Jonesport, Beals rivals in lobster boats, too Hundreds watch July Fourth races

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JONESPORT – The rivalry between the next-door coastal towns Jonesport and Beals, separated by Moosabec Reach, plays out on the water, too.

On no day is that more evident than the Fourth of July.

The towns share a bridge, a high school, a fondness for the Fourth – and the Moosabec Lobster Boat Races.

“The [radio] announcer … kept saying the Jonesport Lobster Boat Races, but it’s really the Moosabec races,” said Melanie Alley, a Beals woman who has organized the event each July Fourth for the last six years.

“It’s as much Beals as it is Jonesport,” she said.

The lobsterman who won the title “world’s fastest lobster boat” in the day’s final race, Galen Alley of Beals, did it with a wooden boat, Lorna R, that was built more than 30 years ago by Riley Beal, also of Beals.

But the man who may have felt the most satisfaction on Tuesday was Bernard “Benny” Beal of Jonesport, who watched from a chair at the end of his wharf.

“I could have watched from the water in my boat, but I thought I’d relax in a soft seat, for once,” Beal, 74, said after the event was finished.

“I sure enjoyed seeing one of my grandfather’s boats [Lorna R], that old wooden boat, take the prize. A lot of credit goes to the builder [Riley Beal], and also the guy who built the motor [Richard Weaver of Steuben]. He sure packed a lot of wallop in that motor.”

Benny Beal sat out racing this year after having raced Stella Ann to the “world’s fastest” title for many years.

He’s 74 and continues to haul traps daily. But he has eased away from racing in the last five or six years. He now sits out one year but races the next “to prove a point.”

Next year, he promises, he will be back in the races.

The return of Lorna R and the debut of Underdog were the two most talked-about topics at Tall Barney’s, Jonesport’s morning gathering spot for fishermen, in the months leading up to the Fourth.

They will continue to be talked about – and not just for the rest of the summer.

“For all year,” said Bimbo Look, a Jonesport man who has gotten excited about lobster boat racing for 37 of his 43 years.

Lorna R had been sold out of the area years ago, and brothers Rocky and Galen Alley brought it back last year from Vinalhaven.

They restored it specifically with the Moosabec races in mind – then endured a sudden fix in April when something went wrong on the water off Beals and it sank.

The fiberglass Underdog was built in Ernest Libby Jr.’s shop in Beals last winter specifically to race rather than to haul traps. It was considered the boat to beat – until Lorna R raced by it twice on the Reach.

The showdown in the “gas free-for-all” division – the third-to-last race – was tight, but Lorna R clocked 42 mph to Underdog’s 41 mph.

Galen Alley then appeared to have engine trouble with Lorna R, but brought the boat back around in time for the afternoon’s most awaited race, the “world’s fastest lobster boat” division.

Again, Lorna R outpowered Underdog. This time, the speeds were 53.6 mph for Alley to 49.3 mph for Libby Jr.

That a 5-mph tide was coming in kept Lorna R from possibly topping 55 mph – something that Benny Beal was able to do three or four times in his 50-plus years of racing.

However separate their hometown prides, residents of both Jonesport and Beals share a history of having originated lobster boat racing, which has become Maine’s most original summer sport.

It began as a Fourth of July folly, in fact, once in the 1950s as an event purely for the local lobstermen of Jonesport and Beals.

Now the sport has a well-established schedule of sanctioned races for points in seven coastal communities. Races at Boothbay Harbor opened the season last month, and after Tuesday’s races at Moosabec, races in Stonington, Friendship, Harpswell, Winter Harbor and Searsport take place through August.

Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the Fourth of July events in Jonesport drew crowds of 10,000.

“Back when I was a kid, this was big, much bigger than it is today,” Look said.

Tuesday’s event drew 70 boats, plus hundreds of spectators watching from the best vantage point of all, on the water in boats anchored along the course.

Kenneth Snowdeal, a Jonesboro native now living in Columbia Falls, would argue where to best watch the races. He was perched, along with an estimated 700 others, along the bridge to Beals.

He turned 65 in April and has been coming out to the races for 40 years.

“This is the best location,” Snowdeal said as he leaned on the bridge’s rails. “And this is the biggest event of all Down East on the Fourth, too.”

That’s something the people of Jonesport and Beals would agree on.