Eben Wilson of East Boothbay docking his Scilly Isles pilot cutter at Bristol Marine in Boothbay Harbor.
EAST BOOTHBAY: There are very few people that opt to juggle several very different marine activities. How many lobster fish full time, can build sails for a traditional sailing vessel or a high-tech racer, and go sailing and or racing on a traditional or high-tech racer anywhere in the world? This does not include redoing several boats, whether they were wood or fiberglass, or rebuilding a fine home built by the boatbuilders of Hodgdon Brothers in East Boothbay. Eben Wilson has been doing this for years and seems to have mastered the balance and done so at a very high level of success.
On the morning of the Annual Meeting and Awards Banquet for the Maine Lobster Boat Racing Association on 19 October I was walking around Boothbay Harbor and met up with Eben, once while he was on his way to the dock and then when he was docking his 44-foot wooden Scilly Island pilot cutter HESPER at Bristol Marine. HESPER was built by Luke Powell of Cornwall, England in 2004. Eben said that Powell had built about nine of these classic vessels, which were used for fishing and coastal trade around the English Channel in the 1800s. Two of these found there way to the United States, but the other one has since returned to her builder in England.
HESPER is 44-feet on deck, 60-feet length overall, a mast 70-feet tall with a topmast and displaces about 25 tons. She has an opepe backbone, with double-sawn oak frames, carvel planked with larch and oak, oak finished bright on deck as well as her interior. She is fastened with bronze. A cutter is defined as a decked over vessel, with a single mast rigged with a gaff mainsail, topsail, two headsails, and a straight running bowsprit that can be run in. This is also a term used for small boats used on older ships-of-war. She has four berths up forward, a pilot berth in the salon, which is up high and out of the way behind the settees, and then there is a quarter berth tucked up underneath the counter. Eben added, “It is a bit of a pain to get into, but boy, is it comfortable when you get in there.”
Eben purchased her in February and opened a charter business, but unfortunately it did not go quite as planned. He has thought about selling her, but he really likes the boat and it makes a great cruising boat for he, his wife and their two girls. Eben is already planning to go cruising on her next year. He said, “The girls really like being on the boat. We did the Eggemoggin Reach Race this year and we are going to cruise some next year. Hopefully, we can do several more weeks than we did this year if I don’t decide to do something stupid and sell it.”
Eben has lived in East Boothbay a majority of his with the exception of ten years in Nobleboro and a year out of the country in Europe and the Caribbean. So, what was it like growing up in this small town? Eben explained, “It was great. Back then Goudy & Stephens was still running, which is now Ocean Point Marina. They were the last few guys of the older generation of shipbuilders that came up building wooden boats and then moved to steel and then to fiberglass. Hodgdon was running down on Murray Hill Road. I remember Sonny. I remember seeing him in the shop. He passed away when I was about 12. Jake and Joel Stephens were running Goudy & Stephens when I was a kid. I worked there a couple of years cutting up all the old boats and burning cradles. Basically, I grew up in a shipyard. I worked with my father building sails and then went to work for the Carter’s down on Murray Hill Road. That is where I started lobstering.
“Bob Norwood sold me my first 8 four-foot wooden Anderson traps,” continued Eben. “I found later on that they were a lot of work to haul. That is when I started in a dory lobstering when I was about 11. I started working for Ralph (Carter) over at Murray Hill and stayed with them until I was like 18.”
When asked why he went lobster fishing Eben said, “I don’t know, I just thought it looked like fun.”
Eben’s father is Nat Wilson of Nathaniel S. Wilson, a very well-known sailmaker all over the world. Eben did not work with his father until after high school. “I didn’t have the temperament until I got out of high school to be able to be in the loft with him.,” added Eben. “He is an incredible person, but sometimes father and sons working together doesn’t always work. I grew up around it and I was always up there so when it finally came to setting out to do it, I already knew the basic principles. Then getting to a point where I was confident doing it on my own, took some years. Sometimes you are building a sail from the 1600s that did not have any metal in it, all hand-laid grommets and beckets built out of synthetic material. It was all built as it would have been. Then the next day you would be building a motor or cruising sail. I have worked with him for 20-plus years, mostly in the winter. I did four years full-time when I wasn’t fishing. It was pretty hard watching the lobster boats go by outside on a hot summer day sitting there in the sail loft.”
Eben’s father was not ready to retire and he wanted to do something else. “I started commuting down the river by skiff and that is how I wound up in South Bristol. Living in Nobleboro I had a V-bottom skiff, a Murphy skiff, with a 40-hp Tohatsu. I said, “Maybe I will set a few traps. I still had my license. I needed to get bait, fuel and sell my lobsters so I asked Andy House, Reggie House’ son, if I could go to the co-op and at least sell what I caught and get bait and fuel. He said, “Sure, of course you can.” So, I got in over there and that started with the skiff and 20 traps. Then I bought a 31-foot BHM with 800 traps off of Dustin Delano along with a federal permit. That was in 2011.”
I remembered back when I first met Eben, he had a Fred Lenfesty wooden lobster boat. He said that she was built in 1965. Eben explained, “Mark and Ralph Carter bought it off of somebody that Craig Sproul had sold it to and they rebuilt it. Ralph when he got out of the Navy came back and he built himself a boat, MILDRED A. which was built by Everett Barlow. Mark went into the Navy and did four years. He came out and Ralph got him started lobstering again. That’s when they rebuilt my boat, the Fred Lenfesty boat. He named her PATRIOT, which is what he ran in the trap hauling races for years. He put in a whole bunch of 350 Chevys and a 454 at one point. Eben said, “The 454 wasn’t a great engine, so it never really went any better. The 350 with a good cam, an intake manifold and a four barrel carburetor and that thing would slide along pretty nice. I bought it off Mark after he built his 34 South Shore. I ran that for several years, did a lot of work to it, put new floor timbers in, a new floor and a new engine. I sold that a few years after I got it and moved up to a 35 Young Brothers, which I bought from Randy Shepard down at Billings in Stonington. That got me started at Billings Diesel. Harlan (Billings) came along side in his truck and I was standing there looking at the boat. He rolled down his window and looked at me and goes, “I know that engine (300-hp Cummins) has got a lot of hours on it, but I will put my name on it, that thing will be just fine for you. I fished that motor for 3 years, sold it to Scott Brewer, Rusty Brewer’s brother, and he fished with that motor. It had 14 or 15,000 hours on it when I took it out and I think Scott fished it for another six years. I had that right up until I got out of the lobster fishing business.”
Eben’s father helped Eben’s older brother Nat get onboard the three-masted schooner ADIX as a crew member. Eben remembers her when she came to be rebuilt at Goudy & Stevens. Nat joined her in New Zealand and then sailed in her across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, through the Caribbean, up to Newport, Rhode Island then over to the UK. He then got on board the schooner ELEONORA, a replica of Herreshoff’s WESTWARD. Eben was looking to get out of town so his brother told him to pack a bag, buy a one-way ticket, and meet him in Antigua. He ended up working in a sail loft there. “I met Andrew Dove in the grocery store,” added Eben. “I heard him talking to somebody saying he was looking for another person to work in the sail loft. I was kind of on my last dollar and trying to figure out what I was going to do. Andrew ran the North Loft down there, which was originally Antigua Sails. Graham Knight had previously run it for years down there. A beautiful shop, canvas shop upstairs and sail loft downstairs. We pretty much just worked on super yacht sails and a few cruising boat sails.”
Eben turned and told Andrew that he was a sailmaker from Maine and that he was interested in the job. He was invited to the loft and met Andrew’s partner. They talked it over and Eben had a job. They not only built sails, but they also crewed on race boats. That winter he did his first Super Yacht Regatta, followed later by the St. Barts Bucket, Antigua Race Week and the Fife Regatta. He raced on board ADIX, the William Fife schooner ALTAIR, ELEONORA and the Gloucester fishing schooner COLUMBIA.
It was during this time that he met his wife, who tried to get him to slow down some. Eben did get a job on shore with Doyle Sails in Salem. He said, “The irony of that was I did get an apartment, but I was never there because Robbie (Doyle) knew that I had done a lot of repair work on large super yacht sails. He said, ‘Well, you are my new traveling sailmaker.’ I don’t think I was there more than a month and Robbie said ‘We have an issue with a sail in Turkey, so, here’s a kit to put the sail back together and you are flying out tomorrow. I will see you in a couple of weeks.’”
Eben worked there for a year and a half before moving back to East Boothbay in 2011 and going back to work with his father and lobster fishing. This did not stop the jumping on a jet and heading out to a race anywhere in the world. One classic yacht that he got involved with was the Herreshoff New York 50 named SPARTAN. Eben had assisted building her sails in his father’s shop, and then got involved with rigging her after her total rebuild. Eben was part of the crew that took her over to the Mediterranean Sea to compete in a number of regattas there.
When he returned he purchased the BHM 31 with 800s traps, to which he added a federal permit. He said, “That kind of catapulted me right back into all of this. I was rolling pennies trying to get back going again. That is also when we had our first daughter Elise. Lettie was born a couple of years later.”
Eben was in the BHM 31 for about three years when he realized that this boat was too small for where he wanted to fish. He heard from Arnie Gamage that Gene Drinkwater of Spruce Head was getting out of the lobster fishing business and was selling his 40-foot John’s Bay Boat, which had been built in 1997. As soon as he purchased her he had her taken to Samoset Boat Works in Boothbay to have her gone over. The 300-hp John Deere was removed and rebuilt, made some minor repairs and painted her. After several years Eben realized once again that she was too small. One of the big problems was that she had just a 110-gallon fuel tank. This really came to light when he was coming in during a storm, taking a beating, and when he got in he had just ten gallons in the tank. Had he run out, that would not have been good and could have been life-threatening. Eben began looking around and learned that Micah Philbrook of Owl’s Head was selling his Young Brothers 45. This boat was originally built at Little River Boat Shop in Cutler in 2004, for the shop’s owner, Norbert Lemieux. This boat had been well taken care of and was still powered with the 650-hp Volvo. Eben ran her for several years and then brought her to Samoset Boat Works for a total going over. The engine was removed and replaced with an 800-hp MAN, replaced the wiring and hydraulics, all new windows, added a winter back and did a full paint job from top to bottom. When she came out, she looked like a new boat. Eben said the only mistake he made in the rebuilding was where he put the windshield wiper switch. He has to get up and turn it on when if he had located them closer to the helm he could turn it on with his foot.
Why the need of a big boat? Eben fishes 25 to 30 miles below the islands and the Young Brothers 45 is fine for that. “I will always have days that I wish I had something bigger,” continued Eben, “and then you get inside and the 45 feels like too big a boat up inside the islands. I pretty much just keep two guys on year-round now. All summer we just hauled two-days a week. It was great. We hauled 600 traps, Tuesdays and Fridays. I am actually up over last year. We had quite a good winter offshore and the price was up. I am actually making more money because I am hauling more gear. My per trap average has been about the same and around here it is always pretty steady.
“If you can hang on to a two pound per trap average all summer you are doing well,” continued Eben. “There is a lot of shifting, a lot of searching to find little spots. We spent a lot of time looking, but other than that it has been a pretty normal year. I get pretty sick of going four days a week, especially with some of my sailing, because I still do that. I do like my time off, my kids are 9 and 12 and they are only young once.”
What about the future of the lobster industry? Eben said, “The industry is shrinking. It is aging, especially aging around here. I mean a number of guys have aged out or just got out in the last few years. The new reporting, especially the trackers and federal permits, has shrunk the industry. It has forced guys that don’t want trackers to sell their permits. I don’t have that much connection with Downeast, but the few guys I talk to they are definitely off. They are down to what we would consider a good year around here. What is scary for me around here is the fact that the only time we really make money is between December and March, but it is the worst time of the year beating your head against the wall trying to find good weather days. That is what has forced me to be more efficient. Make the boat faster, take two guys, haul more gear per day, because your weather windows are so short. I do not want to be out there in 30 knots nor do I really have to if I can get out and haul everything in 18 hours. You can play your weather windows and you can get more and do better. There is a huge savings on fuel, 40 to 60 gallons a day. You are doubling up on your gear, so for every time that somebody else goes out and hauls 300, you go haul 600. This has been really good for me. You just have to play the numbers game.”
Eben thought that we would see more trap limits and that fishermen should buy up the federal permits. He feels that the price of the permits could increase in value, especially if they allow stacking, the value could go through the roof. A lot will depend on how the regulators deal with the inshore fishery as far as diversity is concerned. With the cost of living, the cost of property, the cost of everything inshore the costs continue to go up and if catches continue to drop up inside and unless the price keeps climbing, you are going to see the inshore fishery change. That is your diversity and these are those fishing out of skiffs and smaller boats.
When one looks around the docks, how many young people are entering the lobster fishing industry? Eben pointed out that there are not many younger people getting into the industry in South Bristol. He did say that there were a few younger fishermen going out of Boothbay. This is a very expensive business to get into. You can start with a small boat, second hand traps, and with a lot of hard work, you can move up to a bigger boat.
“What lobstering has been to me,” said Eben, “is I love the business and I love the work. For me it is a means to live my life the way that I want to. I like my sailing, I like the sailmaking, I like the rigging, I like doing all these other things and that is what I do it.”
