Growing up in Rhode Island, I got out on the water any way I could, ranging from skin diving to sailing to fishing to clamming. In summers during high school and college, pondering a career in marine biology, I got a job helping state fisheries biologists, including spending weeks on lobster boats tracking the sex and size of the catch. I loved getting to know the lobstermen, one of whom was old enough to remember when a German U-boat surfaced near him off the coast and siphoned off his fuel.
At The New York Times, I wrote quite a bit about fisheries issues, including Maine-focused stories like one in 1996 on the dangerous boom-and-bust harvest of sea urchins and, in 2001, on the lobster-boat races in my wife’s ancestral home town, Winter Harbor.
But it’s only in recent years, since we settled in Downeast Maine, that I’ve come to appreciate fully not only the allure of harvesting the bounty of the sea, but also the profound dangers. One after the other, fishers young and old have perished or been maimed in sudden storms, accidents or other mishaps in an ocean environment that leaves almost no room for error. A rope snaps like a shotgun blast. A rogue wave strikes. A boot slips. A scallop dragger flips.
The dangers spread far beyond Maine of course. As I wrote last year, nationally, commercial fishing is second only to logging on the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of deadliest jobs.
Just up the coast from us in Steuben, a particularly wrenching story unfolded in the summer of 2023 as Tylar Michaud, a high school graduate bound for the Maine Maritime Academy in the fall, took his boat out solo one day and didn’t return. The boat was found empty. Weeks of searching ended in heartbreak.
Amid the prolonged grief enveloping the family and community, Tylar’s aunt, Liz Michaud, was moved to found Green and White Hope, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing safety at sea and named for the colors on Tylar’s buoys. The group, working with growing array of partners, has taken a systemic approach to cutting risk in commercial fishing in Maine (and beyond) - working on safety education, boosting access to safety gear and building the capacity of communities to launch search and rescue operations swiftly when the worst happens. Every minute matters here, with sea temperatures even in summer rapidly sapping strength.
I’m making a substantial donation and hope you can help as well.
I just had a sobering and inspiring Sustain What conversation with Michaud and key partners one week ahead of Maine’s second, and now annual, Maine Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day — a memorial day that she helped create. I’ll be attending the event at the Lubec memorial and may get down to the one in BoothBay Harbor, as well.
My other guests were:
Ann Marie Sokoloski, the founder of Voices of the Fleet, an initiative dedicated to strengthening communication between fishermen, regulators, scientists, and coastal communities. She’s also the chair of the committee managing the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec, Maine, and a yoga instructor working with traumatized veterans, many of whom experience “ambiguous loss” — a condition also afflicting fishers and their communities when someone is lost at sea with no trace. She wrote a powerful post about this last year for the blog of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. Here’s an excerpt but do read the rest:
The sea can be generous—feeding, sustaining, and binding a town together—but it can also take without giving back. When it does, there is no gravesite to visit. The memorial becomes the shoreline, the harbor, the tide itself.
This absence echoes far beyond the family. In a small town, everyone knows the lost crew, their children, the boat’s paint color, the sound of its engine when it headed out before dawn. The loss ripples through the wharf, the coffee shop, the bait shed—felt in ways that are spoken and unspoken. [READ ON]
The pain of ambiguous loss
INSERT 07/15 - In the discussion, Sokoloski explained that the work to boost success in search, rescue and, yes, recovery of a body can also help avoid haunting ambiguity:
I’m certified in post-traumatic stress disorder.
So we deal with ambiguous loss and grief within the veteran population for veterans, of course, in combat. So this is something that happens within the fishing community as well, when we have fishermen that are lost at sea. And, you know, when there’s somebody that hasn’t been returned there is this continuous craving that occurs.
And that’s what ambiguous loss or grief is. So there’s no closure…. So this is what keeps occurring when there’s no body recovered and when these communities have to keep searching. And this is kind of where we tie into the search and rescue and the devices.
It’s for people to have have that recovery. Recovery of the body so that they can have that closure. - END INSERT
In the conversation you’ll also meet Josh Duym and Pat Shepard, the founders of the startup Redde Marine Safety, which operates along Maine’s 3,400-mile corrugated coast filling demand for up-to-date safety equipment, regulatory compliance and training.
Shepard noted that the realities of fishing hazards go way beyond postcard views of maritime life in Maine:
When people think about the fishing community in Maine, they think about big lobster boats with life rafts up on the roof and EPIRBs [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons] that can tell your position and life jackets and survival suits and all of that stuff. Clammers go out in a 16-foot aluminum skiff to some of those outer islands and clam for the entire day — in the middle of the winter. And we just saw how dangerous that can be this last winter when we lost two clammers down in Jonesport.
And I think organizations like Green and White Hope and companies like Redde Marine are really well poised to make a difference in some of those sectors of the industry that you don’t necessarily think about when it comes to safety gear.
Here’s what clamming looks like in winter here (Marlboro Beach, about five minutes from our home):
I capped off the show by playing the video of “For Those Who Put To Sea,” the updated version of my song about the under-appreciated dangers facing those working these waters. My fiddling friend Gus La Casse added haunting lines. Let me know what you think:
The song releases everywhere music is found on July 19 and I’ve set the video up as a fundraiser for Green & White Hope. The lyrics (with links to relevant background) are here as a pdf:
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