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Carrying on a tradition: Capt. Mike Brewer and crewman Walter Boyko work one of the last of Maine's sardine carriers. (At Sea).

Article Excerpt
Mike Brewer leans back in a beat-up car seat that serves as a captain's chair. As the late October sun sets and the empty boat pounds into the south wind, he glances between the plotter and the horizon.

"This business is an escape from reality," he says. He crossed the threshold an hour ago, when the 70-foot sardine carrier, Double Eagle, left the wharf in Rockland, Maine. In the fickle herring business, he seldom knows where he will get fish or where he will sell them.

Tonight, Brewer is headed toward Monhegan, where he plans to rendezvous with Western Sea and hopefully pump a boatload of herring aboard from the purse seiner's net. Sardine carriers do not actively fish; they are opportunistic synergists, providing a ready market for the boats that do.

For most of the 20th century, herring supplied the sardine canneries that lined the Maine coast; now, over 70 percent of the herring caught off Maine are sold as lobster bait. "About 90 percent of my market is lobster bait," says Brewer, who mostly sells on the offshore islands.

Brewer's crewman, Walter Boyko, makes his way aft from the fo'c'sle and climbs into the wheelhouse. "Jeezus, I thought you said it was flunking out?"

Brewer shrugs. "It don't look like it," he says, and turns on the sonar. Brewer calls the Western Sea on the VHF. "See anything?"

"No," says Danny Fill, the seiner's captain. "We're going down the western side of Monhegan to the Duck Ledges."

"We're the only carrier that helps look for fish," Brewer says, but his sonar and bottom sounder show no signs of herring. "The customers get pissed when there's no bait," says Brewer.

Midwater trawlers started working in the Gulf of Maine over the last 10 years, and Brewer, along with many other fishermen, believes the new boats have overfished the resource and disrupted the herring's spawning.

"I tried to tell'm 10 years ago the trawlers were comin', don't let them in," Brewer says. "But there's always been plenty of fish around. Now people are realizing its not always going to be that way." As the fishery changes though, Brewer and the region's lobstermen often find themselves counting on the midwater boats for fish.

Before the Western Sea reaches Monhegan, the plan changes. At 8 p.m., Brewer alters course to follow Fill out to Matinicus, 20 miles offshore. Boyko turns in, and the wind turns on. The Double Eagle runs across 4- to 8-foot seas for two hours, following the wake of the seiner all the way to Matinicus Rock.

At midnight, Brewer blows the boat's horn. Boyko rolls cursing out of his bunk, and climbs the fo'c'sle ladder; he hangs onto the rails inside the doghouse and hollers across the wave-lashed deck, "I ain't comin' out until you stop this goddamn thing."

The engine idles down.

"We're going in." Brewer hollers back, and turns the boat toward Rockland. Boyko goes aft to stand a watch. The waxing moon shines on the waves as the empty boat heads home.

"She'd be a lot prettier with the green water coming over her deck," Brewer says. "Cuz that'd mean she was loaded."

A week later the boat idles...