[00:00:00.0]

 

GK: -this on I am just going to hold it like this so you don’t have to worry about it.

 

RA: Ok.

 

GK: Now, can you just say your name.

 

RA: My name. Richard P. Alley. A-L-L-E-Y.

 

GK: And where are we right now, Richard? What’s the history of this little piece of land we are on?

 

RA: We are on pond hill and it belonged to my wife’s great-great-grandfather. I am trying to think of his last name. He was an Emersen. (GK: Emerson?) Bill Emerson. Yup.

 

GK: So he had this land and your wife’s father had it.

 

RA: Yup. He’s related to the Emersons. So that’s how it came to be in the family. They were pretty prominent around here at that time.

 

GK: I haven’t heard that last name much yet. The Emersons.

 

RA: Ralph Waldo Emerson?

 

GK: Yea!

 

RA: They are related.

 

GK: Really! (RA: yea). That’s so much because one of my friends is related to him so he must be related to you. I mean to her on her (RA: to her side) eventually yea.

 

RA: She’s related to the Kelleys on one side of the family and I’m related to the Kelleys on the other side. Her and I aren’t related but just so happens that we are both related in that same family.

 

GK: That seems to happen a lot around here. That you are somehow- people aren’t related but they still have similar family members. (RA:Right) How does that happen? Marriage?

 

RA: Just because my grandfather’s sister married Limeon Wellington Kelley and Limeon Wellington Kelley drowned when he was 27 years and 3 months old. They had one son and that was [Anson] Kelley and he’s responsible for all the Kelleys. Then she married Alfred Abraham [Lenfestey??]. This is Silvia and when she married Alfred Abraham [Lenfestey?], they had another big family. So she’s responsible for all the Lenfesteys as well around here.

 

GK: How many children did she have?

 

RA: She had one with Limeon Wellington, which was Anson, then she had I don’t know how many with Alfred Abraham, quite a few I believe. All the Lenfesteys on the island are from that family. The daughters married into some of the Carvers and the Beals. That’s when everything got mixed up.

 

[0:02:53.6]

 

GK: How do you spell Lenfestey?

 

RA: I’m not sure. We can look it up in the phonebook. (laughter) It’s a long I can tell you that.

 

GK: I haven’t heard that one yet so the big names are Kelley, Alley, Carver, Beals, Lenfesty (RA: mhm). Then there’s (RA: Smith) Smith, Fockingham a bit.

 

RA: Yup. Yup. Sadler.

 

GK: Sadler.

 

RA: Which is disappearing all the time.

 

GK: But that was one of the old names?

 

RA: That was old yup, turn of the century. 1800s into the 1900s they started disappearing like myself. Heirs of that family left.

 

GK: So can you trace your family history all the way back to the first settlers of the Area?

 

[0:03:46.4]

 

RA: (shuffling sound) My sister, who has a degree in history and ancient history, has traced the Alleys back to 960 in England. (GK: wow). Richard Alley was the sheriff of London at sometime in the early 1000’s something like 1060 or something. We have our coat of arms, actually. I got our coat of arms. I found them yesterday I think.

 

GK: Cool.

 

RA: So the coat of arms, you know what that was?

 

GK: It was like a family seal or something right?

 

RA: They used to wear it on their armor. They had that seal on there because when everybody was dressed in armor you didn’t know who they were. They were just big silver chainmail vests or whatever. You didn’t know who they were but with that seal on there you knew what family they were from.

 

GK: Right.

 

RA: So that’s why they had the coat of arms.

 

GK: So how did the Alley family end up in this area?

 

RA: [Eugh] Alley landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1653 and then they migrated down the coast is how they wound up here. John Alley was the first settler on Great Wharf’s Island and he is responsible for all the Alleys. There was John, John Jr., which is buried next to John Maril Louise of Head Harbor Island. John Maril was my grandfather’s father. We go all the way back to the first Alleys plus we go back to the first Beals. [Man] Warren Beal was my fourth great grandfather.

 

[0:05:36.1]

 

GK: Man Warren?

 

RA: Yup and he was the first settler on Beal’s side over there.

 

GK: Is head harbor off of Beals Island?

 

RA: Yup.

 

GK: It’s a different island?

 

RA: Yup. they used to call it Sealand back in the day because- actually I have a movie of it somewhere.

 

GK: Oh you do?

 

RA: Yup, well it’s one they have made up. It used to be all the schools and that’s where the town was back in those days. There wasn’t much in Jonesport. They settled out there to protect themselves from the Indians. So then eventually they migrated onto the mainland. The Sawyers had a big business down there at Sawyer’s cove. Of course, there was a bunch of sardine factories here at the time, during those 100 years, 120 years probably.

 

GK: In the 1700-1800s?

 

RA: They were pretty much done in the 60’s, the 1960’s. Charlie Stevens was the last one to run and that closed before ‘70. (GK:Ok.) before, 1970 I am pretty sure that was closed.

 

[0:06:49.2]

 

GK: When you were a kid, what were your parents doing for work?

 

RA: Well, my mother. She worked in the sardine factory. Daddy, he worked on outboard motors and did mechanic work for people and lobster fished. Basically the same thing I did when I was coming up through the ranks. I did the same thing. I worked on peoples’ boats and built houses and wharfs and lobster fished and dug worms and clams and all that kind of thing. Just basic survival, that’s what we call it.

 

GK: You do what there is. What’s available to you.

 

RA: Right, exactly. We were hunter gatherers in a pretty much different way than is thought of three hundred years ago. We still had to hunt for work and gather what we could to get by. So I guess you could call us hunter gatherers. That’s how I have always looked at it. It was a great way to grow up, don’t get me wrong. We always had what we needed and a little more besides.

 

GK: You were living out in west Jonesport in that house that you showed me?

 

RA: Mhm.

 

GK: Was that your childhood home? (RA: Yup) Were you born out there?

 

RA: No, I was born just outside London.

 

GK: Oh right!

 

RA: [Crookem Common, on Limble Lost farm] My parents rented a little cottage from a farmer, Dennis Thoroughgood. He had a mink farm and that’s where we stayed and I remember it growing up. That was quite a farm really. They had a butcher shop there and raised mink. Of course mink coats were a big deal back then. There was a lot of money in mink and fox I guess. It was fox other there and mink over there. There was a fox farm in Mason’s Bay, which is no longer there, but I know where it was. (GK: Wow).They raised foxes over there. Of course, they trapped mink out on these outer islands. Off Jonesport and Beals, they trapped mink on all of those. So its pretty interesting.

 

[0:09:11.5]

 

GK: Are there still mink here?

 

RA: Oh yea lots of them. We see a lot of them when we are walking around the islands. We do that for entertainment in the summer when the weather’s nice.

 

GK: So you were born in London, (RA: mmhm)  outside of London. (RA: Yup). When did your family move back?

 

RA: We moved here in September of ‘61 to the family home is West Jonesport, which was Alfred Saddler’s house originally. It has been there since 1880. I think that’s when my great grandfather got the land, was in 1880. The house was built out of a bait shed (laugh). They didn’t waste nothing back then. When I was rebuilding my buddies house, which was Andrew Peabody’s, I found a board in the wall with barnacles on it. They had scrapped the barnacles off and used the board in the side of the house. (laugh) That’s how frivolous they were. Whatever they got, they used. They used whatever was available to them.  (GK: yea) It is pretty amazing some of the things they did and how they survived. And the knowledge they had, they had a lot of knowledge. They were very smart when it came to weather and how to get by and how to make use of things. Something that the kids these days would walk right by, wouldn’t give it a second glance. Probably throw it in the dump.

 

[0:10:42.8]

 

GK: Yea, did you feel like- did your grandfather- was he alive when you moved here?

 

RA: Oh yea.

 

GK: Did he teach you about some of that stuff or?

 

RA: All of it. (GK: yea). Yea I didn’t get along good with my father. My grandfather and I were like two brothers. Of course he was old by the time I ever knew him. He died 1970 at the age of 92. (GK: wow). But he took a wealth of knowledge with him when he left. No question about that.

 

GK: What were some of the things he taught you about?

 

RA: Oh, how to plot a course, how to fish, how to knit a head, how to knit pockets, how to build a trap, how to build a house, how to build a building. I mean you name it. We did everything. We did it all. Wasn’t nothing we didn’t do. And I still do it today. I still use it today. A lot of things that he taught me, which I have passed on to my children to a degree. My son he’s pretty handy too. He can do about anything. He can repair a garbage truck or his pick-up truck or his car or build a piece on his house. Doesn’t matter, if he wants to do it he’s going to do it. Its just the way we was brought us. You can’t run down the road here and get a job because there’s no jobs to get. So you get by with whatever you can get by with.

 

GK: Right so you have to do- I mean especially in those days you had to- it wasn’t like you had the money to get everything- if you wanted to build your house you’d do it on your own time, (RA: right) you save money that way.

 

[0:12:29.8]

 

RA: Right, I built this house over a period of years. My other house sat right in front of it, which was also just another camp I built on to. Then I built this new one behind it and when this one was done I tore the other one down and buried it out back. (laughter) I tried to give it away and that’s why I say kids today don’t care about stuff like that. They’d rather live in a metal trailer, I guess, not me personally. The other one was finished just like this one is. It was all pine and hardwood. Nobody was interested so I tore it down and hauled it out back. (GK:Wow). I had Dennis do it. He was the one who did all the groundwork for me.

 

GK: Who’s Dennis?

 

RA: Dennis Morsey. Morsey [inaudible] works is his business. (GK:Ok) yup.

 

GK: So when you were a kid, did you go fishing? How old were you when you started to go lobstering ?

 

RA: Well when we first got here, I wanted to go lobstering and Daddy wouldn’t let me. He said, “ I don’t trust you or your grandfather” he says “Or to put the two of you together” (laugh). So I went with my grandfather for a couple years and then I started by myself in 1965. I built my own traps, I don’t know, I think I had 25, maybe 30 traps that I had either built or repaired. Then my cousin, who decided he’d save some out for me so when I got all done, got my traps set, he says, “You got all your traps in the water?” I said, “Yup”. He said, “Come on up here” he says “I got something for you” and I went up and he gave me 16 more. So that’s what I had when I first started was about 46 all together the first year. I hauled them by hand out of an 8-foot skiff with a six horse mercury outboard motor on it. Then that fall I bought an old seine skiff from Herbert’s Smith He bought the ware from my wife’s uncle the herring ware. So he didn’t need the seine skiff anymore and I bought that and a bigger motor the following year. So I had more traps and bigger boat and just kept upgrading from that over the years.

 

[0:14:54.9]

 

GK: Was it really different then where you were setting your traps compared to now? Were you really close to shore or what did you do?

 

RA: Well, the first year my father didn’t want me to go on the southern side of the reach because the weather can get bad in a matter of minutes but my uncle told me, he said, “Come with me and I’ll show you a good place to fish” so he took me over to duck ledges and a couple days later Daddy came in the house and said, “I see some of your traps went adrift, you better be damn careful when you go hauling.” Because I lugged over across the reach, I wasn’t supposed to but I did.  (GK: Oh wow). He told me not to but I did it anyway. So they never knew where I was from the time I was ten years old until now they never knew where I was. I was fishing somewhere or I was in a boat. They knew that but they didn’t know what I was doing or where I was. That was just part of life here. They’d see you at supper time generally. Go home, get cleaned up, get something to eat and go to bed and get ready for the next day, the next day of adventures. And that’s what it was, it was just a big adventure.

 

[0:16:12.5]

 

GK: So you were doing at that time, so what in 1965 how old were you at that time?

 

RA: I was nine.

 

GK: Nine!

 

RA: Yup

 

GK: So wow, so had that little boat then you were nine.

 

RA: I actually had the boat before that but he wouldn’t let me fish.

 

GK: So then, when did you start doing other work like clamming and digging for worms?

 

RA: He let me do that the minute we got here. Yea he said, when we moved here, “You are in a free country now, you can do anything you want.” he says “You can have anything you want” he says “Just one catch.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “You got to work for it.” (laugh) So that’s when I learned how to work. I’d dig roller clams and drag them over into skiff and dig four-five hundred worms and my cousin bought worms so I used to dig for him in my early years. Because I dug for Hagan’s bait for years after that. That was a good job. I liked worming. I liked clamming to as far as that goes. I still do that. It was all, you had to be a beast. You worked in all kinds of weather. There was no, “I ain’t going today” because it was raining, you just put on a raincoat and you went. Especially, if you had some project you were doing and you wanted the money. If you didn’t go to work you didn’t get no money. Obviously. Nobody was handing anything out at that time.

 

[0:17:40.5]

 

GK: Right, but it was also different in the sense that- I think it’s hard for some people to related to because their job is to have a boss and a supervisor and you go to an office and expected to be there (RA: 9-5) a certain amount of time. And this is like, you don’t have to go.

 

RA: No (Laughter) It was just a work ethic. That’s when when you go down south and they love to hire people from Maine because they can’t sit still and they are going to work. That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. They are going to work. You hire them, they are going to work. They know it and they love them. When I went down South, I wasn’t there anytime and they gave me a raise. They called me in the office and they said, “How long been on the water?” I said, “All my life”. He said, “I’d rather have you in the engine room than on the deck.” He said, “I’d much rather have you in the engine room” so I took the test and passed it and they put me in the engine room. Then a couple years later I was in the wheelhouse running the boats.

 

[0:18:51.0]

 

GK: Where was- How did you end up down south?

 

RA: Oh just, adventure. Got tired of doing what I was doing. You know I figured I wanted to see some more of the world so I wound up down Morgan City, Louisiana. I jumped on a plane and got off in New Orleans. They picked me up in a carrier took us to Morgan City and introduced us to everyone and went to work.

 

GK: Where were you working? What was the boat?

 

RA: We were in the mineral oil business. They were drilling wells and tending wells and taking crews back and forth. Hauling [bay-right] and cement and all that stuff out to the rigs. Food boxes, I mean we did everything. I mean we serviced the rigs, is what we were doing.

 

[0:19:40.4]

 

GK: And there were people- I don’t really know much about oil- there were people- Did people live out on the rigs?

 

RA: Yup, they lived out on the rigs. They had big- I got pictures here somewhere- they had big housing – I don’t really know what you’d call it- I guess you’d call it an apartment, big housing system (GK: unit?) where people stayed on the rig thirty forty fifty people.

 

GK: And the rig is just out in the middle of the water?

 

RA: Yup, out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Yup.

 

GK: I didn’t realize that (mumble).

 

RA: You’d sail out there in the day and you wouldn’t see a thing and then at night, when the sun went down it was like you was in a city. Lights everywhere, because the lights you could see for twenty five- thirty miles. I worked on two of the biggest sea rigs, Western pace-setter II and Western Pace-setter III. They were semi-submersible. They were huge. Those rigs were huge. Then I also worked with a [Pen-rod 55], which was the biggest jack-up. The legs on that thing were 333 feet long. It was a big rig. We have 2,750,000 pounds and we used to tow that thing around to different sites. It was a production rig. But that was interesting for a while, about five- sixe years then I had enough of that and came back in. I got married and wound up working on trucks which is what I was trained for.

 

[0:21:15.5]

 

GK: Like engines? You were a mechanic?

 

RA: Tractor-trailer trucks. Still have all my stuff down cellar. A toolbox and everything, but I worked on those for years.

 

GK: Who’s trucks did you work on?

 

RA: When I was down in New Hampshire I worked on everybody’s. [Sorringson], Midway Excavators, all kinds of stuff out of Canada, [Elky]. All kinds of different companies. Pepsi-cola we serviced 268 Pepsi-cola trucks alone. That was a big outfit, Pepsi.

 

GK: So you went from Louisiana to New Hampshire?

 

RA: Back here then to New Hampshire.

 

GK: Ok (RA: Yup). Went up here, got married…

 

RA: Yup. Wound up back down New Hampshire and then wound up back here eventually, where I am at now. I’ve been here- we came back here in the summer of ‘89. I’ve been here ever since, but I never really left the place because every fall I’d come up and go fishing with my father because it was easy quick money. I’d come up here and make a little extra money. I’d take my vacation around the lobster season. So I never really got out of the lobster business. I was involved in it every year one way or another. So that made it nice, a little extra money dont hurt (laugh).

 

GK: When did that industry start changing? I mean at least in terms of gear and what you were.. Do you remember that switch?

 

[0:22:54.1]

 

RA: The lobster industry? Oh yea. Aquamesh was some of the first wire we built traps out of. All the tools we were using, we are still using today were in the furniture business, all the hard rings and the clamps and the fancy tools. That was all furniture stuff and of course they started vinyl on the wire and we started using their clips and tools to build the traps with and a lot of us still build them today. Now, we don’t knit heads so much anymore and we don’t actually we don’t knit pockets anymore either. We buy all that stuff I am of the age where I saw it switch from wood to wire and I saw it switch from people doing everything by hand to buying shrimp mesh heads and plastic pockets. I mean that’s just the way we do it. Then we got pockets now, flea bags. They are flat and made out of cloth they seem to work well. The crabs chew them up. They’ll chew them up overnight.

 

[0:24:09.7]

 

GK: When did you first start using those?

 

RA: A couple of years ago.

 

GK: I haven’t seen those.

 

RA: Yea, a couple of years ago they started using them. I got them on every trap I’ve got in the water right now.

 

GK: Because it’s an alternative to plastic or is there-?

 

RA: Well, the bait stays on in them longer and you don’t have to put as much in there. The way you’d have a regular plastic nine-inch pocket, you’d probably put six or seven herring to a pocket and theses you only have to put four. It’ll stay on for a week or two in most cases so this time of year when the weather’s bad you only get out maybe two or three times a week. You know there’s bait on them so they are working for you. That’s the main thing to keep them working and then I guess we try to haul- we used to haul everyday when I was just- years ago but now its more like every four or five nights some cases six or seven because bait is more expensive so you give them a longer soak time. Hope for a better harvest. It’s changing every year. Technology is changing. These young kids have figured out how to fish offshore in the big tidal area. They use a 75-pound anchor on the both ends and fish fifteen to twenty traps between the two anchors with two end lines. It’s all changing, bigger boats, more people. I don’t know about more money because its expensive to build a $750,000 boat and then have another quarter-million dollars tied up in trap gear probably or more.

 

[0:25:52.6]

 

GK: Yea, do you worry about that- the debt people are getting themselves into?

 

RA: I don’t know that I worry about it. I wonder where its all going to end. I think.

 

GK: What do you mean?

 

RA: How big is the boat’s going to get and how many people are going to wind up- they don’t have sterns in them anymore. We always had sterns in them. There have already been one or two drowned that way. Hauled overboard through and open stern and I don’t know. I kind of wonder if they are better off or where it’s all going to end.

 

GK: Yea. When did that start happening? I was on a boat that had the stern cut out, whatever you want to say. It wasn’t there. (RA: Right) Honestly, I was pretty nervous. I hadn’t seen that. I hadn’t been on a boat like that before.

 

RA: When they started fishing trawls they took the sterns out of them so they could throw twenty traps down on the floor and run them out on the open stern. Then some of them put tailgates up and then they decided it was too much of an aggravation opening and closing that so the just did away with them all together, which I don’t agree with. If I have a boat its going to have stern in it. I am old school I guess. I don’t really want to go out there and go head-to-head with those guys either. They are pretty ruthless. They run trawls over each other. We used to be-I we’d saddle alongside another fishermen we wouldn’t try to tangle him up you know or run traps over top of him just for the sake of getting ours in the water. There seems to be a lot of that going on now. Competition is everything to them.

 

[0:27:36.1]

 

GK: And would you say that’s more, for like the big boats that are going off shore or that’s also happening inshore too?

 

RA: No, that’s the big boats going off shore. Inshore you can still only fish pairs and triples and singles and stuff like that. So, (dog barking) they tried some of them – bought two boats and they got one fishing inside with the kids and the other boat they are fishing out over the three mile line which is also something new. They wouldn’t have allowed that years ago. They would have limbed them up. They wouldn’t have allowed them in here. It was territorial. There was lines out there in the ocean and the fishermen knew where they were. You’d go one side or the other you weren’t supposed to be on. You wouldn’t be there long. You’d come up missing. I don’t see so much of that anymore, at least not around here.

 

[0:28:32.7]

 

GK: How did you get your territory? Was it kind of your grandfather?

 

RA: Grandfather, father, uncles, cousins. I am the only one left. I’m the dinosaur. I’m the only one left in the family. There’s no other fisherman in our immediate family. There used to be a dozen of us. Now there’s just me.

 

GK: So your kids don’t do it? Don’t fish?

 

RA: Nope. Nope. Nope. My daughter does accounting and auditing for [Barry Dun?]. My son works for [Mark Wright] Waste Disposal. Works on trucks. The next few generations, I don’t know what they are going to do. (laugh) It will be interesting. I guess. Yup. A lot of people moved away. They couldn’t cope with the way things were going so they moved away, got jobs and have never looked back.

 

GK: What do you mean “the way things were going”? The way that fishing was going?

 

RA: Yup. yup. The way fishing was going. It drove a lot of them away. They started out fishing and then they just left. Some of them went into the service. Some of them went and got jobs and there’s not as many fishermen now as there used to be (GK: hm). Used to be that everyone was a fisherman but now it’s not the case anymore.

 

[0:30:08.7]

 

GK: Did it used to be too that people were fishing- Was there more of a variety of the species they were catching?

 

RA: Oh yea. Yea there was stop seiners, and there was weir fishermen and there was ground fisherman. There was gillnetting, longlining, halibut. They caught halibut on longlines and haddock and hake and that’s all pretty much gone now. All the herring fishing is pretty well gone. Like I said, it’s changing year to year. It’s changing. Of course, when there’s more rules put on you a lot of the things that you could have done twenty years ago you can’t do now. It’s against the law. They won’t let you do it. So, you can’t catch herring anymore and the factories are all shut down. There’s still big clams but there even rules and regulations on that. Like after this big rain, they will probably shut it down for red tide. Too much freshwater too many contaminants washing into the sea. They’ll shut it down and they’ll test it and if tests alright they will open it up again in a week or two. We never used to deal with that.

 

GK: Do you think you didn’t deal with it because people didn’t know or it wasn’t an issue?

 

RA: It wasn’t an issue back then. Nobody even thought about it I don’t think. Nope. You just went to work and did your job and nobody really seemed to mind. But once they tackled the wood industry in the state of Maine then into the fisheries and now they are into everything and it has changed the whole way everything works. It’s more politics than it is fishing or woodcutting. There’s a lot of politics involved now.

 

[0:31:59.4]

 

GK: Did you notice-I mean because you were alive for all those changes in regulations- were there any that happened that you were like “oh, I did notice that there weren’t as many of that kind of fish’ or did it feel like it was out of nowhere?

 

RA: It just felt like that they were taking away our freedoms because there is still fish. (GK: yea) I think there will always be fish. I don’t think you can clean the ocean up entirely. As far as lobstering goes, we are farmers. We aren’t fishermen anymore. We get vents in our traps that will let a [] right through. A lobster that we can keep can go right out through. Just like we opened the door for him. So we are just farmers now, we get only get so many shared into the measure. We catch oversized lobsters all the time. I mean those are lobsters that got out through our traps and now they are oversized and we can’t sell them anyway because they didn’t trap there in all those molts in between. You only get a window of opportunity of an inch and three-quarters now anyway where you can keep a lobster. It used to be three and three-sixteenths. Now, it’s three and a quarter and the upper end is five inches. So that’s an inch and three quarters that you can keep it provided it’s not v-notched. Now if its v-notched or egged you can’t keep it anyway so it’s free forever, which is – I mean it’s changing. Everything is changing.

 

GK: Do you think that- It doesn’t seem like anybody is having trouble catching lobsters? (RA: No) In terms of how many they are getting so.

 

[0:33:44.2]

 

RA: No, everybody is doing what they want to do basically I guess.

 

GK: Cleaning up.

 

RA: Except, you can’t- If you are a high school student and you have worked with the rules and regulations and come up through the student licensing system you can still get in the fishery. If you moved in here from New Jersey or somewhere, you can’t get in the fishing business. You’d have to go with somebody for two years then you’d have to get on a waiting list and you may never get a license. It’s not something you can walk in anymore and get a license and go fishing.

 

Its just not- you can’t do it. Its just not possible. It’s almost impossible actually.

 

GK: Do you think people should be able to?

 

RA: That’s the way it always was. (GK: yea.) In most cases, families that are fishing in this area, they have always been fishing families. Its heritage passed down from generation to generation. It’s different. This rules and regulations politics mostly is changing it all. They are worried about whales that we don’t even catch. I mean they are worried about a whale getting wrapped up but I have never have seen one. I went through all the whale disentanglement training and all that stuff and we never ever got called or was asked to go and untangle a whale because I don’t believe there was ever any tangled up. All the whales that we find around here around the shore that’s dead, which aren’t that many. In my lifetime, there’s probably been half a dozen. They are ship struck. They get run over by a big ship and of course they start rolling and when they do they get tangled up in gear. That’s my theory. If they are healthy and they are swimming in the wild, they just don’t swim up and get caught in a rope. That ain’t how it works. It’s natural of them to avoid things like that.

 

[0:35:54.5]

 

GK: Do you think there are other types of fishing that are more dangerous than lobstering for whales? I heard a story, when I was doing this in Lubec, about whales being tangled in gillnets. (RA:Yup). Which seems to me like that would probably be more problematic because you could catch a whale that way.

 

RA: But you aren’t dragging a gillnet, its anchored either end and they’d swim into it or we’ve had them swim into them when we were gillnetting and what they do is they break the led line and the float line and swim right through them. So they- you have to go back to the other end and get the other flyer and haul the other half of the net and tie back together because they can swim right through. (GK: And break it) And break it right in two. That wouldn’t even phase them. I don’t know who told you that story but I have tied (GK: Well it was a person-) at least a dozen gillnets back together they just swam  right straight through.

 

GK: It was someone who does whale disentanglement. She was diving. Her husband is a scallop trawler. She wasn’t being political about it at all. (RA: yea) She just said that they found-they used to disentangle minkes from gillnets a lot because the mesh was so fine. (RA: hm)

 

RA: That was in Eastport?

 

GK: That was in Lubec. Yea, but they also, up there, between Gran Manan and Lubec is like a major whale highway. They see like sixteen in a day so that’s like different.

 

RA: They have beluga up there as well.

 

GK: They have everything. Yea. It’s amazing.

 

RA: They got Minkes and Beluga and all kinds of whales up that way. When the poggies were in here, I think it was around the late ‘70’s, and they were catching the poggies. They were purse seining. Those minkes would swim through our gear all the time. I never saw one caught. I’d see 15-20 a day and never saw one caught. None of them was ever caught in the gear.

 

[0:38:10.0]

 

GK: Yea.

 

RA: What we do get once in a while is we’ll get a turtle. They are very easy to get out. They almost want to help you get out. I have them seen them wrapped up in a warp. (GK: Wow, turtle) and I can’t figure out why really. Most of the time it’s just like gone over a flipper or something. It’s very easy to get them out. I have never seen one dead or that I couldn’t get out easily. I have only caught probably 4 or 5 of those in my lifetime. I helped one other fisherman get on out one day. I have seen them caught but not drastically just barely hung. (GK: Yea) It’s like “Op I am hung on something” and they just kind of hang around until someone gets them out of the mess. (Laugh) I guess.

 

[0:39:22.4]

 

GK: What is the difference- this is kind of a silly question.You just said there’s poggies. Are poggies and herring and sardines all different fish?

 

RA: Yup

 

GK: Or are they all-

 

RA: Yup

 

GK: Ok, they are not different ages of the same fish?

 

RA: Nope. They are different. Herring and sardine are what most people refer to them as and then poggies are more like a sawbelly which is a river herring basically.(GK: Oh ok). Poggies are more like that. Yup, they are different.

 

GK: And now, so with this herring quota stuff that’s happening, are you worried about what bait you are going to use? Have you been using herring?

 

RA: Oh yea. That’s all I use. I don’t like putting anything in the water that is foreign to the environment like pig hide. I’d never use pig hide or any of the stuff they have built in the laboratories. They made hockey pucks and all different kinds of things for us to try but I’d never try any of that stuff. I use basically herring and flounder and redfish. Those are the three things I have used in my lifetime and I prefer herring over all the rest of it. If I could get flounder I would use that but, I’d jump to get flounder. (GK: mm). At the volume you’d need to bait your traps, you wouldn’t get it. Once in a while we will get some flounder [] out of Massachusetts or something. That’s about the height of it. I never actually had whole flounder just one time to bait my traps on and they came out of Canada for some reason. (GK: mm) One of the local baitman got a truck load of them and he tried selling them to my father for the lobster pound but he didn’t want them so I bought the whole truck load. I think it was thirty barrels but that was the best bait I ever had. They like flounder it’s good bait.

 

GK: Yea. Are you worried about the next season (RA: Oh yea) with what you are going to do with bait?

 

RA: Yea. Bait doubled it went from ten dollars a bucket to twenty basically. Now, I mean you go out at catch. The other day I went out and caught 62 pounds of lobsters and I got this slip right here (Rustling-coins/moving of chairs) because I don’t want to lie to you. (Laugh/walking). Lets see. (walking sounds).

 

[0:41:49.1]

 

RA: This is what’s happening right here. I went out and caught 62- pounds of lobsters which I only hauled 110 traps so that really wasn’t that bad. I call them good spring hauls. I had $170.50 worth of lobsters, my expense was $97.98 and I took home $72.50. So my expense is more than my take-home on a day like that. Thousand dollar days now you got to have five or six hundred pounds to make a thousand dollar day. I don’t even know if I can find one (shuffling through papers). There’s one. Thirteen. (rustling papers). There’s one there, 466 pounds. I only took home $778. I mean, its now bait is a big issue.

 

GK: Yea. The price.

 

RA: The price of the bait is a big issue because you have too much in expense. My expenses now average somewhere between, well this one here is 162 just picking a random one. Pick another random one. That one there is $250 expense. I mean that’s unheard of. I’m alone in the boat. (laugh). (GK: Wow.) There’s another random one. There’s $110.73. Throw one in here see what we come up with. There’s $156.18. I mean I am alone. I don’t have a sternman. I am fishing alone. (GK: Yea) So that’s a big expense so basically what that means is I have to make $150 before I get to keep anything (laugh). (GK: Yea) I mean how many people are going to do that. Only a fisherman (laugh), I am not going to come to work for you and spend $150 before I make a dime, you know what I mean. It’s just unheard of.

 

[0:44:16.8]

 

GK: And that’s a big change that you have seen in the past couple of years in terms of expense? Or the past decade maybe? How long do you think that’s been?

 

RA: I used to haul bait for lobster pound out of Charlie Steven’s factory in the ‘60’s in a [skow] with a 9.5 horse Johnsoner on it. I’d sail down the reach and load it and sail back to the wharf with it and unload it and put it in barrels for the pound. Fifty cents a can for sardines. That was the head and the tail. The cuttings is what we called them back then. Now, they don’t do that anymore so I buy whole herring but we are paying $20 a bucket for it. I mean the last day I was out there, I used four cans which is $80 in just bait. So my expense that day was more than my take-home. So it’s crazy really.

 

GK: And if you want to keep using herring it’s going to go way up, right?

 

RA: With the quota cut back, right. The bait people, the people that are catching it, they are going to get the same money out of half the bait. So what’s that going to do to you? About $40 a 5-gallon bucket. We’ll say $80-100 a bushel. That’s where I can see it going. (GK: mmhm). Then we get alewives in the spring and there’s a big demand for alewives because all the fisherman want it for bait. You go to the brook and you practically got to fight over it. Actually in some cases, they have fought over it.

 

[0:46:03.8]

 

GK: Really?

 

RA: Oh yea, people buying the brook out and paying the guy. The guy that’s at the brook has got to buy a license so some of the bigger fishermen are buying the license for him and then they get all the dibs on the alewives. That means they have got other guys coming in like myself. You aren’t going to get any alewives because that guys going to get them all.

 

GK: No, I have been there one time in Woolwich, Maine where there’s a river and they do- The guy there has a little smoke house which is cool but then the fishermen come and buy the alewives and they are lining up before he’s even at the door. (laugh) There was 10 guys just waiting. Alewives fish better? In the spring?

 

RA: Well, it’s cheaper bait.

 

GK: Oh it is?

 

RA: It’s cheaper than herring which is, then again, I don’t think it is going to be. Because if they find out they are getting forty dollars for a can of herring, they are going to charge forty dollars for a can of alewives. (laugh) I mean, and they are still going to fight over them. No, I mean personally I don’t like alewives. I have used them a few times in my life and I can’t say I have ever had a good haul on them. (GK: Wow). I much prefer herring over any bait that I use. Other than flounder, I’d take flounder any day but that’s just something we don’t get.

 

[0:47:25.6]

 

GK: It’s almost like-I don’t know what industry does this- but it’s almost like the price should be capped on this at some point. Like somehow, there’s some sort of I don’t know subsidizing the bait (RA: Right). So that you don’t have to pay all that money (RA: Yea). I don’t know how that would work. (RA: Well-) I am an idealist all the time.

 

RA: What it’s going to wind up being is that there will be no more spring fishing and you are going to wind up spending half of your money in expense so if you get 1000 bucks you might get to take 500 home. That’s where it’s headed.

 

GK: And do you think that is going to push people…

 

RA: That will put people out of business.

 

GK: Put people out of business and do you think it will push them into different – into the offshore kind of more – it feels more industrial or something. It’s like huge huge lines.

 

[0:48:37.4]

 

RA: Right. Right. They don’t fish like we do. I’ll fish around a ledge or I’ll fish around the hard bottom or fish around the edge of the hard bottom. We place our traps. They just go out there and run a line, after line, after line. They keep them baited and hope they fill up full of lobsters. That’s basically what trawl fishing is. You can’t place trawls like you can single gear or pairs or triples or even five for that matter. You can go around a piece of hard bottom with a five. Pushing one at a time, watching your meter and pushing them as you go. But you aren’t going to do that with a trawl. You just run a straight line and it’s a whole different way of fishing all together. All together different. They want bigger boats. They got bigger crews and they use way more bait and (laugh) I don’t know what it is going to come to. I am amazed. I sit back and I listen and I watch what’s going on. I am amazed at what’s going on. Who’d ever heard-tell of a 50 foot boat and lobster businesses. That was unheard of 25 years ago. Well, offshore lobster boats area 3, area 2 and 3, they used to run them out there. Then those guys they stopped fishing out there because they were getting the gear cut off and foreign draggers were coming in and towing their stuff up overnight. So they pretty much gave up. The last one I knew off that fished out there like that, he’s fishing inshore now. (GK:Wow). He couldn’t keep up with it. And these guys down here have been cleaned out too. They have been cleaned out out there. Purse seiners came in and cleaned them out.

 

[0:50:36.2]

 

GK: Oh really?

 

RA: Oh yea. Cut off hundreds of traps overnight. Of course they got a lot of them back overtime but yea. Purse Seiners. They was out there again a little while ago and they cleaned up another bunch of gear.

 

[0:50:47.4]

 

GK: Are they from the area?

 

RA: No, they come from down south. Southern Maine to up here. Of course the closure was down there and this was open so they came up here and set through the gear.

 

GK: So they don’t have zones in federal waters the same way?

 

RA: Well, they have places they open and places they close.

 

[0:51:12.8]

 

GK: But its not like for lobstering? Like you can’t-

 

RA: It’s not like the zone set up for lobstering (GK: yea). We never had zones anyways. When I started lobstering that was something that we never had. We never had zone A, B, C, D, E, F whatever. That was something they dreamed up in the last, oh, 12 or 14 years. I didn’t like what was going on so we started the Downeast Lobstermen’s Association. Timmy Peabody and I got in a fight on the radio, or argument not really fight. Got in an argument. I said, “Let’s do something about it” so we started the Downeast Lobstermen’s Association. The MLA had already been started here probably forty years before that, but it kind of drifted away from here to Southern Maine and now its working its way back because one of the boys out of Cutler is the president of it now. For years, it was Dave Cousins and Pat White and people like that and like I said it was down southern Maine. So we started our own. “By the fisherman for the fishermen” was our motto. We got Bob Smith and Junior [Badlin] and oh Junior Kates had a charter that he got for scalloping and he let us have it to set up the Downeast Lobstermen’s Association. Its still going. There’s still two or three hundred members so it’s still a working organization, working for the fishermen. Then they started playing around with lobster prices so we wound up starting this union which we have now. Are you familiar? (Gk: mhm) Yup. We started the Maine Lobstermen’s Union. I’ve been involved in a couple things like that in my life. Getting things like that organized and started and I’ve been on the governor’s advisory council several times. I’ve been going to all these meetings for over thirty years. Every year you keep losing a few freedoms and that’s not what our forefathers fought for doing World War I and II. I just- I don’t agree with everything that’s going on. But it is what it is and you can’t change it unfortunately.

 

GK: What were some of the things you were- what were some of the goals of the Downeast Lobstermen’s Association?

 

[0:53:41.4]

 

RA: Well, the feds come in and said they were going to cut us back to 472 traps. At the time, I was fishing over 11 hundred. I didn’t want to be cut back. Pat White says you are going to fish 600 and I said, “No I am not, I am not going to fish 600. Not if I can do anything about it.” I said, “I am going to fish what I want to fish.” Well, he was right to a degree they put on a trap limit and cut us back to 800 and they were trying for 600, but we fought it and beat it. So we wound up- I can still fish 800 today because I fought for it and a lot of other fishermen fought for it. If I’d’ve listened to Pat White, “Alright, do whatever you want to do” I’d have been fishing 472 now. Instead of the 800. By fighting and getting this organization started and getting the fishermen together and giving them the knowledge of what’s going on in the political arena we were able to maintain 500. I mean 800, excuse me.

 

GK: And it’s almost like it’s a compromise, right?

 

RA: It’s a compromise. It’s politics. You got to learn how to play politics.

 

GK: Yea.

 

RA: Now, I didn’t know. You can have a representative on your side and you go to a workshop arlight. You go in this workshop and this representative is on your side. He’s sitting right here beside you. You can look right over and see him, but if he don’t like what you’re doing, he don’t have to tell you that in the beginning and he can work with you for a year until you get to this workshop and then when they get ready to vote. Guess what he does. He gets up and goes to the bathroom, so there’s your vote gone. You’ve spent all this time with this joker thinking he’s one your side and about three minutes before he votes he walks out of the room. That vote’s gone. So all the work you did was for not. I mean he just gets up and walks out.

 

[0:55:38.5]

 

(Overtalking) GK: Does that happen-

 

RA: Things like that- Oh I see-

 

GK: Do things like that happen?

 

RA: Sure!

 

GK: That’s frustrating.

 

RA: Oh, You’ll put in a bill. You put in a good legitimate bill that’s going to help your out or help you fellow fishermen generations to come. They’ll put what they call ‘a rider’ on it. Well, when the bill comes out it doesn’t look anything like the bill you put in. It’s got a bunch of other junk on it that you didn’t want and you didn’t know what was on there, but they stuck it on there as ‘a rider’. Well, then you can’t table it because if you table it they can bring it back the following year. So you have to kill it. So you have to learn how to be a politician as well as a fisherman as well as mechanic as well as a- I mean (laugh). In future generations, there’s probably not going to be many of them that want to do what we have done. A lot of what I have done in my lifetime, they are not going to want to deal with all that. I don’t think. So..

 

GK: And then, the union, when did you get involved with the union?

 

RA: The minute it started.

 

GK: That wasn’t too long ago. That was about-

 

RA: About five years ago now.

 

GK: Yea yea.

 

RA: So-

 

GK: I remember that.

 

RA: A lot the people that are not union members, they were [juttering and sputting] and spitting because we were union. We’d’ve started the union. That was to boo. You are not supposed to start a union. And they didn’t want anything to do with it so they were bitching and growling and about everything time something happened it was on account of the union. Which is false, but anyway. They got what they called a dividend. They started paying a dividend on account of the union because they knew the union was going to pay one. So some of the lobster buyers gone out and was going to pay the union so if there wasn’t any boats out on a day, they’d say, “Well, I am going to pay a twenty cent dividend today.” That’s to pull fishermen from this wharf overthere to sell to him. See what I am saying, or from that wharf over to sell to him so they could get that twenty cent dividend that day. Well, they’d do that if there was one or two boats out. If there was fifty boats out it was five cent dividend, but it was still more than they ever got and the union members at that time still hadn’t gotten anything. These guys were paying a dividend to get those lobsters away from the union and the union still never got a dividend until last year. We got one last year. In 2017, we got five-cents a pound on every pound we sold.

 

[0:58:06.8]

 

GK: Is that the bonus at the end of the year [inaudible]?

 

RA: Nope. The bonus is totally different.

 

GK: What’s the dividend?

 

RA: The dividend was the nickel or the ten cents or whatever the other dealers were paying to get the lobsters away from the union wharf. And they did. It worked. They got some fishermen away from the union wharfs.

 

GK: Where’s the union wharf here?

 

RA: There’s several of them.

 

GK: Oh okay.

 

RA: The co-op is union and oh Smith’s Lobster is union an Huntely’s Wharf, Hopkins Point Lobster is union.

 

GK:Ok

 

RA: So they all buy union lobsters. Then on the other side of the reach we’ve got Snappy, which is Albert Carver. He’s on Imperial point. I am not sure the name of the business over there but anyways he’s not union. He pays a dividend along with some of the others. Bert, and Sidney Look he paid the dividend as well. This year he didn’t pay it. He didn’t pay it this year. He maintained the fishermen by service and better bait measure and stuff like that is how we hang on to him this year. So, I don’t know. It’s a game and you got to be listening all the time. If you snooze you lose. You know how that goes, so. Yea it’s a game.

 

GK: And ultimately it falls to the fishermen of where they want to sell and when.

 

RA: That’s right.

 

GK: You know so its like-

 

RA: Nobody is tied to any spot.

 

GK: Yea.

 

RA: I mean I am a union member. I can sell to anybody I want. I do in the summertime. I sell some of my lobsters to friends and family and people that’s bought them from our family for years. (GK: mhm). That come from Connecticut, New York, wherever. They look forward to getting fresh caught lobsters. It’s a big deal for them to come up and pick up their lobsters. They get a big chuckle out of that. They like it (laugh). Of course, I like talking to them so it works out for everybody concerned I guess. Then the rest of them I sell to the union and I have since it started.

 

[1:00:25.4]

 

RA: I, actually, only got a dividend one year. The union members, myself included, only got five cents one year. We got a dollar forty from the co-op and then we got a five cent dividend on top of that. So we got $1.45 last year for every pound we caught. (GK: hm). Which you know, that was good. It was a big help.

 

GK: Yea. That makes a big difference.

 

RA: Oh yea! Definitely makes a big difference. No question about it. There’s a lot of things that come out of it. Repairs to your wharf and new traps and rope and repairs to your boat. I mean there’s all that money. That’s not all 100% take home is what I am trying to say.

 

GK: Yea

 

RA: A lot of that money goes back into the business. So.

 

GK: Does having all these private wharfs- because that’s not something that is that common in other fishing towns anymore. (RA: No) Like stonington doesn’t really have those. Do you think that’s – I have never really thought about it but – that’s probably an added expense for a lot of people?

 

RA: Yep, like myself.

 

GK: Yup. But would you want it to change or do you think it’s good to have those working?

 

RA: Well, I’m tickled to death that I’ve got my own private wharf. I can come and go and do as I please. (GK: Yea, it’s great.) Put my traps right on it when I am taking up and when I am setting off, I set off it and I repair my gear on it. I mean it’s just-when I first started my father when he was fishing he had the wharf so I brought my traps up here and piled up where that trailer is up above the house here. So I’d bring 800 traps out of the water and up here and then I’d bring 800 traps from up here back down to the water and set them and that was a lot of work. I am glad now that I have got the wharf. I can tell you I only have to go from the boat to the wharf and from the wharf to the boat. Makes a big difference. It cuts out a lot of work.

 

[1:02:28.3]

 

GK: Yea. In Stonington my friends pile 20 traps on the back of their truck to drive down. I mean it looks ridiculous but they are driving from the middle of the island down to the pier (RA: Right) to load up.

 

RA: They are hauling the traps inland and putting them in their driveways.

 

GK: Yup. Yup.

 

RA: I love to ride down there anyway. I get on the bike and I just got no destination. I get down there, fill her up, and away I go.

 

GK: (laugh) That’s fun.

 

RA: I just ride along, look the countryside over and see how people operate. You are right a lot of those traps are a long way from the water.

 

GK: Yup.

 

RA: Well this is seven and a half, eight miles from the water here. (GK: Right) That’s one way. So if I did two, I went down and came back that’s 16 miles just for one load. (laugh). That’s a lot of work, a lot of money, a lot of expense.

 

GK: Will you start taking traps in at this time of year? Do you-

 

RA: I have taken-(GK:You have?) I have taken, I can tell you because I keep a good record, (shuffling). I have taken 223 right now.

 

GK: Oh Wow. Yea I’d like to get some photographs of people (RA: Yup) loading them out because we have stuff from the spring of everybody setting and now its the different time of year.

 

[1:03:48.7]

 

RA: And now everybody is coming the other way (laugh GK: yup). Well not everybody but a lot of them are coming the other way.

 

GK: Yea, not the offshore guys.

 

RA: Nope, they are going to hang on for another month or two or maybe all winter some of them. Some of them will bait all winter. They probably won’t haul more than once or twice a month but they will bait. They will make sure they are baited heavy. They are the guys who are using the pig hide and the rockfish and the oh what else herring, redfish, [wracks/rags/rats]. You name it. Whatever they can get their hands on. They are putting everything in there they can put in there to try and keep bait on them. They got some monster pockets, of course, and they got big traps as well. (GK: yea). They got monster traps as well. I mean where I fish are 42-43 and half inch traps. They are fishing 54’s to five footers. There’s a limit there is a limit on how big a trap you can fish. I think it is 24’ by 16.5’ by five foot, I think, is the biggest.

 

GK: Wow, that’s a huge trap.

 

RA: That’s a big trap. My son and I got right in one. He got in one end and I got in the other way (laughter). Laid right down. That’s a big trap.

 

GK: That is huge.

 

RA: But, I fish 42 and 43.5 inch. I used to fish some five footers when they first come out. Like everybody else, I wanted a better mousetrap. It just didn’t work for me.

 

GK: It seems back breaking too.

 

RA: They are heavy.

 

GK: Yea.

 

RA: They are very very heavy. Yea the old wooden traps, I took one out of the water with 35 fathom of rope in it. My father was jarring so I put it on the scales and I weighed it and it weighed 125 pounds. The wooden trap with 35 fathom rope was 125 pounds. (GK: Ooh) Of course, these wire one’s aren’t quite as bad as that.

 

GK: That’s crazy.

 

RA: Now, I got wire traps with four bricks and wire traps with four air-goes. The air-goes are a lot lighter than the bricks. It’s new technology taking over all the time. Everytime it does and every time something catches on, like the air-goes when they first came out. They were 2.75. That’s what we were replacing the bricks with. Well now they are like 3.25. (GK: Really?) (Laugh) They have gone up because everybody is using the air-goes (laugh).

 

[1:06:16.2]

 

GK: Are those those strips on the-

 

RA: That’s those little metal blocks (GK: Yea, yea, alright sorry- there is goes) and they are supposedly heavier underwater than the brick. It’s interesting. It’s really interesting. Even from my point of view and I have been at it, like I said, 53 years, 54 years this year, it is still interesting to see what they come up with. In some cases, it’s even amazing I guess when you look at lobster tank that will hold a whole 5,000 pounds. I mean that’s almost unheard of. (laugh) For me.

 

GK: Yea, and then these guys will start-some people will start scallop dragging and urchins- do people go urchining around here?

 

RA: Not so much anymore. Urchin business is pretty well done. All the divers my age are out of it. They are not diving anymore. There’s probably 50 dive masters in Jonesport and Beals that are not diving anymore.

 

GK: Yup

 

[1:07:34.2]

 

RA: I am one of those. I actually dove for scallops and I really enjoyed that job but family got after me. They wanted me to get done. They says, “you are getting too old” and probably I was but I enjoyed it. It was fun. I didn’t even actually consider it a job. It was more fun than it was a job. They didn’t want me doing it anymore because I got (GK: Dangerous) arthritis. And it is dangerous (GK: yea). I always told whoever was tending me, if something happens to me, “Don’t worry about it. It ain’t your fault. It’s all up to me.”  When I go over the boat, it’s all up to me (GK: yup). I’m either good at it or I am not. Yea, its dangerous. I have gotten in several messes. I have come up. I always had a complete set of gauges. I was watching my gauges. I was down to like 650 and I thought, “Well maybe I’ll go up”. I was on the edge of a piece of hard bottom and I thought, “I’ll go up a few feet higher and then I will get a little longer out of my air and probably pick up another half a bucket of scallops or something” I started to go up and I couldn’t go up. So I says, “Well I’ll go left or right” and I couldn’t go left or right either. I come to find out a spreader had got caught on the second stage of my tank behind my hood and I didn’t know what it was.

 

[1:08:55.7]

 

GK What’s a spreader?

 

RA: Between traps, that piece of float rope between the traps. Well it got caught on that second stage and I couldn’t see anything. The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t go left or right. So I said, “ Well I am going to try and roll over” so flipped over and when I was flipping over with my peripheral vision I could see that it was a spreader running down. So I took my arms up like that, and got my arms over the rope and pulled the traps together and then was able to get it off over that second stage. Now, if it hadn’t come off over that second stage, then I would have had to abandon my BC and my tank and all of that stuff and my weight belt and hung onto my scallop cage and go up that so I wouldn’t exceed the-because when you ascend you aren’t supposed to come up faster than your smallest bubbles. So I used to lay on my back and kind of ease the air out my BC and watch my smallest bubbles leave me until I finally broke water. But! As it turned out I finally got it off over there.

 

[1:10:03.7]

 

GK: Wow

 

RA: But another day I was diving (laugh), don’t ask me how it happened I have never had it happen again, but I was down there and my weight belt came off. Well my weight belt was 62 pounds and somehow it hit the buckle and I felt it sliding. I didn’t dare to move because I knew if I moved I’d shoot right out of the water. So I looked around to see where my scallop cage was and I got the rope shortened up and got it in my hand. Of course, I had to move. So I moved. When I did the belt rolled off and that left me hanging onto my scallop cage, again, so I wouldn’t go flying out of the water. So I laid there and slid up. He said, “what are you doing up here?!”, the guy that was tending me. I said, “I lost my weight belt” (laugh) course I never had another one. I said, “throw another cage right now and well mark it” and he said, “well how are you going to get back down there?” I said, “I am going to get the anchor out of the bow of the boat” I said, “I am going to jump overboard with the anchor in my hands to go down.” Which I did, and as luck would have it I was only six or eight feet. I could see my weight belt. I was six or eight feet away from it. So I held the anchor and walked over, hooked my legs around the anchor so I wouldn’t go flying up. Got my weight belt back on and went back to work. You can get in trouble down there.

 

[1:11:31.9]

 

GK: Wow, so if you go flying up, you’ll get (RA: Right), your head will get messed up? Your brain?

 

RA: No no your lungs would explode.

 

GK: Ohh

 

RA: You are down there on compressed air. It’s boyle’s law. Every 33 feet is another atmosphere. (GK: Wow). So if you are down 66 feet you are down 2 atmospheres. You’ve got all that pressure pushing in on you and you are breathing in that compressed air. When you get to the top all of that compressed air has to be out of your lungs because I mean you’d have great lung expansion if you shot out of the water. That would just explode your lungs. (GK: Scary!). Blow the alveoli off your lungs. (GK: Scary). Yes, it is. (GK: Yea). The rate of ascent is 60 feet, 60 seconds. That’s military tables, which everybody uses. I used to come up slower than that I used to lay back and watch my bubble because, like I said, I enjoyed it. I was looking at everything and couldn’t wait to get around the next rock or set of ledges. It was just awesome. I loved diving. I found all kinds of stuff and have plenty of stories to tell from that experience. (laugh). I was diving another day and it was –

 

[RECORDING PAUSED]

 

[00:00:00]

 

GK: Got your hand out. [inaudible]

 

RA: Yea, I used to stick my hand out so I wouldn’t run into bottom when the visibility was bad so anyway there was an old aluminum boat where we’re diving this day and it was buried in the sand and we used to dive around it well in the bow of that boat there was lobster. Big oversized lobster and I’d used to aggravate him every time I was around there. I’d pick him up and I’d take him and go with him. I went down and I found the boat and I got the lobster, had him under my arm and I remember swimming along with my cage in the other hand and I took him over and I dropped him off. There was a big bunch of rocks and there was a big crack down in the middle of them and I dropped him down in there and then I swam off. I was picking urchins up and stuff once in a while I’d get a scallop or something. I did this until I got my bag full. Then I said, “Well, I’ll go up.” so I tried to go up and I couldn’t go up. I tried to go left and right and I couldn’t go left and right then I realized I was in a cave. You see these caves when you’re diving when the water is clear, but you don’t go near them. You stay away from them. At least I don’t go in and explore. I’ll stick my head in and look around sometimes but I never ever went deep. I was in that thing about twenty feet. I kept letting the air out of my BC and pushing myself backwards and kept trying to go up and go up and couldn’t go up. I kept letting the air out push myself backwards and I couldn’t go up  so this went on I figured I’d gone about twenty feet is about how far I’d gone at that point I tried it sure enough up I went. So I went up and Gus said, “How many you got?” I said, “I got bag full” I said, “I got a few scallops and bag full of eggs.” He said, “Where’s the lobster?” I said, “ I took him over and dropped him off.” Because he I was aggravating that lobster.

 

[0:01:59.0]

 

RA: And (laugh) a couple days later, we went back down there, well it wasn’t a couple days it was probably a week and the water was pristine. I mean you could see fifteen feet which is unusually in the wintertime around here. The first thing I done was I went and checked on the lobster and he was back in the bow of that boat. That was his home and I’d pick him up every time I was there. That time I didn’t bother him because I wanted to find that cave. So basically I knew what direction I was going in because I had a compass on my gauges. Like I said I had a full set of gauges and I knew how to use them. So I followed them along and found that cave. that cave was huge (laugh). I don’t know how deep it really was because I finally stopped when I found out I couldn’t go up but I could have gone ahead.

 

GK: Wow.

 

RA: That cave! I found the opening to it and it was huge. I never ever went in it again.

 

[0:02:56.8]

 

GK: Why does it get to the point where you can’t go up?

 

RA: Because it was narrowing up as I went into it.

 

GK:Oh. Got it.

 

RA: So I couldn’t go up. I could go ahead but I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t go left and right because it was closing in on me.

 

GK: Oh my god.

 

RA: So I had to push myself back the way I went and hope nothing got caught. You know, the rope on the bag didn’t get caught or some of my hoses or something didn’t get caught. I just kept easing myself back, letting a little air out and easing myself back.

 

GK: I wonder what lives in there.

 

RA: Well, as I imagine, everything. (GK: yea). I really don’t know because like I said that time that I was in there it was so murky that you couldn’t tell you couldn’t see anything in there. Albert had a tank house over on the island and he had salt water pick-ups out on the reach. Well after a big storm the rockweed would fill the cage and plug the intake to the tankhouse. He couldn’t get anybody to go down because nobody dared to dive in that kind of – I mean it’s just like going like this and diving [probably makes a hand motion]. So he said, “What are you doing today?” I said, “Nothing, why?” and he said, “How about going out and clearing out my intake?” I said, “Sure”. Because I built the cage, I knew what it looked like. So I went down, like I said, it’s just like being blindfolded going down 30 feet then swimming off 120 feet and clearing off these intakes out. You gotta do it all by memory because you can’t see anything and you can’t get nervous if something bumps you or you hear something. You can’t deal with it. You just gotta do your job. Get back out and you’re done. (laugh) so to speak.

 

[0:04:39.6]

 

RA: I’ve done that a few times too. (GK: Oh my gosh). Just my memory and feel. Diving is a pretty interesting job around the coast of Maine. I can tell you I used to go check moorings and do all kinds of that stuff. Roger does it now.

 

GK: Roger who?

 

RA: Roger (Dane?). I don’t know if you have ever met him or not he’s at Ralph Smith. It used to be Three Rivers Company. You go down to the marina in Jonesport and there’s a side road that goes over to Sid’s, goes to old house point (GK: yea). They are right down on the very end. He goes down and cuts rope out of peoples wheels and stuff now.

 

[0:05:22.4]

 

GK: Oh wow.

 

RA: And he’ll dive by a mooring or a sunken boat or something. All the stuff we used to do. He’s still doing it because he’s a fairly young fellow. I haven’t dove for maybe six seven years now. But that was an interesting job because I dove in the Gulf of Mexico as well. there we had a decompression chamber right on the deck of the boat and we had a guy doing all the dive tables and we were diving on Nitrox, which was mixed gas. You could stay down longer. We were going down and cleaning all the rig legs and stuff and all those lichens and stuff and scrape that stuff clean. They didn’t want all that stuff growing on those rigs so we’d go down. We’d keep all that stuff clean. We might go down and repair something that they wanted repaired. It was interesting. It was fun.

 

GK: Wow.

 

RA: But, it was a lot warmer down there man! (laughter) and you could see a lot better the water was clearer than around here.

 

GK: the Atlantic ocean is so mineral-rich. (RA: Uh) I mean up here this Gulf of Maine is like..

 

RA: The other day when I went out because it was after that big storm. The lobster’s eyes actually glow red. A lot of people don’t realize that but if you take them out of the trap and their eyes are just glowing. Red, that’s so they can see and some of that stuff I guess. (GK: Wow). It must enhance their vision or something. Boy the other day they were doing some glowing. They were still glowing Tuesday, not as bad but boy, Monday they were really bright. Like that light on that machine there. That’s how bright they are. (GK: Wow). They are bright, wicked bright. Its quite a thing. I remember the first time I saw it I thought Boy now that’s something. That was pretty interesting.

 

GK: That’s amazing.

 

RA: Yep.

 

GK: Well, Richard, thanks for telling me all these stories. We’ve been going for over an hour so might want to take a break.

 

(Laughter)

 

RA: Don’t bother me.

 

GK: That’s great. I don’t know how. I am going to turn this off.

 

[0:07:35.5]