel’s lenses, designed in 1822 by Augustin Fresnel and manufactured in Paris, are optical masterpieces of ingenuity, graded in order of their size, cost, and complexity from First Order (called “hyper radiants”) to Sixth. Seguin’s lens, weighing three tons and standing twice the height of a keeper, valued at eight million dollars, was saved by the intervention of a local lobsterman from being dismantled by the Coast Guard in the 1980s. Tended and financially supported privately by Friends of Seguin Island in Bath, one of the many salvation and restoration projects along this coast, the light is lit by a couple of thousand-watt bulbs—only ten times the power of a household bulb—and focuses its rays to an intensity of four million candle-power, casting its beam eighteen miles. (In earlier days it managed a similar range using lamps lit by sperm oil, lard, and kerosene.) It does this by a dauntingly complex arrangement of more than a thousand crystal prisms and bull’s-eye lenses mounted in a brass frame. In the infancy of Maine’s lighthouses they all cast a single white beam, creating a dazzling and bewildering string of light along the coast. To distinguish between these lights, colored lenses were tried, radically reducing their range. The solution was the creation of flash patterns, a periodicity peculiar to each light and published in the Coast Guard’s Light List under the rubric “light characteristics.” Each light has its flash-and-eclipse interval, a repetition pattern controlled by a clockwork mechanism—driving huge counterweights and needing to be wound several times per day—comprising shutters mounted on low-friction rails circling the Fresnel lens. Seguin’s characteristic used to be one second lit followed by one second eclipsed. Today, owing to its blue-ribbon place of honor in the lighthouse pantheon, it beams white and steady; its fog signal sounds two brays every twenty seconds.