In a Maine Town, A Lobster Tale Ensnarls a Fisherman



In a Maine Town, A Lobster Tale Ensnarls a Fisherman

Despite a Crustacean Boom, Hamlet Finds No Peace; Mr. Drouin Gets Taunted

By ROBERT TOMSHO

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

August 24, 2005; Page A1

CUTLER, Maine -- Saltwater dripped from the big load of trouble that lobsterman John Drouin hauled up from the deep one recent morning. The tangle of trawl line hanging from his boat had ensnarled an anchor and nine lobster traps.

Powerful tides here sometimes whip lobster gear into such knots. But so do rival lobstermen out to settle scores. "I have no idea what happened, but I'm not going to blame anybody," Mr. Drouin said as his boat rocked on the waves.

Judging from the drift of recent events, it would be impossible to rule out sabotage. Two rival lobstermen hauled Mr. Drouin into court last year. A letter in a local newspaper in June berated him for his new boat and his birthplace. His children get hassled in school about his legal problems.

Behind Mr. Drouin's travails is a nasty fight about who gets to fish for lobster here. The 40-year-old heads a regional council that in January voted to reduce the number of lobstering permits. As a former Cutler harbormaster, he also recently enforced rules limiting the town's boat moorings. Those moorings afford the best access to the lobster beds along a nearby stretch of coastline.

The ensuing ill will underlines a big paradox in Maine: An era of unprecedented lobstering prosperity has brought strife to those who make their living from the sea.

After hovering for decades at around 20 million pounds a year, Maine's lobster catch began to surge in the late 1980s. A record 70 million pounds was tallied in 2004. Scientists say the bounty may stem from the decline of fish that prey on lobster hatchlings. They warn the boom could crater without warning, noting a little-understood shell disease has ravaged lobster fishing in other parts of New England. Even so, that hasn't stopped Mainers from rushing to get in on the bonanza.

Some of the most lucrative lobster fishing has been around Cutler, a foggy hamlet of 650 with a harbor marked by a white, cast-iron lighthouse on a small island at its mouth. Steep rock bluffs and tall evergreens protect the waterfront here where, on clear days, dozens of moored lobster boats shift in unison to the changing tides.

On shore, new pickups are parked outside many primly painted homes, and younger lobstermen talk relentlessly about buying bigger boats.

Cutler was a more hardscrabble place when a 13-year-old Mr. Drouin moved there from Connecticut in 1978. At the time, most lobstermen also had to chop wood, harvest blueberries or dig clams to make ends meet. But lobster fishing seemed romantic to Mr. Drouin, whose father was a shopkeeper.

By age 14, Mr. Drouin was working second-hand traps from a small skiff. Though sometimes taunted for being "from away," as outsiders are called, he slowly worked his way into the community. He became a harbormaster in 1994, head of a regional lobster council in 2003, and rose to senior harbormaster last year.

In the mid-1990s, Maine lobstering changed when the state put limits on lobster traps and hinted at more drastic action if new regional councils of lobstermen didn't adopt tighter restrictions on their own. Fearful of overfishing, the state cautioned that too many Maine communities were becoming overly dependent on lobster as their main product.

In response, many state lobster zones made it tougher for would-be lobstermen to get licenses. That led some Mainers to seek lobster licenses from other zones that hadn't yet imposed restrictions. The Cutler area initially didn't want to curb licenses. But some of its lobstermen began to fear their open waters would be invaded by license applicants from other parts of Maine.

So in January, the council Mr. Drouin chairs voted to restrict new lobster licenses to one for every three existing permits that are retired. "The industry is healthy and we would like to keep it healthy for the fishermen already in it," says Mr. Drouin.

That thinking suggests greed to Bradley Peabody, 46, a local apprentice lobsterman. Now relegated to trying to get onto a 47-person waiting list to be a lobsterman, the former clam-boat captain is trying to organize a legal challenge to the restrictions.

In June, Mr. Peabody wrote a letter to a local newspaper, the Downeast Coastal Press, disparagingly referring to Mr. Drouin as a "man from Connecticut." Noting Mr. Drouin had purchased a bigger boat -- a 46-footer compared with an older 42-footer -- earlier this year, Mr. Peabody alleged Mr. Drouin "would not need to take another man's slice of the pie" if he hadn't bought the new boat.

Mr. Drouin says his new boat is "none of Bradley Peabody's business," adding that the decision to restrict licenses reflects the views of regional lobstermen.

Mr. Drouin is embroiled in another lobster-related battle as well. He was Cutler's senior harbormaster last year when lobstermen Dale and Michael Griffin applied for permits to moor their lobster boats in the town harbor. Although the brothers don't reside in Cutler, their family had lived in the town for generations and still owned sizable acreage in it. They figured that was enough to win them a permit.

But Mr. Drouin and Cutler's two other harbormasters disagreed. Thanks largely to permits granted prior to the 1990s, when Cutler formally began regulating its harbor, nonresidents already held seven of 45 mooring spots. Maine law only requires towns to set aside 10% of their moorings for nonresidents.

The Griffin brothers didn't go away. In May 2004, they filed a lawsuit in a state Superior Court in Machias to challenge the permit denial, arguing the harbormasters had misconstrued the law and should be maximizing moorings rather than limiting them. A month later, aiming to capitalize on a state law encouraging coastal towns to provide moorings to shorefront property owners, regardless of their residency, the Griffins also bought 70 acres of sloped timberland at the far end of Cutler harbor.

Within a few days, the Griffins began building a road to the water to erect their own pier. The drone of tree-cutting machines soon echoed over the town, while explosions sent rock chunks tumbling down. Officials quickly stopped the Griffins for not having proper permits. The harbormasters also refused to approve a mooring since at low tide, the property's shorefront becomes a mudflat where boats don't get access to enough water to stay afloat.

In March, the Griffins revised their suit to allege the town and its officials had conspired to monopolize the harbor. In the pending suit, transferred to U.S. District Court in Bangor earlier this year, the brothers are seeking nearly $1 million in damages from the town and officials including Mr. Drouin. "I got more roots in Cutler than he's ever had," Dale Griffin says.

Mark Franco, an attorney representing Cutler, says its officials have been "absolutely following the letter of the law." Mr. Drouin says he bears no ill will to the Griffins, and that he and the other harbormasters were simply enforcing state and local harbor regulations.

Last spring, Mr. Drouin's 12-year-old daughter, Chocorua, told her father that her classmates were harassing her about the Griffins' lawsuit. Her 10-year-old brother, Tyler, asked his parents whether the family was going to be all right. Mr. Drouin resigned his harbormaster post soon thereafter.

Sailing back toward Cutler harbor recently with a tank full of lobster, Mr. Drouin said he sometimes wonders whether it's time to leave the town. He says he longs for mornings when the only question he faced was whether it was too foggy to go out.

Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@

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