Lobster wars rock isolated Maine island

updated 7:43 a.m. ET Sept. 5, 2009

MATINICUS ISLAND, Maine - Life here is defined by the ocean. It's the ocean that feeds the livelihoods of the lobstermen. It's the ocean that dictates the weather. And it's 20 miles of ocean that separates Matinicus from the mainland and makes it a world apart.

The ocean's bountiful waters have also been a source of strife here for as long as anyone can remember.

Lobster fishermen have feuded for generations over who can set traps, and where. To protect their fishing grounds, the lobstermen here have been known to cut trap lines, circle their boats menacingly around unwelcome vessels and fire warning blasts from shotguns.

With lobster prices down, the animosity has been particularly shrill this summer.

On a July morning, it reached the boiling point when a longtime lobsterman and his daughter drew guns on two fellow islanders. The lobsterman fired, shooting a man he had known for decades in the neck, police reported.

The shooting has shone a spotlight on a long-standing territorial system all along the ragged Maine coast that gives fishermen unofficial rights to specified waters. The rights are legally unenforceable but important and usually accepted.

Nowhere are they more strictly enforced than around Matinicus Island, home to a fleet of three dozen lobster boats whose crews have a reputation for outlaw behavior.

"Every harbor in the state has a piece of bottom they call their own. I would be willing to bet every fishing harbor in the world does the same thing and has been doing it since man went out in a boat to fish," said Clayton Philbrook, a lifelong Matinicus fisherman. "It's just that we've gotten the reputation that we do seriously hold the line. We have to."

Matinicus has a reason for feeling that it's on its own. Slightly smaller than New York's Central Park, the island is the farthest offshore of Maine's 15 year-round island communities. It's so isolated that the ferry only comes once a month in wintertime, when barely two dozen people live there. There are no restaurants or gas stations, and islanders fax their orders to a mainland grocery store.

Hostility
Locals now want the state to create a special zone around Matinicus so only full-time residents can fish the waters. Such a move would cut down on the hostility while ensuring the island community's viability, lobstermen say.

"We have a golden area to fish in," Ron Watkinson said as he prepared to go out to his boat in Matinicus Harbor before sunrise one recent morning. "Instead of us having to enforce the boundaries, the Marine Patrol would enforce them."

Matinicus lobstermen fish with more than 20,000 traps and there's only so much ocean bottom to go around. Some liken the fishermen to the pioneers who claimed farmland in frontier America.

"The only difference between this place and the family farms that were settled out West is our land is covered with water," said Marty Molloy, who lives on Matinicus and runs a business buying lobsters from fishermen.

J. Bell / AP

Marine Patrol Col. Joseph Fessenden said he respects the unofficial, self-policing territorial system that lobstermen live by — but laws must be respected.

"We don't let them do their cowboy thing," Fessenden said.

Vandalism and violence to enforce the unwritten rules have cropped up in many places. This summer, in Owls Head along the state's midcoast, somebody sank two lobster boats and partially sank a third. And once in Portland Harbor, a crew rammed their boat into another vessel, jumped aboard and struggled with the other crew before being tossed overboard.

Still, Matinicus has more than its share of run-ins — from smelly bait herring dumped in a gasoline tank, disabling a boat, to raccoons, considered pests, dumped on the island, apparently by a man prevented from fishing there. A few years ago, two island fishermen were charged after one fired a shotgun across the bow of the other's boat when it crossed his wake at high speed.

But this summer saw a more serious incident.

Alan Miller knew he wasn't welcome to set his traps in waters around Matinicus. Miller, 59, is from Wheelers Bay, a small mainland harbor 20 miles across Penobscot Bay, but he reckoned he was entitled to fish Matinicus waters because his wife, Janan, and his father-in-law, Vance Bunker, were lifelong Matinicus residents.

Secret ballots
Bunker, who has homes on the island and the mainland, shared his son-in-law's belief.

But others disagreed. Matinicus lobstermen had voted more than once against allowing Miller to fish around the island. The votes were cast in secret ballots at annual meetings fishermen used to hold the first Sunday of each June in the basement of the island's white-steepled church. (Fishermen put an end to the meetings two years ago after being accused of conspiracy in a still-pending federal lawsuit filed by a lobsterman who had been voted down.)

Nonetheless, Miller this year set hundreds of his traps with their Day-Glo pink buoys in Matinicus waters. Predictably, it wasn't long before somebody cut the lines to many traps, leaving them sitting on the ocean bottom. Replacing a trap can cost $70 to $100.

"He's from Wheelers Bay," said Matinicus lobsterman David A. Ames. "If I went to Wheelers Bay and set my traps, they'd be gone the next day."

Early on the morning of July 20, Marine Patrol officers were called to the island on a report of an altercation between Bunker and Chris Young, a 41-year-old Matinicus lobsterman.

Bunker, 68, grew up with Young's father and has known the son all his life. But tempers were hot that morning. Bunker told officers Young jumped on his boat at 5:45 a.m., accused him of cutting his trap lines and tussled with him, so he sprayed Young with pepper spray.

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