By Sheila Dassatt
When it comes to communication, I feel very fortunate to be able to express my thoughts in print. There is a difference in my DELA report and this article. I try to be as informative as possible with the facts and meetings that have been going on. We are deeply involved with the issues and do our best to make our voice known in the fishery. My biggest concern there is that as time goes on, the associations are dwindling due to members passing away and a lot are retiring. My thoughts on this subject are that we need the next generations to step up and get involved. We have strength in numbers and voices that speak up for what we all believe in and are trying to maintain for these generations.
With this subject being said, tomorrow is election day and we certainly have a lot to think about. I am not going to make this a political article, but I am going to point out a few things about our fishery’s future.
I am not a spring chicken by any means, so I do remember what it was like in our coastal communities to live and work on the coastal waterfront. I may have touched on this in previous articles, but I think it’s time to point out a few things. Most families that lived in the fishing villages had access to a dock right in their front yard. There wasn’t a big need for a car or truck unless you planned to travel to the mainland. Each neighborhood had a store that carried the groceries that you needed. Of course, my friends and I would collect bottles and cash them in for penny candy at these stores! There was a filling station, variety store that carried dry good needs as well as all occasion cards. We had a pharmacy that had a soda fountain where my grandmother would take me for an ice cream cone (while waiting for a prescription). We had a clothing store that also carried shoes and the best brand of blue jeans. Remember the flannel CPO shirts that all the teens were wearing? They were usually burgundy or dark green and boy was I cool in one of them! We don’t want to forget Friedman’s dry goods store as well. This was where most of the young boys, like my brother, got their first pair of hip boots. Then they also got their fishing pants and barvals there too. The older guys wore barvals, which was an apron that went all the way around you and you stepped into it to put it on. My Dad always wore one, he said it gave him more room to move around. There was also a lot of neighborhood kids in town, all mostly walking or riding a bicycle to town. Then there were the “muscle cars” that cruised up and down main street. Life was good!
You’d think that life was going to be this way forever. So moving forward, I did a little research about this and discovered that Maine’s coastline is 5,000 to 5,300 miles. Now, how much working waterfront is there now? We have 20 miles total, 8 miles publicly owned and 12 miles privately owned. This is definitely a concern for our fishing and marine industry’s existence. More and more people have moved in and have turned Maine into a senior vacationland that only exists in the summer (on the coast). The 12 miles of coastline that are privately owned a susceptible to real estate purchases. This is what has been happening all along our coastal villages.
With further research, the State of Maine has a population of approximately 1,414,874 people living here. They come from all different walks of life and after Covid, a lot of them came here to purchase coastal homes, fix them up and either live in them seasonally to work from their front porch, or rent them out at very high rental fees. Most of them think that the fishery is quaint and they paint a lot of pictures or take a lot of pictures of the boats and fishermen at work. It is no secret that the fishery is fighting for our very existence, people saving whales and seeing us as a threat. As times has gone on, we now have 5,200 lobster licenses in Maine and 3,667 active licenses with 1,200 Federal permitted lobster licenses. We also have several thousand recreational lobster licenses that most of us “tolerate.” If you look at the overall population that is now here, we are a pretty small number. We need to look at this very carefully and do our best to keep our existence moving forward for the future. “When it comes to progress, the fishing industry is not viable enough to warrant protection,” is what I have been hearing.
It is a privacy thing, whether you vote or if you are “Red or Blue” our very existence should not be determined by these parties alone. The more one of these parties outnumber the other, there is a good chance that what we stand for and the support that we need will be overpowered by people standing by their party alone and not what is best for us. I looked up the overall numbers of these parties and we are already outnumbered by folks that want to save whales, have us use ropeless gear and support windmills on the Gulf of Maine. How many want to quiet our fishing vessels and think that we should go out later in the morning so they can sleep in? This sounds extreme, but this is really happening. All I can say is we want to stand by our fishing families and save as much of our coastal properties as we can. The younger folks just starting their families should not have to move off island to work on the water. A lot of us have been in this fishery for many generations and it is our heritage. Please, let’s try to stand up for one another and do the best that we can to hold our own.
