Teen buoys summer income by lobstering

WEST BATH – Nate Bishop knows lobstering can trap your soul. Every professional lobster fisherman the wiry 14-year-old meets tells him not to do it for a living.

“But they love it and they won’t stop. They can’t quit,” said Nate, who will be a freshman at North Yarmouth Academy in the fall. This summer marks his fourth year as a lobsterman.

As a milestone of another sort, Nate’s photograph commemorates the month of November in the 2002 Bachelor Lobstermen Calendar. He is the youngest lobsterman pictured; the oldest is in his mid-80s.

After seeing last year’s first-ever calendar, Nate’s mother, Anne Bridgman, sent a snapshot of her son and a letter to Will and Gray Cook, who conceived and published the calendar. Would they be interested in Nate? They would.

“I thought, ‘This is too wonderful,”‘ recalled Gray Cook, who was looking for calendar subjects. “I called and said we would love to include him in the calendar.”

Then last fall, comedian Tim Sample contacted the Cooks with an idea for his “Postcard from Maine” segment on CBS Sunday Morning. He wanted to film a piece on the calendar in Tenants Harbor. Gray Cook called the Bridgmans.

Did Nate want to appear on national television? The family towed Nate’s 15-foot skiff up U.S. Route 1 for the filming. They later hauled it to Port Clyde in November for the 2002 calendar shoot, which shows Nate in profile. No fan mail so far, but the calendars, autographed by Nate, make perfect Christmas gifts for family and friends, his mother said.

“I don’t really parade around saying I’m a lobsterman,” Nate said. “And I don’t really like the picture in the calendar anyway.”

Nate began lobstering at 11, deciding he needed a summer job like his older brother Roscoe, a senior this year at North Yarmouth Academy. One day, driving along Berry’s Mill Road, he and his mother saw a sign: “Free Traps.” They took them and began repairing the 15 dilapidated wooden traps.

Anne Bridgman had built a skiff, mostly from plywood, that sat in the basement of the family’s home on Shoal Cove, where Nate grew up looking at salt water. Neighbors gave them a bait freezer.

Greg, his stepfather, a Bath Iron Works employee, renovated an old outboard motor. Neighbor Seth Washburn said Nate could use his dock to moor the skiff. The fledgling lobsterman also got advice from John Van Orden, another neighbor, who took him out on his boat to gain experience, and told him to go to Stinson Seafood in Bath to buy herring for bait. The next day, Nate set two traps in the cove.

Now, he has 22 traps, “all wire ones,” Nate said proudly, and his mother, who has a recreational lobster license and admitted she was afraid when Nate started lobstering, has five.

Nate said he might increase the number of traps during high school, but that would take a bigger boat, and he does not want to pursue lobstering – a way to make money during the summer – as a career.

Nate knows better than to bother anyone. He sets his traps, weighted with bricks and on 30-foot lines, in Brighams Cove, and a little out into Winnegance Bay, but not too far. Lobstermen who infringe on others’ territory can discover their traps cut adrift or pull them up to find the netting slashed out. Local lobstermen have been kind to him.

“A lot of lobstermen look with fondness at kids lobstering. They remember when it was carefree,” said Anne Bridgman. “They make sure we’re doing OK.”

Anne, who wears buoy earrings, said she believes Maine’s plentiful supply of lobsters may be due, in large part, to the number of lobstermen putting out herring as food and bait.

Armed with his $46 student license, Nate lobsters from mid-May through October and November, and calls fall “the best time” because of the number of lobsters he can catch. He goes out a couple of times a week to haul his traps, marked by buoys painted rust, black and tan.

During the summer, he might catch six legal-sized lobsters in 22 traps; during the fall, he might get 15.

Lobstering also keeps Nate in shape for lacrosse, hockey and soccer during the school year. He just sells to neighbors and friends, letting them know when he has eight or so lobsters available.

“I’m the cheapest price around,” he said, but manages to pull about $500 from the cove each summer.

Nate supplements that income as a sternman aboard a boat operated by Ryan Whitmore, 18, who works as a sternman on his father’s lobster boat in Portland.

On Whitmore’s two days off from his father’s boat, he and Nate haul 300 traps in Winnegance Bay.

“He’s got two traps on each buoy, and I take one and he takes the other,” said Nate, who gets up at 4:30 a.m. to work with Whitmore.

“The sternman pretty much does the messy work. I take out the lobsters and measure and band them, and I bait the traps.” Nate keeps track of his income and expenditures on a home computer. “I only sell lobsters and buy bait and gas, so it’s pretty basic,” he said. His father, Sam Bishop, disagrees.

“Slowly but surely, he’s getting bigger just by selling to friends and neighbors,” Bishop said. “He’s quite astute about it. He really tries to make a living out of it, and if he wants to do it later on, he’s got all the tools.”

Even though he does not venture far into the bay, and turns back if the weather looks rough, Nate said he has experienced some scary moments. Once, with his mother on board, he was unable to pull up a trap. Tying the buoy to the skiff, “I gunned the engine full speed, and we just kept going around and around,” Nate said. “Then the trap came up funny, facing backwards.”

“And we saw this red big something that slowly floated off,” said Anne Bridgman. “It was really spooky.” And unidentified to this day.