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Page 8. MAINE COASTAL NEWS June 2012 Eddie Drew & The Lowells Continued from Page 7.


herring packed in there as close as you could so you could get as many out without pump- ing a whole bunch of water, was the idea. “Sometimes back in those days when you were fishing with MERGANSER, they’d have sets of 50, 70, 80, 90 thousand bushel of herring, so you couldn’t take those all out at one time. They’d be down there for several trips before they could get ‘em all out. The carriers could only haul maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred bushels. So they’d hustle those up to the factory, then come down again and get another load. A lot of fish, why they’d be using a couple of carriers. While one was going up to be unloaded, the other one would be down there getting loaded up, and they’d pass each other on the way.” MERGANSER SISTER SHIPS


The next MERGANSER model built was even more of a speed demon: LEONARD W for Lyman “Gus” Alley of Kittery. LEONARD W had a 455 engine and was said to have gone almost 40 knots. “They took her through the nautical mile down there, for the submarines,


and supposedly, that’s what I read anyway, that she did 39 knots,” says Drew. “Gus took her down to Jonesport one time for the races, and they wouldn’t let her race because she had lifting rails on her.” (Jamie says that this is one of the earliest uses of lifting rails that he has been able to find.) However, in the free- for-all, the LEONARD W beat everybody. Alley had a reputation for racing with the submarines coming out of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and anyone else in the area he could entice. If he turned his cap around backwards, that was your sign. He had a good feud going with the Marconi brothers, who had another MERGANSER sister ship, NANCY MARYANNE.


Drew tells a story told to him by George Spinney of the Kittery area, when Carroll was building a boat for George. One day, George said, there were two sport fishermen down there, twin engines and all this, supposed to really go. So they’re down there, they’re seeing who would have the fastest one – “How many turns you turning now?” They were going back and forth.


George says, “There’s ole Gus there, KUSTOM STEEL


hauling, and he sees those two boats coming. Gus knew they were racing, and Gus couldn’t turn up a race anytime. I watched,” George says, “and ole Gus started hauling faster and faster. He got the last trap aboard, got it baited up. Those two boats come up by him, Gus put it right in the corner, threw the first trap over. The second one must’ve flew through the air about 50 or 60 feet before it hit the water!” Gus went right up between the two of ‘em. One guy come on and he says, “Jesus Christ! Did you see that lobster boat? He went by us like we were standing still!” The other guy says, “Yeah,” he says, “But all I can think of, that lying sonofabitch that sold me this boat, he told me that nothing could go by me.”


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Another sister ship of the MERGANSER was SHARON GAY, for Milton Doughty of Long Island. “She was 36 by probably 9,” said Drew. “Course Milton, when he had the SHARON GAY built, they wanted to build it out of cedar like MERGANSER. But the knots were in the cedar, and Milton didn’t want his boat built out of something with knots in it. They tried to tell him that the knots won’t work out, you know, and your boat will be lighter. But no, he had it built out of pine.” Sharon Gay also had a standing house which added weight, “but she’d go right along, probably do 16 or so,” says Drew. Doughty might have had a crooked boat if it weren’t for Riley, according to what Drew had heard. “They had it all set up, I don’t know if it was Wardlow or Bert [Will’s sons], but Will wasn’t around for some reason. They were all set to timber out when Riley comes in, ‘What the hell you doing? You haven’t got the keel braced off!’” Royal told Drew, “Outside of Dad, Milton probably would’ve had a boat that steered a lot easier going one way than the other!”


Royal used to tell a story about Will Frost: “Back in the old days, they’d take an adze and dub the frames. So this new guy come to work at the shipyard, and Frost is saying about ‘save the line.’ At the end of the day, why the guy come up and he had a couple bushel baskets full of chips. He says,


‘What do you want me to do with these lines? I saved ‘em all.’”


Drew remembers meeting Will’s son Bert Frost once. “He was the one, I think he did away with the shaft log, had one of those angled stuffing boxes on top of the keel, then bored a hole down through the deadwood. Like Chris-Craft used to have in their boats, that angled stuffing box, you’d just screw- fasten on.” That method never caught on for lobster boats, but Bert Frost was later known for his innovations in boatbuilding. A few years later, Frost set up shop in South Portland, on the waterfront. Drew re- members that they had a jig on wheels, set up with frames for a 40' or so boat. “They had three bays there. The jig was on wheels, on a trailer so they could haul it out, lift the hull off and turn ‘er over. So then they’d take and just slide her in the next bay, and start in doing the house and the interior.” In the third bay was one that they were finishing up. LOWELLS IN YARMOUTH Riley Lowell and his sons had a shop in Yarmouth in the 50s and early 60s. “You come up off of Route 88 there and you go up over the hill across the river, it branches off, there’s a V there. And right in that V, there was a shop there.”


“That’s the one where the roof caved in, due to excessive snow load,” Drew said. “When it let go, they were building a boat designed by Lindsay Lord. And at the time when they were doing it, it was the biggest fiberglass boat being built on the east coast. Around 50 feet, if I remember right. When the roof caved in, they were able to get the boat out without any significant damage to it, and they took it on a trailer there, took it down to Robinhood Marina.”


A guy named Ace used to come around the shop. He worked for the post office, but he loved boats and would help out part-time. After they had moved the boat to Robinhood, one day Ace was doing a glass job down in the engine room. “Ace was carrying a five- gallon pail of resin down so he could have it down there to mix up,” Drew said. “I guess the thing caught on the ladder, and he had the top off, cause he was using a lot of it. Anyways, it spilled.


“Ace pushed it around as best he could, then he took squeeze bottles of hardener (the hardener then come in all these squeeze bottles) and squirted it all around and hoped the stuff would harden up. Everyone had left when this happened, so he couldn’t tell any- one, so he went home.”


After Ace had gone, the owner of Robinhood Marine, Ralph Becker, came to see the boat with his friend Sumner Hawley, a founder of the Hyde School and husband to


Continued on Page 22.


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