“I’m really excited about that kind of display,” said Dana Morse, about the model and full-size trawling nets on view in the new fisheries exhibition at the Maine Maritime Museum, in Bath. Morse is the extension associate for the Maine Sea Grant program. “I don’t remember any kind of other display like that being at another museum.”
The exhibition, “Net Worth: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Fin Fisheries” opened May 2 and will run to November 29.
It’s a wide-ranging exhibition, involving history going back to Basque and Portuguese fishermen. “Coming after cod over here was the start of many an empire,” said Christopher Hall, curator of exhibitions at the museum, noting that, “The Plymouth Colony, in 1620, had to send to Monhegan, then a fishing station, for victuals.”
Starting from that point, Hall said he planned to show fishing methods and gear from the early 19th century up to the present. The exhibit includes recent photographs of what Hall called the “day in, day out slogging away in the fisheries,” captured by Kittery Point photographer Sam Murfitt.
For this show Hall gathered help from various sources. The net that has Morse so exited belongs to Craig A. Pendleton, a former Saco groundfisherman and coordinating director of Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA). Pendleton said, “A lot of our focus at NAMA was about teaching the public exactly what we did.” There aren’t a lot of opportunities of that sort of thing, so when Hall called and told Pendleton he was going to have fishing gear on display and do a series of conversations and evening discussions, Pendleton said, “I just thought it was well worth my time to help him out.”
Morse met with Hall, he said, to help him understand “fishing gear, how it’s rigged, how it acts, how it relates to all kinds of things including fish behavior, and just kind of the complicated nature of catching fish and operating a fishing business.” He also helped procure nets and gear through a project he did with Trevett fisherman Kelo Pinkham. Pinkham came up with an idea for a trawl net that would float high enough off the bottom that it would catch cod without catching flat fish on the bottom, and then could be set higher to catch haddock without catching the cod, swimming closer to the bottom.
Morse had a net maker make an engineering model-size net to test the net in a flume tank in Newfoundland. Then they tried a full-size version off Rockport, Massachusetts and had an underwater video made of the net in action, which could be called the gear of tomorrow. Morse and Pinkham will speak on the their grant project at the museum on Thursday, June 18 at 6 p.m.. The talk is called “Not Your Father’s Trawl Net: Fishing Gear in the Age of Technology and Collaborative Science.” Hall hung the net model from the ceiling just inside the museum.
Because of the space needed to display Pendleton’s full-size net, Hall set it up outside the museum. Morse said he was excited about seeing the net stretched out, “Because there’s nothing like being able to put your hands on things and seeing the equipment as it is in real life to give an interested person, a real sense of what this stuff is and what it’s supposed to do.”
In addition to Pendleton’s trawl net, Hall displayed a purse seine, some long lines and trawl lines, which because of the hooks he called, “Very ungainly to display.”
Hall said, “One of the nets we’re showing is only a portion of a net from a net making company from Deer Isle. During WW II and many years before, but during WW II, they made trawl net. They received a sample from Iceland…It was never used. That whole industry is gone. That net is made with [natural fibers] sisal.” The day of natural fibers is gone, and Hall explained that part of a curator’s job, “Is to use stuff that may not ever be used by anybody.” Museums, he said, have the only record left and the story that goes with it.
A fisherman’s widow from South Bristol, Kathy Norwood, agrees with displaying that record. Hall said, “Her late husband’s trawl doors will be in the exhibit.” He added, “She sent some great pictures.”
Other great pictures came from photographer Murfitt, who said he went out on 67-foot groundfishing boat for five days to document the alternating chaos and monotony of offshore fishing. The trip “consists of steaming, often a half-day or more now because of regulations, to viable groundfishing areas” which alternates with “an hour of chaos of setting a net, with four-to six-hours of boredom towing it, with two to three hours of chaos of hauling [the net] back and sorting the fish around the clock.”
Models of fishing vessels such as sardine carriers, 19th century pinky schooners, and Grand Banks schooners will be displayed. And, Hall said, “We’re actually putting a full-sized dory in one of our galleries, with all the gear they fished with,” adding that the gear belongs to a post-war Grand Bank schooner, Sherman Zwicker, built in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, which will be docked at the museum for the summer. He mentioned that the replica of the famous Grand Banker, Bluenose II, will be docked at the museum July 6-8.
As Hall mused about the exhibition, he said that, “Maybe not purposely, but you could say the exhibit in a certain way is approaching it from the fish’s point of view, or at least recognizing that rather than just thinking about the fish as the harvest and some financial commodity…that these are parts of natural systems … beginning to be recognized more, I think, to the fishery’s advantage.”
“Net Worth: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Fin Fisheries,” through November 29, at the Maine Maritime Museum, 243 Washington St., Bath.