July 2010 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 23. LOBSTERS: A 1950s Trip in a Lobster Smack
go down and eat and clean up and wash the dishes. The table has a rail around it to help keep dishes on the table in rough weather. The stove has rails around the top, too. Another good smell would be the smoke from the stovepipe. Sometimes some diesel ex- haust would blow into the pilothouse when you were running before the wind, and that would smell good, unless you got too much of it.
Very early in the morning of Day 3 we start the engine, haul the dory aboard, cast off, take the lines in, coil them up, put up the lifelines, and move slowly out into Portland Harbor. When the diesel is warmed up Dad turns her up to 1750 RPM and the smack settles down to her steady 10 knots. We are going easterly down around the Port Clyde area when we see a schooner under full sail ahead of us. It is a beautiful day and there isn’t much wind so she is just ghosting along. It is the old coaster Alice Wentworth. She’s all painted up for her summer’s work and carry- ing a group of passengers on a windjammer cruise. What a pretty sight! Ami and Stevie had gone captain of just such vessels when they carried freight along the coast. They just stand on deck and gaze at that schooner as we approach her. We pass her and Stevie stands on deck down by the engine room and watches her. Ami comes in the pilothouse and gets on his knees on the bench for’ard of the bunk and watches her out of the after window. As we come through the Mussel Ridges and head across Penobscot Bay we see a U. S. Navy destroyer escort running speed trials up and down the bay. The Navy had a speed test course there. That DE is running at what looks to be flank speed and is dragging up a huge wake. When we cross her wake it is like being in very heavy chop. We continue to the east’ard. We should be home this evening. We pass Petit Manan Light (16 miles to go), and head in toward Nash’s Island Light. From Nash’s Island we have eight more miles to go. We come in through Tibbitt’s Narrows and in by the northerly end of Hardwood Island. We now have two miles to go. From Hardwood Island we can see down the Reach, and our home island, Beals. (There was a tall spruce tree that stood alone by the shore at the northerly side of the Shelter Woods, and it was a good mark to steer for toward our mooring as you came down the Reach)
We come down the Reach to the moor- ing, slow down, and round up to pick up the buoy. Stevie, Ami, and I are on the bow. I take the boat hook and hook the buoy line and pull the buoy up so we can get it in over the side and untie the mooring line. Dad throws the engine out of gear. The end of the buoy line is passed in through the hawspipe and we haul it in through. When the top chain comes up we put it on the windlass drum and use the windlass bars to haul up enough chain to have some turns on the drum and a few half hitches across the two heads on top of the windlass. We take in the lifelines and wash down the decks. The cabin has been cleaned, the three bunks are made up, and the oak floor has been washed. The hot cast iron Shipmate stove has been shined with a piece of smoked shoulder rind (making another good smell). The fire in the stove is now dying down and is OK. The brass in the pilothouse has been polished and the pilothouse floor has been washed. I go down in the engine room and check things out. The engine is shut off, the main switch is turned off, and the water intake valve is closed. It is hot in the engine room, but it is quiet now except for a few sounds such as the clicking of the engine cooling off and some water draining out of piping. The engine has been faithful and has done every- thing we asked of her. The dory is put over- board and our bags are put in. We do a final
check and look around to make sure that everything is OK. The pilothouse door, the cabin doors, and the engine room doors are closed. Everything must be left clean and ship shape.
We all get in the dory and push away from the Arthur S. Woodward. As we row ashore we look back at the smack, now se- curely on the mooring. With a little imagina- tion you can sense that the smack feels sat- isfaction for a job well done on the long trip. EPILOGUE
Before there were engine driven well smacks there were sail powered well smacks. Both of my grandfathers went captain of sail smacks. The era of engine powered wet well smacks lasted a relatively short time, essen- tially about the first half of the 1900s into the mid-1950s. It has been nearly a half century since lobsters were transported in a well smack. Whether they were powered by steam, gasoline, or diesel engines, American well smacks ranged from Anticosti Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Quebec), up and down the coast of Nova Scotia, to New Brunswick, to ports, harbors, coves, islands, and gunk holes along the Maine coast, to Boston and North Shore ports in Massachu- setts, to Block Island, RI, and all the way to Montauk, Long Island, NY. Those coura- geous capable lobster smack captains went in all kinds of weather, day in and day out, day and night, year round. Did they run lobster smacks simply as one part of a lobster’s journey from a lobster trap to a person’s dinner plate in some far off place? Absolutely not! And yes, it was a good way to earn a living, but I think it was considerably more than all of that. I believe it was something in the going in a smack, the experiences, the challenges, the responsibilities, the satisfac- tion of work well done, the application of knowledge, the enjoyment of the work, the intangibles sensed by skippers and crews that definitely overshadowed the simple pragmatic aspects of lobster transportation. It was the very being on a lobster smack rather than the basic reason as to why we were running the smack that seemed to take prece- dence.
As trucks took over the transportation of lobsters the lobster smacks phased out. They had fulfilled their role in the lobster industry during their era in maritime history along the coasts of the northeast United States and Canadian Maritimes.
There were numerous American well smacks during the period of their existence. The well smacks Aerolite, Pauline McLoon, Grace M. Cribby, and Arthur S. Woodward have been mentioned. Some other well smacks were Flora Belle, Thelma, Susie O. Carver, Satellite, Mina and Lizzy, Verna G., H. A. Johnson, Adele Mcloon, Trimembral, Louise McLoon, Frances Evelyn, Chester T. Marshall, Lynn, and Silas McLoon. The op- erating procedures and protocols on our smack were not too different from those on other smacks. It was as if there had been an unwritten guidebook for operating lobster smacks. As a boy growing up I was on lobster smacks, I paid attention, and learned how to run a smack. My dad and my grandfathers were good teachers.
On August 19, 1999, Lois, Dad, and I went out to Grand Manan on the ferry from Black’s Harbour, N. B. We had the privilege of standing with Dad on the high cliffs of Southern Head, near that short little light- house. Coming from the direction of Lubec, Maine, was a Canadian sardine boat that was about the size of the Arthur S. Woodward. She was painted white and reminded us of the smack, and we thought and commented about how our smack had looked coming by Southern Head in the 1950s.
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