“The smart man ain’t the one who does it himself; he’s the one that can find the competent people to do it for him,” said Marsden Brewer, of Stonington, describing Winter Harbor business owner Christopher Byers. Byers, better known as “Buddha,” started the enormously successful D C Air & Seafood 12 years ago out of frustration at not being able to buy local compressed air for his urchin diving tanks.
A natural diver, Byers’s lobsterman father’s Winter Harbor friends had dubbed him “the harbor seal” when he was a child. His mother, Ruth Byers Rodgers, said that despite a tragic paternal family history of deaths at sea, her son “loved the water. He wanted to be on the bottom of the ocean and on the top of the ocean.”
Diving was perfect for a boy with a first-class mind, but one plagued with severe dyslexia. Although the Sumner school system recognized dyslexia 30 years ago, it didn’t know how to teach affected students. The only school that could have helped him was a boarding school in Boston that cost $20,000 per year, which his parents did not have; and at age eight he was not willing to live away from home.
At 12, Byers started earning money diving and cutting rope out of lobster boat wheels. At 13, he and a friend built a skiff that he described as, “a disaster.” He then turned to lobstering, but didn’t care for it.
Although he did well in grade school, in high school he was put in classes with mentally and physically handicapped students. He dropped out Oct. 12 of his third year.
With his mother helping by driving him back and forth to class, he passed the diver certification course and started diving professionally at age 17. This was the “gold rush” period of urchin diving, and Byers, among many others, earned $800 per day. In 1992, the year he was 20, he said, “There were over 3,000 licensed urchin divers.” He and many others made “over six figures a year.” He kept not a cent and had nothing to show for this high early income except for his now 16-year-old, recently refurbished 31-foot Duffy lobsterboat, NAVIGATOR.
In those glory days, Byers sold 90 percent of his sea urchins to Brewer, who then owned Bandit and The Bitch Seafood, the company from whom Byers also bought his air, driving all the way to Stonington from Winter Harbor because he “got in a feud” with a nearby urchin buyer and “wouldn’t do business with him.” The dyslexia, Byers says, gives him a low frustration level.
When Byers approached Brewer to purchase an air compressor, Brewer recalled, “I was getting tired of trying to deal in Stonington and Winter Harbor. He took over the Winter Harbor part of the business and never looked back.”
Brewer owner-financed the air compressor. Byers had a 20- by 24-foot garage that belonged with a house on property he rented from his mother, so on the way home with his purchase, he stopped in Ellsworth where his mother then lived and where she rented a room to Donald Robichaud. He remembers saying to Robichaud, “I’ve got an air compressor; I’ve got a buildin’ and I need someone to run it. Do you want to go into business 50-50 with me?” Robichaud did, and D (for Don) C (for Chris) Air was born. Byers, now 35, was 24 at the time.
It was that simple.
They pumped air for urchin divers in the area while Byers continued to urchin-dive, then Brewer asked them to buy scallops for him at their air station. In order to hold the scallops (in insulated totes) safely, Byers and Robichaud built an eight-by-eight-foot addition onto the garage that they could padlock. This was the first addition of many that would follow. Then, besides buying scallops, they began to sell diving apparel.
In the autumn of 1996, Byers recalled, “A high-line lobster fisherman, Jason Knowles — head of the Winter Harbor wharf — gave me $400 and asked me to go to Boston and find a crab market for him.”
Byers asked his friend Duane Joy to go with him to read road signs and handle other mundane details. Monday morning, hung over after a weekend of partying with the high school friend with whom they stayed, Byers said, “I walked into 30 different seafood companies: the Boston Fish Pier, everywhere,” offering Jonah crab for sale. Only two of the 30 showed any interest. One, Commercial Lobster, said they’d take a thousand-pound sample. He kept on trying until he found another, New England Crab, that asked for a two hundred-pound sample, and said, “The other 28 businesses were a bust.”
Back home on Monday, he called Knowles to say he needed 12 crates of crabs (one hundred lbs. to a crate) by the next day.
Tuesday, the weather was unfavorable for fishing, but that afternoon, Commercial Lobster called to up their sample order from 1,000 to 5,000 lbs.
On Wednesday, the boats could fish. Byers called Knowles to tell him he now needed 52 crates of crab for a sample. “Then,” he recalled, “New England Crab called and said they’d take all they could get sight unseen.”
Byers and Sargent drove to Ellsworth, rented a U-Haul, collected 35 crates of crab from Knowles’s boat, 40 more from Knowles’s friend Brian Bridges, in Corea, and drove the 75 crates of crab to Boston.
He made another trip with 70 or 80 crates of crab, then stopped in Bangor on the way home and bought a 1994 GMC 18-foot refrigerated truck.
That winter they bought and sold crabs and scallops, and pumped air. Then they started selling a few lobsters. As Byers recalled, “A hundred crates of crab and five crates of lobster, that’s how we started.”
The following fall, Byers started buying sea urchins. By now, the business had grown to the point where he needed help, so he asked his mother to join the company as bookkeeper.
Ruth Byers Rodgers spent that first winter freezing in what she recalls as a cardboard room they added to the garage for testing sea urchin roe for size and quality to determine its price, a process she calls “making a good guess.” She’d weigh an urchin, then crack the shell, scoop out the roe and weigh it to find the roe’s percentage of the urchin’s total weight. If the roe was 10 percent of the urchin’s total weight, that made a base price of such and such. With each additional percentage point, the price went up 10 cents.
A year later, Byers bought out Robichaud and made his mother a 50-50 partner in the business, which they incorporated in January 1997. On becoming a partner, Ruth Rodgers mortgaged her house and infused the business with $25,000 that paid for a 30- by 40-foot addition.
Within three years, D C Air became the biggest urchin buyer in the state. Byers remembers buying 5 million pounds of sea urchins their best year, a year 18 million pounds was harvested in the entire state. He knows his figures are correct: he was appointed by the governor to the first Sea Urchin Council in 1993 and has been on it “faithfully” ever since.
With the decline in the sea urchin industry from over-harvesting, he and Rodgers took the money they made from urchins and invested it in the lobster industry, where they have been “very successful,” as opposed to other efforts that were not. He admits, “We’ve been in all kinds of stuff that flopped.” His failures include trying to buy and sell sea cucumbers and mussels. He said, “There’s been a lot of long, hard road.”
That road, though, has led to a multi-million-dollar corporation with about a million dollars invested in three big “Novi” fishing vessels 48, 45 and 42-feet long, seven 18-wheel trailer trucks, three 10-wheelers and a full-time staff of 14. That original garage has expanded to an 8,500-square-foot building. Sales last year were, he said, “Way over $10 million.”
His secret: Byers always offered a good product, he always paid fishermen well, and he worked like a demon. Still does.
He starts his daily phone calls at 7:30 in the morning. At 9 he gets in his truck and rides around the Schoodic Peninsula for an hour–not hard duty in anyone’s book–to get an idea of production, both his and his competitors’ before stopping at a restaurant for breakfast. He then works at his office, making calls to check availability of bait and giving orders to the crew. If it’s one of the three days a week that he buys urchins, he heads to Jonesport to do that while Rodgers takes care of the shop.
Despite his success, Byers is unsure of the future. Seated at his desk in the original part of the garage and sporting a Hawaiian shirt under which shone a flat, Italian gold chain, the crusher claw of a gold lobster clasping it, he said, “My biggest fear now is that the lobster industry is going to decline. We have expanded and expanded in the last ten years, and are now uneasy because the lobster business is 60 percent of my business. The sea urchin industry was at one time 80 percent of my business. It’s now about five.”
D C Air handles about a third of the Maine mahogany clam industry. It also buys and sells bait, lobster, crab, scallops, urchins, halibut and what he calls “a few mussels.” He did well with big jumbo scallops, called U-10s, but admitted, “That resource is pretty well gone.”
“We’ve had to be flexible because what we started out to do has changed five or six times,” he said. He then took a breath, smiled, and added, “And we still sell air.”