State tries to coax Mainers out of fishing business

BEALS – Every Monday, Vernal Woodward hops in his Mercury Marquis, puts on some inspirational music and begins paying visits to fishermen and their families. He’s a traveling salesman of sorts.

But the 94-year-old son and brother of a lobsterman is selling an idea that many fishing families don’t want to buy.

Maybe, he suggests, it’s time for struggling fishermen to throw in the towel. Try something else. Attend some classes.

“I say, ‘How would you like to go to school? Here’s a list of things you can study.’ They say, ‘What are you trying to do, get us out of the lobster business?”‘ The answer is yes.

The notion that the state can persuade lifelong fishermen to try new jobs on land has met with ridicule in Down East Maine. But slowly – over the past seven years and at a cost to the federal government of $11 million – Maine’s program has paid to retrain 1,000 fishing industry workers in financial need.

In the early days, the retraining project’s director, Scott Tilton, got the word out through advertisements and information booths. But he soon learned that he got better results with people bred in the fishing industry like Woodward.

When a fisherman hears it suggested that he can’t make a living on the water, he should hear it from one of his own, Tilton said.

“This is an admission of failure, to say, ‘I can’t make it in the fishing industry anymore,”‘ said Tilton, whose project, amid rebounding groundfish stocks, is set to expire next year. “It’s a private decision.”

Just across the water from Woodward’s house is Tall Barney’s, a diner named for a strong man who fished here in the 19th century and, according to legend, once felled a horse by punching it on the nose.

Fishermen who go to Tall Barney’s for coffee before heading out to sea don’t like the idea of quitting.

With fishermen, as with loggers whose families have spent generations in the woods, sticking it out becomes a matter of family pride, said a specialist in displaced natural resource workers.

“There’s a history that’s very palpable. It’s in the individual, and it’s in the community,” said Joe Valek, who has overseen retraining of loggers in Oregon and Washington for the U.S. Department of Labor. “But as the situation changes, there comes a time where an individual decides to part from tradition.”

Frank Morgan, a peer support worker who tries to drum up interest in the program in mid-coast Maine, said he routinely passes out information to groups of fishermen who shrug or snicker.

But later, when he gets home, his phone starts to ring, he said.

Vernal Woodward has refined his pitch by delivering it to individuals or small groups but never big groups. He drives past Tall Barney’s on every trip up but he doesn’t go there to publicize the program.

“I wouldn’t mention it in there,” said Woodward. “They’d throw me through the side of the house.”

Despite resistance, the pitch works sometimes.

Tim Merchant remembers the Mercury Marquis coming down the driveway two summers ago. He listened to Woodward, filed away the business card and went about business as usual digging for clams and worms.

Then one cold evening this winter, the haul seemed heavier and his joints achier, and he retrieved Woodward’s phone number.

In total, some 780 people connected to the industry – spouses and children are eligible, as are clammers, wormers, and seaweed pickers – have been counted as successful “separations.”

Success is not a given. The process ends in one out of five cases that Maine’s Retraining Project has handled in a return to the fishing industry.

Meanwhile, with groundfish stocks in an apparent rebound, it’s unlikely that the retraining work with fishermen will continue after the latest federal grant ends next year, Tilton said.

None of that deters Woodward.

On Monday, he planned to get back into his Mercury, put on the music and take to the road with a Sprite as he went fishing for fishermen ready to try life on land. “I’ll have ’em,” he said. “Just wait.”