maine fishing

Airboats Find a Home in Maine Waters

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Long a staple for the swamps of the South, airboats are now finding their way into Maine waters. 

This story first appeared in the Island Institute’s The Working Waterfront newspaper, and is reproduced here with permission. Click here. 

Story and Photos by Kelli Park

The flat-bottomed, fan-propelled vessels have grown in popularity, and find practical use in shallow water. Airboat hulls are built with aluminum or fiberglass and are coated with polymer to protect against hard surfaces, including snow and ice.

Propulsion is achieved with an aircraft-type propeller and an aircraft or automotive engine, ranging from 50 horsepower all the way to 600 hp, and the boats can reach from 35 mph to 100 mph.

“Think of a reverse airplane,” explains Harpswell Harbormaster Paul Plummer, who uses a town-owned 20-foot airboat. “You know how airplanes have the props in front? Well, just flip it around. And put a boat on it. It’s literally pushing you with all that horsepower from behind.”

The airboat was invented in Nova Scotia by Alexander Graham Bell in 1905. Airboats were used for military purposes during World War I by the British Army in the Middle East, the Soviet Union in World War II, and by the U.S. in the Vietnam and the Iraq wars.

In the 1920s, Glen Curtiss, an American aviation pioneer and a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry developed an enclosed airboat that could comfortably seat six passengers, while frog hunters in the Everglades tinkered with what they could find to develop their own version of the airboat. In 1933, Johnny Lamb and his friend Russell Howard built a 12-foot airboat using a second-hand aircraft propeller and a plywood rudder to work more efficiently in the Everglades, where they harvested 75 pounds of frog legs a night.

Shellfish harvesters in the Midcoast agree that airboats provide increased efficiency on the flats in more ways than one. Harvesters can reach their destination on airboats when the tide has already receded from the shoreline.

“The airboat makes the job a lot easier,” says Daniel Fortin, who digs for clams at Maquoit Bay in Brunswick. “It saves your legs. It saves your hips. You only run your boat for four or five minutes each trip in and out.”

Cody Gillis, who works with Fortin, agrees.

“It beats walking. It beats waiting for the tide in a regular skiff.”

Airboats also allow for easier access to different, possibly more fruitful, areas. “You can get in and out when you need to,” says Peter Holman, who’s been clamming in Maquoit Bay for 30 years and has enjoyed the benefits of his father’s airboat for the past four years. “You couldn’t do that with a regular boat.”

Being able to arrive and depart freely on the mudflats is also important for safety during medical emergencies and severe weather.

“They’re handy in case something happens out there,” Fortin noted.

Airboats gained prominence during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for their ability to navigate over partially submerged buildings and wreckage. The so-called Cajun Navy evacuated over 5,000 people on 30 airboats in less than 36 hours.

Marine law enforcement officials realize the value of the airboat in Brunswick, with its 67 miles of coastline, and Harpswell, with 216 miles of coastline. Brunswick introduced the airboat to the mudflats in the mid-1990s, and Harpswell recently purchased a new 20-foot airboat with a 550 hp, 6.2 liter big block engine for $76,000.

Although airboat operators take small craft advisories seriously, the vessels can work on frozen bays in winter for search-and-rescue operation. Marine wardens also use airboats to conduct shellfish surveys.

Plummer, Harpswell’s harbormaster, warns that different skills are needed to operate an airboat.

“It’s a dangerous piece of equipment. It’s good to find out what the boat’s capable of,” he cautions, before zipping off in one.

A Woman’s Place on the Working Waterfront

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JENNIE BICHREST BEGAN HAULING TRAPS BY HAND, AND NOW RUNS A LARGE BAIT BUSINESS
 

This story first appeared in the Island Institute’s The Working Waterfront newspaper, and is reproduced here with permission. Click here. 

(Personal photos courtesy of Jennie Bichrest)

August 2019

Story and Photos by Kelli Park

From hand-hauling lobster traps to selling more than 10 million pounds of bait annually, Jennie Bichrest knows the working waterfront inside out. This summer, as the lobster industry faces a shortage of herring, the bait of choice, her business—Purse Line Bait—is playing a critical role in keeping that waterfront working.

Bichrest was growing up in Illinois until a vacation brought her family to the Maine coast in the early 1970s. Her father was hooked, and family vacations were then spent on a commercial fishing boat. Later, her father bought a 46-foot sailboat with a vision of educating his children as they sailed around the world. The family moved to Cundy’s Harbor in Harpswell, and though the children did learn to sail, the around-the-world voyage never happened.

Instead, Bichrest stumbled upon old wooden lobster traps in her neighbor’s barn, which inspired her, with the help of her grandfather, to build her own by steaming and bending wooden bows using a steam-box she found in the barn.

While her father found work on fishing boats in and around Cundy’s Harbor, Bichrest hauled traps by hand with her own skiff and spent time with her friends working on the water, where she was the only woman.

“I was never a ‘girly’ girl,” she says. The group she hung out with was into fishing, so that became her focus as well. She eventually married Mark Bichrest, whose family has been fishing for five generations.

The two worked independently on the water—she lobstering, he dragging—until pogies arrived on the coast in the late 1980s. Mark was fishing for a Russian ship, Riga, which anchored offshore and processed fish into fishmeal. “They all wanted jeans, Levi jeans from Goodwill,” she remembers. “Jeans and cigarettes.”

Jennie and Mark soon started their bait business with a boatload of pogies at a time, delivering to local wharves and individual boats, until word spread and demand grew.

“When we first got in business, we knew you had to have storage,” she remembers. “The herring were only around so long. We survived more on fresh fish coming in. We had dump trucks, and we loaded the fresh fish every day and we would go to the wharves.”

But if there was no catch, her customers had no bait.

“That’s when we started barreling bait,” she explains. “Once they started with the quotas, there was more need for freezers and storage.”

Within a few short years, the business had evolved from boatloads of pogies, to truckloads of fish, to the widespread distribution of salted, barreled bait with the need for storage facilities.

Demand continued to grow and in 1996, the couple bought a facility in Sebasco once used to make ice for fishing boats, and it became home for Purse Line Bait. After their divorce in 2003, Jennie Bichrest expanded the business with the purchase of additional freezer facilities in Harpswell to meet the demand created by quotas placed upon commercial fishing—more freezer space was needed to store fish, ensuring its availability throughout the year after quotas had been met.

Bichrest currently relies on five suppliers for a steady stream of herring, pogies, and redfish from as far away as New Jersey and Canada. She stores three million pounds in each of her Phippsburg and Harpswell facilities, and another three million pounds in rented space south of Portland.

The vagaries of fish populations impact the business, she said.

“The first year pogies hit it was devastating,” because when that fish was available for bait, the demand for other bait, like that which Purse Line sold, can decrease rapidly. If her freezers are full because fishermen are buying bait from different sources, her largest supplier will find other markets for his product.
“People don’t understand that you have to keep it all going, or they’re not going to be there. That’s what frightens me,” she confesses. “They don’t think about all the other people the business supports—the carriers, the other boats.”

In February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cut the 2019 herring quota by about 70 percent, from 110 million pounds to 33 million pounds. Herring is the most commonly used bait in the lobster industry. Bichrest believes that the cut will hit the island communities the hardest, where lobstermen rely on the carriers for bait.

“There’s not enough freezers in the state of Maine with this latest herring cut,” she says. “And really, more importantly, we’re going to lose the infrastructure.”

Bichrest has advocated for conservation measures that would ensure sustainable fisheries, including encouraging closures during spawning on Georges Banks, popular fishing grounds between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia, to promote the growth of young fish.

“You can’t continue to kill babies and expect to have a healthy fishery,” she says.