Island life, endangered
Lobstering limits, high costs plague Monhegan
MONHEGAN ISLAND, Maine - A few of the signs tacked inside The Monhegan Store, where the no-frills shelves are beginning to fill up for tourist season, tell early risers how to use the waffle maker, how to brew a batch of coffee, and where to scribble one's purchases in the absence of the proprietor.
Such is the laid-back, low-distraction life on this rocky, rustic place, where 60 year-round residents hunker down off unpaved roads, near a one-room schoolhouse, and within walking distance of a dock that connects them with the mainland 10 miles away.
To the artists and day-trippers who flock to Monhegan in summer, the tiny, square-mile island is an idyllic throwback to a slower past. But to many of the people who stay here 12 months a year, a close-knit, isolated way of life is under siege by fishing regulators and a punishing cost of living.
"This year-round community is in serious danger of extinction," said Katy Boegel, owner of The Monhegan Store and the wife of a lobsterman.
A major culprit, Boegel and other residents said, is the state Department of Marine Resources, which has imposed a 300-trap limit on each lobsterman here, a steep drop from the 475-trap maximum to which the fleet agreed two years ago in exchange for two additional months in their season.
Monhegan, where the lobster season runs from October through early June, has the lowest trap limit in Maine, but islanders benefit from an exclusive, no-competition zone that rings the island. In addition, state regulators said, studies have indicated that fewer traps can yield just as many lobsters. But fishermen here said that low prices for their catch and fewer traps have crimped income at a time when fuel, bait, and other costs are high. Electricity here is billed at 62 cents per kilowatt hour, for example, compared with 16 cents for mainland residential customers of
"I've seen a lot of winters, good ones and bad ones, but this was the worst one I've ever seen," said Doug Boynton, 61, who has been lobstering for 38 years.
Credit cards are maxed out for most families, said Sherm Stanley, the dean of the lobster fleet, whose great-grandfather was the first keeper of the Monhegan lighthouse. Some of the boats are being remortgaged, he added, and many captains are scrambling to make ends meet.
Even the schoolhouse is losing pupils, with only three children - instead of the current five - expected in the fall for kindergarten through eighth grade.
George Lapointe, the state's commissioner of marine resources, disputes the notion voiced repeatedly here that his office has been unresponsive and insensitive to the island's plight. Lobstermen throughout the state are hurting, said Lapointe, who added that a review of Monhegan's catch after the first 300-trap season showed an increase in income. The lobstermen here, however, counter that any increase was simply an improvement over a disastrous previous year.
In any event, Lapointe said, annual fluctuations in the economy should not be the catalyst for frequent adjustments to the trap limits. "Just because economic times are bad," Lapointe said, the thinking "that we relax our conservation . . . standards is one of the mindsets that has gotten so many of our fisheries in trouble in the past."
Those standards are working, Lapointe said. Recent studies, he added, have shown that the Gulf of Maine is not being overfished for lobster.
On Monhegan, such talk often sounds like mainland bureaucratese. Moving off the island, once unthinkable for many here, is now a topic of serious discussion.
"That's the last thing I ever thought about - leaving here," Stanley, 61, said in a thick Down East accent. "But you've got to pay your bills."
As Stanley checked off the stresses bedeviling Monhegan, he sat in his grandfather's chair in a 19th-century fish house on the harbor's edge, buoys and tools and foul-weather gear hanging from wooden beams, and his pet husky, Lakota, curled up in a bed of rope.
Stanley, for now, has no plans to leave, but fellow lobster captain Robert Bracy decided recently to pull up stakes and will head to St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, with his wife and 4-year-old son. After Bracy's boat was badly damaged, no insurance company would take another risk on the 40-year-old lobsterman, said his wife, Tralice, who is a curator at the Monhegan museum.
In St. Croix, she said, her husband might try to land a job as an able-bodied seaman.
"We put everything on the table and decided to move on and do something different," Tralice said in the store, where Boegel had attracted a small crowd with an offer of free hot dogs. "It was a very difficult decision. There's such a beautiful sense of familiarity here."
Other lobstermen have stopped fishing well before the June 7 deadline this season because, they said, the trap limit makes the work unprofitable. One has taken a job on a tugboat, and others are working construction as the island's inns and bed-and-breakfasts prepare for the tourist season.
As lobster captains stay ashore, the sternmen who haul the traps become collateral damage. Most of that labor is done by younger workers, who are attracted by the sequestered ruggedness here and can endure harsh winters both on and off the water. With real estate prices driven up by summer residents, the scarcity of jobs makes a year-round population even more difficult to sustain.
"For Monhegan to survive, it needs to be a good place to live for young people, and that's going to be hard," said Boynton, who pulled up his traps early and is now doing construction.
Lisa Brackett, a sternman for Stanley, has Monhegan connections that date back centuries. She sees the stormclouds but remains committed to an island she loves.
"I'm afraid to see what has been a tradition out here for so many years disappear," said Brackett, who lives in a harborside house that her family floated over from Boothbay Harbor in the 1920s.
"I'm afraid of losing the winter community," Brackett said. "It's scary, and it makes me really, really sad."
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at b_macquarrie@globe.com. 