Heavy Seas
“I’m usually up around 3:30 a.m. or so, I try to get out and haul my traps right around legal time, which is twenty minutes before daylight,” Chuck tells me. “You usually get that southerly wind in the afternoon, so if you can get your day in before that point, you avoid getting banged around.”
Chuck Stacy is my uncle and he has been working in the fishing business since he was twelve. Today he turns fifty-eight. His license permits him eight-hundred traps and on a good day in the late fall, he can expect about one to three pounds per trap.
Chuck sits six feet away from me on a couch, hesitant and aware of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, sipping black coffee out of a light brown disposable cup. “I started out on a party boat, or a head boat. We could take out forty people max and there was a lot of drinking, we caught cod and haddock mostly,” he reminisces in a rather impartial way.
“I was there for about thirteen years, worked my way up to captain, and then I got sick of dealing with the public,” Chuck laughs with and a slight, anxiety inducing cough.
Chuck is a listener, not a talker, and he speaks and looks at you with the demeanor of an unsuspectingly skilled poker player. Although he holds opinions, he rarely feels the need to vocalize them. The man looks his age, but it’s noticeable in his face he’s worked hard for a living. Skinny and about average height, he has short brown hair and a beard that starts out orange and then fades to gray about halfway down his face. Chuck Stacy is by all accounts weathered and maybe twenty years out from resembling Hemingway’s old heroic fisherman, Santiago, The Old Man and the Sea.
“I own two boats. One of them is the Joan T, named after my mother, and the other one is the Denise Marie, named after my wife,” he tells me with conviction. Traditionally all ships are feminine, and in Maine, it is custom among lobstermen to name their boats, symbolically, after loved ones, but more specifically, after mothers, wives or daughters. “The Joan T, my original boat, I just lobster out of, and then I built the Denise Marie for strictly tuna fishing.”
For the last thirty some odd years, my uncle works as a lobsterman in his lifelong hometown, York Harbor, a coastal village in Southern Maine. Lobster is a staple of the coast of Maine. The popular crustacean is caught with a ‘lobster pot,’ or a cage-like trap that is submerged underwater and attached with rope to a colorful buoy that floats on the surface, marking its location. Each buoy has a unique make up of colors, distinct to the lobsterman that placed them.
Hundreds of years ago, lobsters were looked at as the ‘cockroaches of the sea,’ used for purposes like lawn fertilizer and prison food. However, by the end of second World War, the seafood became recognized as a delicacy. Out of an estimated 122,000 tons of lobster caught globally per year, 59,000 tons of it is hauled out of the coast of Maine.
“Over the years I’ve caught blue lobsters, yellow ones with blue dots, and a half-red half-green one, but I mean if they’re a keeper, I’d just throw ‘em in with my catch and bring ‘em to the dealer,” Chuck says. After a day out on the water, he’ll stop at his wholesale dealer on the way home, where he weighs out and cashes in his catch, soon to be distributed throughout the seacoast area. “He always takes ‘em. This guy’s been doing it along time, very dependable. His checks are always good too, that’s important.”
The lobster business has proven to be steady for Chuck, and he’s permitted himself his fair share of luxuries: a few rifles for deer hunting and a hot tub on his porch. “Personally, I’ve been at it long enough so I’m pretty established and don’t have a lot of big high payments, like new boats to pay for or new traps, but a lot of guys do, and they’ll feel it,” he says with a hint of compassion.
“Do it long enough, you get caught, on occasion, in some pretty interesting lightning storms and heavy seas thirty or forty miles out, but you just get under the cabin and hope you don’t get hit, it usually passes quick,” Chuck reflects. Up until recently, the occasional storm system or equipment malfunction had been the worst of it for my uncle, but since the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for lobster has essentially vanished.
“You know, I’m not surprised it eventually got to us, and here we are, but I didn’t think it would come to this extreme in shutting down the country, boy, the economics of it aren’t very good,” Chuck says alongside an unsure laugh. “I talked to my lobster dealer yesterday, and he said he don’t even have a market for ‘em. The restaurants aren’t buying.”
Lobster is messy, and because of that most people choose a restaurant setting to enjoy the meal. Since the outbreak, however, most every restaurant has closed its doors, and no one’s buying lobster.
What Chuck is saying rings true not just in the lobster industry, but among the other small-scale productions throughout the States. In a country that adores tycoons and profiteers, it’s no secret that the American economy shrugs off small business. In a normal, pandemic-free timespan, twenty percent of all new small businesses in America close in their first year, seventy percent by their tenth. Since the outbreak, roughly six out of ten small business employees are not going to work, resulting in a sixty-two percent decrease of hours reportedly worked. The situation is forcing Mom and Pop stores to close permanently country-wide, all the while the government funds a 1.5 trillion-dollar bailout to the banking system and Wall Street.
“If I went out and got the lobsters out of the traps, I’d basically have to peddle ‘em myself out the back of my truck on the side of the road or something,” he says.
It’s true, just on my drive over, I passed two makeshift lobster stands, both selling at a cheap, peak season price during what is usually the most expensive time of the year. “I’m hoping it ends sooner than later, but I guess compared to other countries we’re doing quite well with dealing with it, as far as testing and all that stuff,” Chuck says with subtle reassurance.