The Lobster Trap: Can Stonington, Maine, Survive the Tide of Change?

I first visited Stonington, Maine, in the summer of 2003 to write a story for Yankee about the community’s proudly held identity as a fishing town. Even then, Stonington was an anomaly. While other main streets and harbors along the Maine coast had become the shiny domain of tourist shops and pleasure boats, here, on the rocky outermost tip of remote Deer Isle, lived just over 1,000 people whose lives were still largely built around what they hauled from the sea.

The challenges Stonington faced back then—tighter regulations, increasing costs, wild swings in the price of lobster—still confront the town more than two decades later. But now it’s increasingly feeling the threat of climate change, too. Early last year, two powerful storms slammed into the island, cutting off Stonington from the mainland, devastating businesses, and swamping the public pier. The Gulf of Maine’s warming waters, meanwhile, are putting the very survival of the state’s signature lobster industry at risk. Even for a community long accustomed to dealing with headwinds, these latest developments beg the question: What will it take for New England’s largest lobster port to endure?

Last June, I returned to Stonington to find out.   

* * * * *

Robbie Eaton is ready to get on the water.

It’s pushing 5:30 on a Thursday morning in early June, and for the past half hour the 24-year-old has been prepping his boat, the Legacy, a mint-green 35-footer docked at the Stonington Fish Pier. It’s not quite summer but it’s starting to feel like it, warming up even at this hour, and the surrounding harbor is quiet, a testament to just how early the workday starts around here. In Maine’s largest lobster port, many of its 350 boats motored off nearly two hours ago.

If Eaton were intent on chasing some of the season’s very earliest shedders, he would have joined them; however, his focus these past few weeks has been the state’s short halibut season. He’s licensed to catch 25 fish for the month, and with half of them already landed he’s determined to finish strong. The $12 a pound he’s fetching is decent, but the real value of the work is that it’s something different. When you lobster most of the year, it’s nice to break up the routine.

“I ain’t even got any of my traps set,” confesses Eaton, and takes a final swig from his can of Full Throttle energy drink. “I’ll start doing that next week.”

Eaton is a big guy who moves with the unrushed pace of someone who has spent most of his life working the ocean. Eatons have plied Stonington’s waters for generations, and in this tight-knit community of familiar names, theirs is one of the most well-known.

As Eaton prepares to launch his workday, his father, Mike, sits behind the wheel of his idling truck parked nearby, chatting with Casey Soper, a local bait dealer.

“I’ve not stopped this week,” Soper says. “Spruce Head three times. Rockland three more times. Boothbay. All over. I’m running bait everywhere.”

“At a high price,” says Mike, with a laugh.

“Goddamn right!”

Mike turns his attention to his son. “Hey, Robbie! Grab another fish box in the back of Casey’s truck.”

Eaton lifts out a final batch of bait and climbs down to his boat. Soon, he’s cruising the still waters of Stonington Harbor under a streak of sun that has finally broken the clouds. The two older men take in the moment.

“I’m staying put today,” Mike says, as his eight-week-old black Lab climbs over his lap. “I’m just going to play with her. I’m sort of semi-retired at this point.”

“More like just tired,” Soper cracks.

Even amid the men’s banter about this year’s incredible pogie run, and chopping it up over Mike’s father’s once-dominant lobster boat racing (“He had big horsepower and the balls to drive it,” Soper recalls), more serious topics can’t be avoided. A decade ago, Mike was regularly fishing six days a week, hauling 800 traps. Today, he’s reduced his schedule by a third and cut his trap load to 600.

“Honestly, I hate lobstering,” he says. “It’s become such a cutthroat business. The price of bait is high. Fuel is high. And the atmosphere around it has changed. People have gotten greedy.”

Soper jumps in. “How long have you been on your own?”

“Thirty-five years.”

“And how much has the price of lobster changed in those 35 years?” (Though the figure has, in fact, gone up and down over that time, Soper’s point is well taken: In 2023, the most recent year for Maine’s catch data, lobster averaged $4.95 a pound—a little over 30 cents more than what it fetched in 2005.)

“Everything else has gone through the roof,” Mike says. “We can’t set our own prices, because it’s considered price fixing. If you said, ‘I’m not selling my lobsters for that amount,’ the buyer would just say too bad and go on to the next boat. But then when the pandemic hit, it got to be $8 a pound. They showed their real hand.”

These are hard facts that complicate what Mike wants for his son, Robbie, and his older daughter, Sara. Both are committed to making their living on the water. But perhaps for the first time in the family’s long Stonington history, the older generation would prefer the younger one didn’t follow in its footsteps.

“It’s not like you get to really enjoy your time on the water,” Mike says. “You have to fish hard all summer and through the fall just to make it through the winter. When I look at the kind of future my kids may have, I’m not sure they have one.” He sighs. “But it’s all they want to do. There’s no sense in talking to them about doing something different.”

In one of the last working fishing ports left in the Northeast, the very identity of Stonington is being put to the test in both familiar ways and new ones. By a housing shortage and the increasing real estate prices it helps fuel. By wealthy second-home owners. By climate change. So, what becomes of a community when its core industry can no longer support the families that depend on it?

“I have nothing against a place like Boothbay, but when you go there it’s not even the same place that it used to be,” says Stonington’s longtime town manager, Kathleen Billings. “Same thing with southern Maine. Did [a tourist economy] really benefit Maine much? I just don’t think it did. When you start losing your natural-resource-based economies, you lose so many other things, whether that’s inland or on the ocean. I think Maine needs to take a really hard look at itself and decide if it still wants to be Maine or Vacationland.”

* * * * *

For much of its existence, Stonington’s remoteness has been more of a virtue than an impediment. This is not a town you just stumble across. Three hours north of Portland and 60 miles from I-95, Stonington sits on the southern half of Deer Isle, an island about two-thirds up the Maine coast and the gateway to Merchant’s Row, an expanse of water running five nautical miles long and one of the centerpieces of Maine’s $400-million-a-year lobster industry.

“Being nestled between Bar Harbor and Camden, we often get skipped over,” says Travis Fifield, a town selectperson and the fourth generation to run the family seafood dealer, Fifield Lobster Co. “You figure when it comes to a coastal town this pretty, you’re going to drive down a Main Street filled with gift shops and bright signs. But it’s really unexpectedly quiet and it feels manageable. At times, when you’re driving around, you’re on this remote stretch by the water and it can feel like you’re at the edge of the world.”

In recent years, though, that allure has reached a broader audience, and Stonington’s rising profile has affected who can now call it home. Median house prices, fueled by the weekly-rental market and second-home ownership, have shot up to over $400,000. The lack of affordable housing has gnawed at the community’s very ability to sustain itself: Contractors are starved for local plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. The local schools struggle to retain teachers. Meanwhile, the predawn hours bring a steady stream of commuting lobstermen from the mainland.

On a prime summer morning, often as early as 3 a.m., Richard Turner Jr. is a part of that commuter traffic. During my first visit to Stonington in 2003, I spent a full day on the water with Turner, then 36, and his father, with whom he’d worked since age 13. Turner spoke with awe of men like his father, hardworking captains who’d built successful lives and raised families doing the only thing they ever wanted to do. “All my heroes were fishermen,” he told me then. “Sometimes I wish I had done something else, but as a kid I couldn’t stay off the water.” He was skeptical, however, that the same life his father had forged would be accessible to him. “In 20 years, I don’t believe working people, normal people, will be able to afford to live here,” he said. 

He had no idea how right he’d be. He’s 56 now, and in the warmer months he lobsters with his cousin, Hilton, before hooking on with a scallop boat in the winter. For the past several years he and his girlfriend, Faye, have split their time between two locations: Stonington in winter, when rentals are less expensive, and a mobile home park in Orland, a good 50 miles from his hometown, in summer.

Orland is where I meet Turner on an early June afternoon. It’s been just a few days since he moved from Stonington, and he is still settling into his summer routine. We sit at a picnic table at the mobile home park, and as we talk, Turner, a gray baseball hat perched atop his head, picks away at a pack of Montego Reds.  

“I miss the salt, I miss seeing Isle au Haut,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty here. We can walk to a lake from where we are, but a lake doesn’t do much for me.” Turner raises his hands and holds them a foot apart. “I’m not interested in catching fish this big. I used to catch sharks as big as this table. You see these guys posting a pic of themselves on Instagram holding up a brook trout and I’m like, I’m proud of you, buddy, but to me that’s just not exciting.”

Health issues have slowed Turner down over the years, and he fears that he may only have another season or two in him. “I just can’t keep up with things the way I used to,” he says. “I’m getting slower. My reactions are slower. My eyesight isn’t what it was, so I miss things. You gotta be in your 20s to be doing what I’m doing. Every second counts—and if you step in the wrong spot with the rope, you’re in a mess.”

Turner has mixed feelings about what’s happened to his hometown. In part, he feels like a casualty of its success—that in missing out on the early years of a lobster boom that began to take off in 2009, he missed the opportunity to create his own nest egg. An influx of younger lobstermen and people “from away” means he also doesn’t recognize many of the faces in town.

But as Stonington has built and attracted fortunes, he also sees a town that looks prettier and more upscale than it used to. Main Street has a few new restaurants, the Opera House theater has been refurbished, and many of the homes don’t appear as tired as they once did.

“When I was a kid, a family would fight over who would get the house after someone died and it would sit empty for a bunch of years,” he says. “Now those houses are fixed up. I think it’s been pretty positive for the town.”

As someone who’s always called Stonington home but now can’t afford to live there, Turner is remarkably sanguine. He recalls a piece of fishing advice he received years ago from an old-timer.

“I had this place where I was catching a lot of scallops, and one day after I’d been off the water for a few days, I went back and didn’t catch a thing,” he says. Turns out, the few friends he’d told about the spot had gone and cleaned it out. “This guy just told me, ‘It’s eat or be eaten. Don’t take it personal.’ And it’s the same thing with this housing market. Hey, if I could have afforded [the houses in Stonington], I’d have bought them up, too. Maybe I’d have bought every last one of them. Who am I to complain?”

* * * * *

Latin pop music blares from a speaker as Tyler Cousins motors his boat, the Breezy Dawn, to the docks of Stonington’s largest seafood dealer, the Lobster Co-op. Waiting for him are three men from Puerto Rico who had traveled north for the $18.50-an-hour jobs that Maine twenty-somethings no longer want to fill. The trio includes a 32-year-old nurse named Luis, a new father who says the pay is better than anything he could earn back home at a hospital. “Maine is beautiful and I like the work,” he tells me. The men arrived in May, live in housing right on the dock, and will return home in December. 

Cousins bops his head to the music as he powers his boat down. It’s still early in the lobstering season, and the 36-year-old Stonington native is taking the day off after hauling in a few hundred pounds yesterday afternoon. Though his head is shaved, he sports a long beard, and he wears camo shorts, a red T-shirt, and a pair of sandals that do little to slow him as he moves briskly around the boat’s stern, offloading empty traps. At the same time, he’s coaching one of the dockworkers, John, who’s still learning how to use the motorized lift that transfers the traps onto a trailer.

Cousins watches one trap dangle in front of him. “You take my teeth out and I won’t be happy,” he tells John, and laughs.

Several minutes later, Cousins is back behind the wheel of his boat to make the slow, short motor through the harbor to fuel and bait up for tomorrow’s run. In a town where a lobster license is practically a birthright, Cousins learned his trade at the hands of his grandfather, Dick Bridges, who was running his first boat before the age of 10 and even now, at 80, still fishes every day.

Despite Cousins’s best efforts to leave lobstering behind, “I realized early on that living on land, getting a paycheck, dealing with people—that wasn’t for me,” he says. “I went to school for hydraulics and diesel mechanics and even moved out to San Diego at one point and worked at a marina: lived on a boat, had a great life, but I was bored. I came back.”

He slows as he approaches the bait dock. “I like the chaos of never knowing if the job is done. Everything is up in the air: the weather, the lobsters, the mechanics.”

Gliding to a stop, he looks up at the two men on the dock. Both are familiar faces. “You got anything special?” he barks.

They drop down six 40-pound bags of frozen redfish. “You sure you can lift those bags in front of your friend?” teases one of the workers. Cousins smiles, waves him off, then rumbles over to the fueling station. That’s $188 for the bait and another $667 in diesel.

“The expenses pile up fast,” says Cousins. “During the heat of the season, you can be up around a grand a day. But I haul alone, so the good days are really good. I can’t haul as much as I’d like, but I don’t have the headaches of teaching someone the system or the problems of just working with another person.”

He cocks a grin. “And to do the same job others do with two people, that makes me kind of a badass.”

Cousins is at an interesting point in his life. He’s not so old that he can’t just break off and start a new career. He’s watched friends leave lobstering for good and heard others talk about doing the same. But just as quickly as doubts begin to enter his mind, they go away.   

“I’m building a business,” he says. “And I’m getting better at it every year. There are lobsters out there. There are always lobsters out there. You just need to know where to look to find them.”

* * * * *

In mid-January of 2024, back-to-back nor’easters clobbered Stonington. High winds, heavy rain, and a rarely seen high tide wreaked havoc on the waterfront, pulling wharves from pilings, hurling debris out to sea and onto land, and flooding roads, businesses, and homes. Down at the town fish pier, assistant harbormaster Dana Webb watched as a four-foot wall of water rushed past his office building, flinging a boat onto the landing and relocating a pair of dumpsters. The pier’s main generator was swallowed whole by seawater.

Elsewhere in town, the waterfront’s electrical system was wiped out, while the Deer Isle Causeway was submerged by 18 inches of water, isolating islanders from the mainland. Private businesses also took a beating. At Fifield Lobster Co., a wharf that had been raised and rebuilt just two years earlier was overtaken by stormwater and had to be reset. Across Stonington it was much the same, with upgrades and rebuilds slated for the docks at both the Lobster Co-op and Isle au Haut Boat Services, all in the name of addressing what had happened and accounting for what could happen next. The uncertainties unleashed by climate change leave no other options. Unless, of course, Stonington ceases to be Stonington.

“People say, ‘Well, just retreat,’” Travis Fifield later told The New York Times. “We can’t retreat. We have to be here.”

Stonington town manager Kathleen Billings was at her home in North Deer Isle when the first and more powerful of the two storms rolled up early on the morning of January 10. “Everything got racked,” she says. “That surge came in and tore all the docks up. It was just devastating, but I also think it opened the eyes of a lot of people that these kinds of storms are real.”

Building resiliency is layered into every part of Billings’s job, and her office reflects the different projects that compete for her time. Desks and tables are stacked with blueprints, maps, and memos. There are grants to complete, project bids to pore over, and a schedule of meetings that at times can feel relentless. “It can be a lot,” says Billings, who has worked for Stonington since 1997 and been its town manager for the past 18 years.

Billings’s family were among Deer Isle’s original European settlers, and today their name is etched into various parts of its economy—notably Billings Diesel & Marine, one of the biggest full-service boatyards between Boston and Nova Scotia. But Billings’s perspective on her hometown isn’t colored by nostalgia. She speaks in meaty paragraphs about the toll that federal regulations have taken on the local fishing economy and the threats it also faces from climate change and cost of living.

Few Maine towns of this size have been as proactive around these issues as Stonington. Over the past year, Billings’s office has spearheaded town discussions about workforce housing, sea-level rise, land management, and aquaculture. A recently established town-administered resiliency fund uses donations from seasonal residents to purchase private waterfront and make it accessible to fishermen. Restrictions on short-term rentals earned voter approval in 2023, and even before last January’s storms, plans were drawn up to raise the fish pier.

With so much of Stonington’s income dependent on the sea, what’s at stake is not just a single industry, Billings says, but a community’s whole way of life. 

“We are a fishing town, and it’s important we maintain that—not just for the fishermen but for everyone else who benefits from it,” she says. “But we only have so much working waterfront, and with the sea-level rise and the storms, how many times do you think these guys can rebuild? Once that waterfront goes to hotels and restaurants, you’re never going to get it back. It’s gone forever.”

And what fills that void, says Billings, is not a one-for-one replacement. A viable Stonington, she argues, is not a tourist-heavy Stonington, whose harbor is stocked with pleasure boats and an economy that relies on a 12-week window to make most of its money.

“I’m all for diversity, but I don’t think a seasonal economy is the answer,” Billings says. “It’s really hard to have stable families, to have a school and other businesses that can subsist and spin off from that. I know some people don’t always see it that way. But if we are going to stay a strong community, we need to sink our teeth into year-round jobs that can help people.”

Whether those year-round jobs can reliably be built long-term off or around the lobster industry is another question. In 2021, Stonington pulled in a record-setting $76 million worth of lobster—nearly $21 million more than Maine’s next-largest port, Vinalhaven—undergirding the state’s record haul of just over $724 million. But those numbers are seen as an anomaly. A near-decade-long boom that began around 2009 has given way to a series of uneven years.

“We have seen a decrease, but I’m not sure you can say that’s a biological signal yet,” says Carla Guenther, chief scientist for the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stonington. “We’ve had a lot of demographic changes in the fishery and how the fishermen are participating [in studies]. But there’s definitely been a slowing of the catch. There was a time when you pretty much couldn’t avoid catching lobsters. You’d pull up a trap and it was full. But you talk to the experienced lobstermen and they’d say, ‘What goes up must come down.’ For others, the thought was, Let’s just ride this high.

“I wish we’d asked as a community if this boom was real,” she says, “because I think there may be a breaking point.”

* * * * *

Michael Joyce is hedging his bets against whether that breaking point might come. He’s 21 and, like Robbie Eaton, grew up here and hails from a long line of fishermen. But he hasn’t staked his future to the water. Instead, he completed an HVAC degree from Eastern Maine Community College, and over the past two years he’s been deep into a 4,000-hour apprenticeship to be an electrician. His mentor is Dana Webb, a veteran electrician as well as assistant harbormaster, and together they worked for much of last year to rebuild the fish pier’s electrical service. 

“I still want to fish, but slowly make it a hobby,” Joyce tells me as we sit in Webb’s office, a small building located at the head of the pier. “I want to keep it fun but still make the money. I look at guys I know, and I just see a lot of them just surviving, just making their payments. I don’t want to fall into that rabbit hole.”

For a time, Joyce thought he might have it in him to make fishing his life’s work. He started in the business at age 7 with his grandfather. A decade later, he had a 29-footer with an inboard engine large enough to haul 500 traps. “There’s a freedom to being on the water all day that is hard to beat,” he says.

Webb, 74, nods in agreement. He also grew up in Stonington, and while he worked 40 years as an electrician at the Bucksport paper mill, he always had a little boat with some traps to run on the side. “[Joyce] and I both talk about how nice it is,” he says. “Just to be out there, there ain’t nothin’ like it. But to do that job, you gotta have drive and you gotta love what you’re doing.”

“One hundred percent,” Joyce says.

Joyce lobstered most of 2021, when Maine shattered catch records. He talked to his parents about pursuing an offshore permit, but his family pushed back; his mom, in particular, lobbied him hard to create some options for himself. So, he enrolled in college and then watched as the lobster boom began to soften. In the time since, Joyce has straddled two versions of the future: one that is still “fully invested” in lobstering, and another that wants “protect” his years ahead.

“I really want to have [security] for my family and stuff, and I think [the electrician] trade is never going to go away,” he says.

Among Joyce’s buddies, “I have friends who are diehards,” he says. “They have the 40-foot boats and they’re all in. But I can tell they’re worried. I have [another] friend, he went to school for electrical engineering and he’s fishing, but he sees the same scenario [I do]. He’d like to start a business before long.”

Over the next several minutes, Joyce and Webb’s conversation becomes a highlight reel of the challenges that the fishing industry faces. But it’s still impossible for either man to shake his reverence for it. You can hear it in their voices. Joyce likes electrical work just fine—the order of it, the demand for precision, and, of course, the consistency of the paycheck—but something in him needs to be on the water. It’s who he is. It’s what he does. It’s where he truly prefers to be.

 “You’re your own boss,” he says. “You’re watching the sun rise, then you pull up these traps, and they’re full of lobsters. It’s really something special.”