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JULY 2017 CHEBEAGUE ISLAND COUNCIL CALENDAR
Marty’s Memories: Large Boats and Fishing Nets
by Marty Trower
With nets stretching out at a diagonal to the sea and the streaming
water glistening in that early light, the large boat appeared suddenly,
quite far off from where the seasonal boat moorings lie. It took me
a minute to realize that this was a rare sight out in the water off
Hamilton Beach these days.
The boat and the dripping nets brought back the memory of a
slumber party in my early teens aboard Gretchen Tonks-Hartling’s
father’s boat,
Armida
. It was glorious to have the honor of spending
the night on board that graceful black beauty of a
sailboat.Wedidn’t
sleep much, having fun talking and just being away from our parents.
We must have dozed off some because I remember being blasted out
of a fitful sleep into bright sunshine and a dreadfully loud droning
noise beside us in the water.
We climbed up to the cockpit and remembered the nets we’d seen
stretched across the cove for weeks. Now, a large boat was right up
next to them, and the noise came from some great machine doing
something with the fish in the nets. The men on the boat invited us
on board, and silly us, receptive to anything, we climbed down in our
pajamas and watched the bewildering process going on. They never
explained, but I remember fish scales everywhere, stuck to the deck,
our ankles, our arms.
This experience was put away as other events overcame our lives, but
it stayed with me. I brought up the story to Ernie Burgess recently,
and he said, “Oh yes, that’s what they did. They were de-scaling the
fish. They did that back then, and sold the glittering slivers for the
manufacture of buttons!”
Oh, wow. So neat! Long-time mystery solved. But what happened to the fish?
Summer on Chebeague