Fisherman Past

I have always had an obsession with boats. I think its part of my DNA. One summer I found myself in Maine as the captain of a beautiful, brightly painted, and fast former racing catamaran converted for day charter trade and tourists.

Even after the conversion from steed to cattle wagon, the cat was still fast. The word got out and soon I was busily making two trips a day from our berth along the working waterfront of Portland. The cat would be filled with tourists wanting to experience the beauty of the many islands sprinkled throughout Casco Bay.

In the evening, after the cat was put safely to bed, I would often walk up the cobblestone streets of the town to have some dinner and wash down the salt spray with a few beers. Some nights I'd run into other friends and the few beers sometimes turned into a few too many. On those nights I’d walk back down to the dock and crawl aboard the cat for a peaceful night’s sleep swaying with the tug of the tide and hearing the wonderful sound of the stretch of dock lines. It sometimes made me think the cat was alive, tugging at her leash, just waiting to run again – perhaps for warmer water and sunnier climes south.

One, "too late night", I slowly wondered back to the boat. Sitting on a bench right in front of the cat was what appeared to be another drunken sailor. When he saw me it gave him the opportunity to launch into a diatribe about what is wrong with the world. Everything that he was spewing about was embodied in the brightly colored cat taking tourists out to his old fishing grounds that had now been fished out and the world was in ruin.

This man’s name was Fawny Dowdy. He had more wrinkles in his face than I had ever seen and that one distinction, I learned later, earned him the cover of National Fisherman Magazine. His hands were like leather and although he must have been well into his 80s he still had the appearance of a very strong man. I listened carefully to his rant and even though I had too much to drink too, I was alert and the chill of a Maine summer evening was reviving me. He carried on for what must have been an hour and when he realized I was the captain of this evil machine, the hatred was now directed to me personally. I continued to listen until he finally had to come up for air. I took that pause to say that I understood what he was talking about.

Portland had a wonderful working waterfront that was being taken over by pleasure boat marinas and condo developers. We were sitting on one of the last two working piers. Fishing grounds had been decimated by new techniques, GPS, factory ships, and the greed of distant ship owners supplying an ever increasing and demanding market with no consideration of the finite limits of a fishery. The population grew along the waterfront and the houses men of the sea like Fawny lived in were no longer affordable.

I think when I said I understood, he had a realization that perhaps he and I were closer than he first thought. He loved boats, knew them all, all the designs, he knew how they all sailed. He loved the big schooners he went off to fish on and he loved little dinghies to play around the harbor in when he was home. He loved rowing a good peapod and he loved the look and feel of a good lobster boat. I actually was cut from the same cloth.

As we discussed our mutual love for boats in general and special appreciation of the right curve of a bow or the sweet shape of tumblehome we developed a friendship. I explained to him that I respected all that he knew and helped to develop to get us to this point where I could now still work in boats. My boat was a crazy colored cat meant to catch tourists but there were more similarities than differences. He explained to me how in days past they would sail big schooners right onto an island beach at high tide. Then at low they would scrape, repair, and paint the bottoms before the tide filled back in, then on the next tide they would let her layover on her other side. Then I would shoot back excitedly with a story of how we hit 18 knots on a broad reach. He was interested and excited too at that number never having gone that fast.

It ended up a beautiful night and by the time the sun was brightening the eastern sky, we had sobered up and were just having fun talking story. It was time for Fawny to go off to wherever he actually lived and I needed a few hours sleep before the first group of tourists came aboard. I invited Fawny to come sailing on the cat with me and while he said I will one day, I knew it wouldn’t happen.

The world of Fawny Dowdy had passed. It was a different day when a wooden schooner could lie on her side at low tide for some maintenance. Today, you would need permission from the waterfront landowner who lived in New York and would then need to get a permit and that would only be after an environmental impact study was done by a certified company specializing in waterfront studies. When that study was reviewed, instructions would then be given as to what tides it were allowed to happen, the most extreme angle the schooner was allowed to lay over, the number of people required to guide her down all wearing lifejackets and hard hats of course. Then a floating boom would surround the area so as to not let any debris escape and a certified hazardous waste crew would need to be standing by in case some fuel from any of the cabin lamps spilled into the water. This would need to be applied for approximately two years before the attempted grounding because of the backlog of paperwork in the different agencies offices. In addition fish counts had to be checked to see if this schooner was in compliance with limits set by an expert in Washington while the Japanese factory ship sits out 12 ¼ miles off the coast basically stealing everything this schooner was meant to work in.

That night with Fawny was over 20 years ago and he no longer knew how to handle the crazy bureaucratic mess we built. Now more than 20 years on and its only become worse. Email, video games, Facebook, Myspace, social networking, cell phones that can search the internet and play movies and more, lets us avoid any personal contact. There is only a desire to get more for me, not to know how our neighbor is doing, no community support for older folks that can’t go for a walk any longer because the city’s sidewalks are so broken up. I think the world has now passed me by too and now I understand where Fawny was coming from even more.

We are no longer free and the greed and corruption in big business and politics have finally run the course and run our liberty into the dirt. The regulations, deregulations, hidden payoffs, taxes, permits are out in the public eye and no one really seems to care. Known thieves hide out in million dollar penthouses in full public view while devastated elders that had their saving stolen have no recourse and struggle with poverty. How can this be?

Well, I guess one good use of my cell phone will be that it automatically alerts me when my permit is finally ready so I can lay my schooner over on a an island beach at high tide.