“I was born right here in the harbor eighty years ago,” says Frankie Bichrest, “I guess I am the senior citizen as far as fishing in this town.”
The town he’s talking about is not all of Harpswell, but Cundy’s Harbor, the small, tight-knit fishing community on the southeast edge of Sebascodegan Island.
Cundy’s Harbor really is a small community. Everybody knows everybody.
“Jesus, the community sure is close. If anything happens, boy, everybody’s right there to give a hand. For the neighbors -- for the local people -- they’re really good.”
“I’ve been fortunate, I tell you, I’ve been lucky.”
Frankie is tall, thin, and looking good at eighty. He sits at his kitchen table in a neat orange sweater and green polo shirt drinking Orange Crush soda. He wears a golden wristwatch and tough working hands. His small bright blue eyes are a little sunken with age but hold a vigor and excitement for life. He fidgets with a clicking pen and drops his r’s as he tells about his life as a fisherman in a thick Maine accent.
Shortly before Frankie’s birth in 1937, his grandparents moved to Cundy’s Harbor from Yarmouth, Maine. Frankie was born in his grandfather’s house and has lived in the harbor since then.
At the age of four, he went to a small school in Cundy’s Harbor which no longer exists. With few children around, Frankie would have been the only child starting school the following year, so they let him start early just to see if he could do it.
“And I guess I done it. Because I was out of high school at sixteen. And of course I fished all summer.”
He had been lobstering or some other kind of fishing since he was about seven or eight.
“I guess you’d call it my career,” he says.
He’d go out with his grandfather or other folks around town. After finishing school, Frankie started to fish full time. He started out hauling his own traps by hand from a little skiff with an outboard motor. When he was around twenty years old, his grandfather sold him his first big boat, which his grandfather had built in the shop by his house. That was the first time Frankie had a real number of traps.
“There’s three peninsulas of course. Cundy’s Harbor, Orr’s and Bailey’s, and then Harpswell,” he says, “My wife comes from over the other side of Harpswell.” Frankie’s spouse, Dawn, grew up on Harpswell Neck where her father had a take-out style lobster business at Lookout Point. Dawn used to work there when she was younger.
Once Dawn came to Cundy’s Harbor, she opened a restaurant called Block and Tackle right next to the community hall. There was a motel that was closing nearby, so for $700, Frankie and Dawn got the building moved to where it is now to become the restaurant. Frankie provided the lobsters and she ran the restaurant until two years ago when a couple of their sons got sick. Their oldest had to have a kidney transplant, and another son donated a kidney to someone. With so much going on, they said, enough’s enough. They didn’t have to have it, so after thirty-five years they shut down the restaurant.
Frankie tried to donate a kidney, too. “I said, jeez, there’s gotta be some old people that need a kidney. But they wouldn’t listen to me. Said I was too old.”
Together, Dawn and Frankie have five sons that live in the area, and all of them fish. Mark, the oldest is a purse seiner, and the other four are lobstermen and gill netters. Purse seining involves surrounding a school of fish with a net and hauling them in while gill netting involves a net spread straight through the water that catches fish as they pass by. Both methods are used for catching fish for general sale and for lobster bait.
They also have many grandchildren around, some with their own families. They even have a great-grandchild who is only five years old but has already gone out hunting deer with Frankie.
In 1967, Frankie made the best investment of his life. He bought a camp upcountry from the owner of a clothespin factory for $400. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes inland from Harpswell just outside of Rumford. Although the gas lamps have given way to electricity from a generator and you can now flush the toilet, the camp still looks original from the outside.
Later, they bought up 300 acres of land around it. People always ask if their land is posted, meaning no hunting is allowed.
“First of all, I say to them, ‘Is your land posted?’ If they say yes, I say, ‘Our land’s posted.’ I think that’s a fair way to be.”
Frankie and Dawn used to go up to the camp with their kids most weekends to go four wheeling and deer hunting.
“I raised my family on deer meat. We used to eat a lot of deer meat.” The first year they were married, Dawn bought Frankie a Remington pump action rifle.
“I’ve shot a lot of deer with that gun.” Frankie isn’t the type to sit up in a tree all day waiting for the deer to come to him. He’s always on his feet, walking for hours.
“But now, I don’t care if I shoot any more deer, because I’ve shot plenty of ‘em. I just like to be out with the crew.” The crew includes all his sons, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
The camp has become a mecca for the Bichrest family. The grandchildren have particularly gotten into snowmobiling and bowhunting through the woods. Frankie tried bowhunting once and lost or broke so many arrows from practicing that he decided to leave it to the younger generations.
Every year for the full week of Thanksgiving, the whole family descends upon their 300 acres of woods. This year will be the fiftieth year, and by now there are probably forty Bichrests there. Sure, some people are sleeping on the floor, but in the open upstairs of the old post and beam camp, there are close to twenty-five beds.
“We’ve got a real close family,” says Frankie.
Frankie and Dawn now live on the main road in Cundy’s Harbor in the Skolfield-Holbrook house built in 1870 that Frankie’s aunt and uncle bought. From their house, Frankie drives his white Dodge Ram a quarter mile through tangled side roads lined with yards full of boats and cars to the wharf he fishes from. At around five in the morning, his helper shows up, they board his thirty-two foot fiberglass boat, and they haul about 230 traps in five hours. He then sells his lobsters to Watson’s Store, the same place he has been selling his lobsters for sixty years. They then prepare for the next day, and Frankie generally gets home by ten or eleven with time for a full day ahead of him.
Frankie’s helper this summer is a young man who just graduated high school and will be going to culinary school in the fall. He had never lobstered before, but he came asking for a job, and he has been good help. There has always been somebody who wanted to hop on board with Frankie. When his sons were growing up, they would often help. Then it has been some of his granddaughters. He has been lucky not to have to look for help too much.
They go out lobstering on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Each day he hauls about half of his traps so they always have a few days in the water to catch lobster. Then, on Wednesday and Saturday they fish for bait, such as pogies, using a small purse seine net.
“If you catch your own, saves you a hell of a lot of money,” he says. Pogies right now are about $150 a barrel.
Frankie also buys some bait from Watson’s Store, though the fish are actually coming from his son’s business. He has a big purse seiner, but Frankie can’t buy directly from his son because they fish out of Portland and have the boats out in other places all the time.
“I was up to my trap limit for awhile.” Frankie had 800 traps, the maximum number a single commercial lobsterman can have. “But as I got older, my wife and my boys have told me to cut back. You should hear ‘em. This year I’m only fishing 450. I’m getting old and lazy.” He may be getting old, but he is still hauling a few hundred traps four days a week.
He could still fish 800 traps, because in his zone, Zone F, that is the legal limit. In the next zone over, Zone E, the limit is 600 traps per person. Frankie fishes just out of Cundy’s Harbor in the New Meadows River along with about fifty other fishermen in the area.
There are a lot of young people starting up now, but it is much harder to secure a fishing license than it used to be. When Frankie was growing up, there were no licenses. Then they gave out lifetime licenses, like the one Frankie’s uncle had that Frankie has held onto. After that, they changed it so you could have a license for life, but you had to pay for the license and trap tags, which legally identify each traps, every year. Frankie will have his license “until I get done, until I call it good.”
Now, you cannot just go buy a license like you used to. There is a lottery to only allow a small number of new licenses each year. When young kids start out, they also now have to go through an apprenticeship program. Frankie has taken some apprentices out on his boat to get them started. Once they are licensed, they get a small number of traps and keep building up. Frankie had two granddaughters who fished then took a year off when they were in college. When they tried to come back and fish again, they had to re-enter their names into the drawing. They still haven’t gotten their licenses back.
Frankie said that the regulations probably started about twenty-five to thirty years ago. “They’ve just gotten worse and worse. It’s all political.”
You used to be able to jump from one fishery to another, and now that is a lot harder. Frankie used to go lobstering in the summer then go shrimp dragging in the winter.
“They won’t let us go shrimping anymore. It’s one of those deals. They say there’s no shrimp, but when they go testing there’s plenty of shrimp. One of them deals.”
From Frankie’s experience, the problem with shutting down fisheries is that they put a lot of people out of business. In addition to the fishermen, there are peddlers selling fish on the road and larger scale processors that all lose business. You used to be able to make a good living from the shrimp business in Maine.
Changes in the business over Frankie’s lifetime have not all been regulatory though.
The lobstering world was very different when they used wooden traps compared to the new wire traps. When Frankie was young, he would help his grandfather haul out all his traps and patch them. They fixed them up and put in new head netting where the lobsters come in.
“I’d go to school then come home and help him head his traps, getting ready for the winter. Twice a year we’d have to head them damn traps. When it comes time to be patching traps, you was patching traps. These young guys now think, jeez, we’ve got it hard with these wire traps. But that’s why these guys get it pretty gravy now.”
With wire traps, they pretty much just have to put in a trap tag and a couple of hard rings to hold the nets open, and that’s it. All the synthetic materials last a lot longer. They used to have to take out the wooden traps and dry them or else worms would eat through them.
“Now, you can leave ‘em forever, just about.”
A lot of guys fishing drag their feet when changes come. They see wire traps, and say, “what the hell are they thinking?” Frankie said he wasn’t the last to switch over to wire traps, but he certainly wasn’t one of the first ones either.
“We were skeptical. Then we found out that they would catch lobsters, so I switched over.”
Back in the day, Frankie’s grandfather built “I don’t know how many” wooden boats. That’s what they used to do. When someone needed a new boat, they would build it. Frankie’s uncle used to build boats in the winter for different guys around town. But now, with fiberglass, boats last a lot longer unless something unforeseen like a storm or fire happens.
After the first boat his grandfather built for him, Frankie bought his first new boat with the “modern technology” -- fiberglass. This boat, the one he still uses everyday, is named Dawn R., after his wife. Frankie has had a few other boats since then, but he has sold them off and always kept this one.
“Jesus, they last awhile,” he says. Maintenance on fiberglass boats is all cosmetic. By looking at Frankie’s boat, you would never know that it has seen thirty-five years of fishing.
Some of the younger fishermen will trade in boats like cars. They keep updating their boats for faster versions.
“It’s like ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’, ya know.” They make a lot of money then spend a lot of money.
“If you work at it, you can make a good living. But if you sit around on your butt and watch the other guy...ya know.”
When people look at lobstermen from the wharves, they often think all the money is going in their pockets. They often don’t realize how much bait, traps, and engines cost.
When you drive down Cundy’s Harbor Road, you pass through the town with several fishing wharves on your left. Then the paved road abruptly ends and becomes a dirt road. That’s when you get to “money country”, as Frankie calls it. Out-of-staters have built two- or three-million dollars homes on the water and they are only there for a month or two in the summer.
“A lot of them are pretty good.” They do contribute to the fire departments and other aspects of the town in the summer, but a lot of them also have signs up saying “Private”.
“It’s crazy what money people have got.”
When Frankie was growing up, there used to be all kinds of small cottages on side roads that people would rent for a week. Now, a lot of them have been made into year round houses, and there seem to be less of those kinds of tourists anymore.
One thing that has increased a lot, though, is traffic. “You wonder where the hell all the cars park.”
When Frankie was young and “out raising hell”, he remembers traffic meaning meeting one car on the harbor road at midnight or one in the morning. Now, there is steady traffic all night long all year round. When it’s fishing season, there are trucks going all hours of the night. Guys will leave at one or two in the morning. On the best hauling days, there will be heavy traffic going down to the wharves at four in the morning.
“My grandfather fished until he was eighty-seven. I don’t think I will. The newness will have worn off by then."
The town he’s talking about is not all of Harpswell, but Cundy’s Harbor, the small, tight-knit fishing community on the southeast edge of Sebascodegan Island.
Cundy’s Harbor really is a small community. Everybody knows everybody.
“Jesus, the community sure is close. If anything happens, boy, everybody’s right there to give a hand. For the neighbors -- for the local people -- they’re really good.”
“I’ve been fortunate, I tell you, I’ve been lucky.”
Frankie is tall, thin, and looking good at eighty. He sits at his kitchen table in a neat orange sweater and green polo shirt drinking Orange Crush soda. He wears a golden wristwatch and tough working hands. His small bright blue eyes are a little sunken with age but hold a vigor and excitement for life. He fidgets with a clicking pen and drops his r’s as he tells about his life as a fisherman in a thick Maine accent.
Shortly before Frankie’s birth in 1937, his grandparents moved to Cundy’s Harbor from Yarmouth, Maine. Frankie was born in his grandfather’s house and has lived in the harbor since then.
At the age of four, he went to a small school in Cundy’s Harbor which no longer exists. With few children around, Frankie would have been the only child starting school the following year, so they let him start early just to see if he could do it.
“And I guess I done it. Because I was out of high school at sixteen. And of course I fished all summer.”
He had been lobstering or some other kind of fishing since he was about seven or eight.
“I guess you’d call it my career,” he says.
He’d go out with his grandfather or other folks around town. After finishing school, Frankie started to fish full time. He started out hauling his own traps by hand from a little skiff with an outboard motor. When he was around twenty years old, his grandfather sold him his first big boat, which his grandfather had built in the shop by his house. That was the first time Frankie had a real number of traps.
“There’s three peninsulas of course. Cundy’s Harbor, Orr’s and Bailey’s, and then Harpswell,” he says, “My wife comes from over the other side of Harpswell.” Frankie’s spouse, Dawn, grew up on Harpswell Neck where her father had a take-out style lobster business at Lookout Point. Dawn used to work there when she was younger.
Once Dawn came to Cundy’s Harbor, she opened a restaurant called Block and Tackle right next to the community hall. There was a motel that was closing nearby, so for $700, Frankie and Dawn got the building moved to where it is now to become the restaurant. Frankie provided the lobsters and she ran the restaurant until two years ago when a couple of their sons got sick. Their oldest had to have a kidney transplant, and another son donated a kidney to someone. With so much going on, they said, enough’s enough. They didn’t have to have it, so after thirty-five years they shut down the restaurant.
Frankie tried to donate a kidney, too. “I said, jeez, there’s gotta be some old people that need a kidney. But they wouldn’t listen to me. Said I was too old.”
Together, Dawn and Frankie have five sons that live in the area, and all of them fish. Mark, the oldest is a purse seiner, and the other four are lobstermen and gill netters. Purse seining involves surrounding a school of fish with a net and hauling them in while gill netting involves a net spread straight through the water that catches fish as they pass by. Both methods are used for catching fish for general sale and for lobster bait.
They also have many grandchildren around, some with their own families. They even have a great-grandchild who is only five years old but has already gone out hunting deer with Frankie.
In 1967, Frankie made the best investment of his life. He bought a camp upcountry from the owner of a clothespin factory for $400. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes inland from Harpswell just outside of Rumford. Although the gas lamps have given way to electricity from a generator and you can now flush the toilet, the camp still looks original from the outside.
Later, they bought up 300 acres of land around it. People always ask if their land is posted, meaning no hunting is allowed.
“First of all, I say to them, ‘Is your land posted?’ If they say yes, I say, ‘Our land’s posted.’ I think that’s a fair way to be.”
Frankie and Dawn used to go up to the camp with their kids most weekends to go four wheeling and deer hunting.
“I raised my family on deer meat. We used to eat a lot of deer meat.” The first year they were married, Dawn bought Frankie a Remington pump action rifle.
“I’ve shot a lot of deer with that gun.” Frankie isn’t the type to sit up in a tree all day waiting for the deer to come to him. He’s always on his feet, walking for hours.
“But now, I don’t care if I shoot any more deer, because I’ve shot plenty of ‘em. I just like to be out with the crew.” The crew includes all his sons, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
The camp has become a mecca for the Bichrest family. The grandchildren have particularly gotten into snowmobiling and bowhunting through the woods. Frankie tried bowhunting once and lost or broke so many arrows from practicing that he decided to leave it to the younger generations.
Every year for the full week of Thanksgiving, the whole family descends upon their 300 acres of woods. This year will be the fiftieth year, and by now there are probably forty Bichrests there. Sure, some people are sleeping on the floor, but in the open upstairs of the old post and beam camp, there are close to twenty-five beds.
“We’ve got a real close family,” says Frankie.
Frankie and Dawn now live on the main road in Cundy’s Harbor in the Skolfield-Holbrook house built in 1870 that Frankie’s aunt and uncle bought. From their house, Frankie drives his white Dodge Ram a quarter mile through tangled side roads lined with yards full of boats and cars to the wharf he fishes from. At around five in the morning, his helper shows up, they board his thirty-two foot fiberglass boat, and they haul about 230 traps in five hours. He then sells his lobsters to Watson’s Store, the same place he has been selling his lobsters for sixty years. They then prepare for the next day, and Frankie generally gets home by ten or eleven with time for a full day ahead of him.
Frankie’s helper this summer is a young man who just graduated high school and will be going to culinary school in the fall. He had never lobstered before, but he came asking for a job, and he has been good help. There has always been somebody who wanted to hop on board with Frankie. When his sons were growing up, they would often help. Then it has been some of his granddaughters. He has been lucky not to have to look for help too much.
They go out lobstering on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Each day he hauls about half of his traps so they always have a few days in the water to catch lobster. Then, on Wednesday and Saturday they fish for bait, such as pogies, using a small purse seine net.
“If you catch your own, saves you a hell of a lot of money,” he says. Pogies right now are about $150 a barrel.
Frankie also buys some bait from Watson’s Store, though the fish are actually coming from his son’s business. He has a big purse seiner, but Frankie can’t buy directly from his son because they fish out of Portland and have the boats out in other places all the time.
“I was up to my trap limit for awhile.” Frankie had 800 traps, the maximum number a single commercial lobsterman can have. “But as I got older, my wife and my boys have told me to cut back. You should hear ‘em. This year I’m only fishing 450. I’m getting old and lazy.” He may be getting old, but he is still hauling a few hundred traps four days a week.
He could still fish 800 traps, because in his zone, Zone F, that is the legal limit. In the next zone over, Zone E, the limit is 600 traps per person. Frankie fishes just out of Cundy’s Harbor in the New Meadows River along with about fifty other fishermen in the area.
There are a lot of young people starting up now, but it is much harder to secure a fishing license than it used to be. When Frankie was growing up, there were no licenses. Then they gave out lifetime licenses, like the one Frankie’s uncle had that Frankie has held onto. After that, they changed it so you could have a license for life, but you had to pay for the license and trap tags, which legally identify each traps, every year. Frankie will have his license “until I get done, until I call it good.”
Now, you cannot just go buy a license like you used to. There is a lottery to only allow a small number of new licenses each year. When young kids start out, they also now have to go through an apprenticeship program. Frankie has taken some apprentices out on his boat to get them started. Once they are licensed, they get a small number of traps and keep building up. Frankie had two granddaughters who fished then took a year off when they were in college. When they tried to come back and fish again, they had to re-enter their names into the drawing. They still haven’t gotten their licenses back.
Frankie said that the regulations probably started about twenty-five to thirty years ago. “They’ve just gotten worse and worse. It’s all political.”
You used to be able to jump from one fishery to another, and now that is a lot harder. Frankie used to go lobstering in the summer then go shrimp dragging in the winter.
“They won’t let us go shrimping anymore. It’s one of those deals. They say there’s no shrimp, but when they go testing there’s plenty of shrimp. One of them deals.”
From Frankie’s experience, the problem with shutting down fisheries is that they put a lot of people out of business. In addition to the fishermen, there are peddlers selling fish on the road and larger scale processors that all lose business. You used to be able to make a good living from the shrimp business in Maine.
Changes in the business over Frankie’s lifetime have not all been regulatory though.
The lobstering world was very different when they used wooden traps compared to the new wire traps. When Frankie was young, he would help his grandfather haul out all his traps and patch them. They fixed them up and put in new head netting where the lobsters come in.
“I’d go to school then come home and help him head his traps, getting ready for the winter. Twice a year we’d have to head them damn traps. When it comes time to be patching traps, you was patching traps. These young guys now think, jeez, we’ve got it hard with these wire traps. But that’s why these guys get it pretty gravy now.”
With wire traps, they pretty much just have to put in a trap tag and a couple of hard rings to hold the nets open, and that’s it. All the synthetic materials last a lot longer. They used to have to take out the wooden traps and dry them or else worms would eat through them.
“Now, you can leave ‘em forever, just about.”
A lot of guys fishing drag their feet when changes come. They see wire traps, and say, “what the hell are they thinking?” Frankie said he wasn’t the last to switch over to wire traps, but he certainly wasn’t one of the first ones either.
“We were skeptical. Then we found out that they would catch lobsters, so I switched over.”
Back in the day, Frankie’s grandfather built “I don’t know how many” wooden boats. That’s what they used to do. When someone needed a new boat, they would build it. Frankie’s uncle used to build boats in the winter for different guys around town. But now, with fiberglass, boats last a lot longer unless something unforeseen like a storm or fire happens.
After the first boat his grandfather built for him, Frankie bought his first new boat with the “modern technology” -- fiberglass. This boat, the one he still uses everyday, is named Dawn R., after his wife. Frankie has had a few other boats since then, but he has sold them off and always kept this one.
“Jesus, they last awhile,” he says. Maintenance on fiberglass boats is all cosmetic. By looking at Frankie’s boat, you would never know that it has seen thirty-five years of fishing.
Some of the younger fishermen will trade in boats like cars. They keep updating their boats for faster versions.
“It’s like ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’, ya know.” They make a lot of money then spend a lot of money.
“If you work at it, you can make a good living. But if you sit around on your butt and watch the other guy...ya know.”
When people look at lobstermen from the wharves, they often think all the money is going in their pockets. They often don’t realize how much bait, traps, and engines cost.
When you drive down Cundy’s Harbor Road, you pass through the town with several fishing wharves on your left. Then the paved road abruptly ends and becomes a dirt road. That’s when you get to “money country”, as Frankie calls it. Out-of-staters have built two- or three-million dollars homes on the water and they are only there for a month or two in the summer.
“A lot of them are pretty good.” They do contribute to the fire departments and other aspects of the town in the summer, but a lot of them also have signs up saying “Private”.
“It’s crazy what money people have got.”
When Frankie was growing up, there used to be all kinds of small cottages on side roads that people would rent for a week. Now, a lot of them have been made into year round houses, and there seem to be less of those kinds of tourists anymore.
One thing that has increased a lot, though, is traffic. “You wonder where the hell all the cars park.”
When Frankie was young and “out raising hell”, he remembers traffic meaning meeting one car on the harbor road at midnight or one in the morning. Now, there is steady traffic all night long all year round. When it’s fishing season, there are trucks going all hours of the night. Guys will leave at one or two in the morning. On the best hauling days, there will be heavy traffic going down to the wharves at four in the morning.
“My grandfather fished until he was eighty-seven. I don’t think I will. The newness will have worn off by then."