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June 2012 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 7. Eddie Drew & The Lowells By Ruth Lowell


Based on interviews of Ed Drew by Jamie & Ruth Lowell


Ed Drew is mostly retired now, in his late 70s, but he spent many decades as a traveling boat repairman in the Greater Portland area, as detailed in an article from MCN’s April issue. During that time he made many friends and colleagues in the marine industry. Some of his close friends included the Lowell/Frost family, who, like many nautical families, had been building boats since the 1800s and earlier. He has many stories about them. [Will Frost is considered a primary origi- nator of the Maine lobster boat. Frost’s fore- man, Riley Lowell, married Frost’s daughter, and they had five boatbuilding sons (Royal, Danny, Donny, Malcolm, and Carroll).] Drew first met up with Will Frost and the Lowells when he was in his teens. He lived on Long Island, and a fisherman on the island named Milton Doughty was having a boat built. “When I first knew [Royal Lowell], he was working with his grandfather then, old Will Frost,” said Drew. “They were building boats over on the corner of Washington Avenue and Allen Avenue, where that Amato’s place is now. There was a barn there and that’s where old Will Frost was building boats back in the late 40s.”


Drew particularly remembers Merganser and her many sister ships, including Leonard W, Sharon Gay, Aloutte, Raven, Nancy Maryanne, and No Name. Wooden boat builders would often create a design, usually by whittling a half-model, and then build many boats from the same pattern. Each boat would be a little different as the builder tweaked the design, or the owner requested different features. MERGANSER


MERGANSER was built for Bob Dyer of Chebeague Island, to be used for herring fishing. The Dyers had a main boat, a raised deck 40-footer, said Drew. MERGANSER was to scout around with – and scout she did! For a long time she was the fastest lobster boat in Casco Bay.


“They had one of the old Chrysler Crown engines in there,” said Drew. “Of course it didn’t have a house on it or anything like that, all’s it had was a spray hood, so it was light. It was built out of cedar. She was the fastest boat in the bay, at the time. Probably do 18 or 20 or something.”


Even another Will Frost boat which had two engines wasn’t able to beat her, much to the disgust of the boat’s owner. In attaining this speed, Bob Dyer went through some engines. “With Bob, she was idling, or she was in the corner,” said Drew. “About every couple of years they’d go up to John Toft at Peacock Canning Company and say ‘We need a new engine.’ They’d slap a brand new Chrysler Crown in ‘er.” Drew tells a story about Bob Dyer: “I always laughed about ole Bob there, he al- ways wore rubber boots, all the time. The old ones that you roll down, the hip ones. I was walking over Commercial Street there one day, coming over towards Casco Bay Lines, and here comes this guy with a blue suit on, and a white shirt and a red tie, everything like that, and rubber boots. Course he was quite a ways away, and I says, ‘That’s gotta be Bob Dyer.’ Sure as shit... ‘Jeez,’ I says, ‘you’re all dressed up, Bob. What’s going on?’ “‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I gotta go to a funeral.’ “He was just off the island, the boots looked like he’d been down there clamming in ‘em.”


For the herring fishing, they would start


Royal, Carroll and Malcolm Lowell, Eddie Drew and Danny Lowell standing on the dock at Even Keel in Yarmouth.


after the moon went down. “You didn’t go looking until probably after midnight. The herring, when they’re there, what you do is you take and splash an oar or something like that into the water. If there’s herring there, it’s just a big glow in the water. If it was real white solid, why you knew there was a lot of fish there.


“Then you throw the seine out, make a circle right around them. Or if they were up in a cove, you stop it up, run the net across the mouth of the cove. The next day you come down, tow everything around, make a pocket. You leave ‘em in there three or four days so they purge themselves.


“Then the carrier would come along, and you use a purse seine. You scare ‘em down to one end, get ‘em thick as you could, and set the purse seine around. It had iron rings at the


bottom with a line going through, and you took and hauled in both of those lines. It would close the middle right up so you could close the fish up.


“Back in the old days they used the big dip net in the boom of the sardine carrier. They swing it in, then pull the pucker string, the bottom would open up, the sardines would go down into the hold. They’d tie it back up again, do the same thing again. “Later on when they come to the fish pump, they’d just drop the end of the hose down in there, start the fish pump up, and the sardines would just go right in. You’d just keep pulling the purse seine up more, finally you’d start getting into the twine, you start hauling that into the dory. You’d keep the


Continued on Page 8.


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