Timber Tina was the first Survivor to get kicked off the island this season.

Tina Scheer, the lumberjill who owns the Great Maine Lumberjack Show in Trenton, was voted off Exile Island Thursday night at the end of the first episode of “Survivor: Panama” despite her demonstrated ability to start a fire, find fresh water and pluck a feisty live fish off the beach with her bare hands.

The 45-year-old world champion lumberjill even used skills from her day job – a rarity on the show – when she chopped at a palm tree with a machete in order to get firewood.

“I think they picked the wrong girl,” Scheer said in an on-air interview after her torch was extinguished.

Her older woman’s team had lost the program’s first immunity challenge when they failed to finish a complicated task faster than the next slowest group, the younger men. The challenge involved jumping in the ocean, unlocking a raft, paddling it to the beach, digging up a clue and solving a puzzle. Scheer was the group member who successfully dived to free the raft.

It appeared that one teammate, Cirie Fields of New Jersey – a woman who said on the episode that she was “afraid of leaves” – campaigned heavily to discredit Scheer with the other women on the team.

Her most poignant on-air moment was one that her teammates didn’t see. Scheer’s only child, 16-year-old Charlie, was killed last spring in a car crash in Wisconsin. At one point during the episode she walked away from the group of women and sat alone on the beach, writing on the sand that she loved and missed her son.

Her teammates were caught by the camera whispering that they couldn’t understand why she had chosen to sit alone. Tina had told the camera crew that she preferred not to tell her teammates that her son had died and that she needed some time to grieve alone.

Scheer splits her time between Maine and her hometown of Hayward, Wis., and couldn’t be reached for comment after the program aired. She will appear on the CBS Early Show this morning to discuss her short stay on Exile Island.

“It’s definitely a bummer,” Allison Melton of Orono, a lumberjill who works for Scheer, said Thursday night. “She had a lot of potential … I do think she made some mistakes.”

Those included being too honest with her teammates when she became frustrated with their work ethic or with their discomfort in the outdoors, according to the lumberjill.

“If you’re going to play that kind of game you can’t be honest,” Melton said. “You have to put on some kind of facade and pretend.”