Norma Rackliff worked a lobster boat for forty years.

Community Arts & Traditional Arts

Norma Rackliff: “Early mornings are the best time of day...”

Spend a morning scanning the coast of Maine, and you are far more likely than ever before to see a woman at one end or the other of a working lobster boat. It wasn’t always that way. When Norma Rackliff first stepped aboard a lobster boat on the coast of St. George she was both a rarity and a pioneer. Forty years later, she still fishes for lobster in the summer, but is content to let her youngest daughter bait each trap.

“I’m the captain, I make my daughter do the hard work,” she laughs. In the 1950s the wire lobster traps of today had not been invented yet. Lobstering families had to build their traps by hand out of wood, perhaps as many as 100 each winter.

“They had to go out in the woods and cut their own spruce, and saw up their own lumber to make the trap,” Rackliff said. The netting or “trap heads” that covered the ends of each trap also had to be made by hand using a pair of oversized knitting needles. “And every fisherman had his own type of head that he wanted knit. There were no two fishermen that would have the same kind of a head.” Working with twine fastened to a hook on the wall, Rackliff could turn the trap heads out at the rate of about one every 15 or 20 minutes. Rackliff says the task was particularly hard on her hands.

“It would make your fingers raw, you’d have to tape your fingers up, or wear gloves, because that string would rub across, and take the hide right off. When I first started lobstering, the fishermen – the men – didn’t think too highly of it. They did not consider it to be a woman’s job. And I can remember one fisherman said to me, ‘Well, why ain’t you home, makin’ an apple pie?’ How things have changed!”

Rackliff says that is not all that has changed over the years. She remembers her first boat built long before the days of fiberglass hulls.

“I think it was a little round bottom wooden boat – can’t remember where we got it. And the outboards, they were not that dependable, and I’d have a few wooden traps, and the wooden traps – when you set them in the spring, you'd have to put rocks in them for ballast, so they’d go down and soak up on the bottom.” And if one of those unreliable outboards failed, she says, you wanted to have a good pair of oars handy.

These days Rackliff refers to herself as a “blueberry fisherman” – she only goes out when the weather is good and the skies are blue. She also took time off for family over the last four decades.“I raised six kids, and I lobstered in between each child, I guess.” When she wasn’t watching the six children, lobstering kept her watchful eyes on the waves just off her bow.

“There’s lots of rocks out there, and I swear they move every year. They’ve all got some paint on them from our boats.” Still, Rackliff says the early mornings are the best time of the day, when the water is calm, and there’s plenty to see. “The ledges out there always have the seals on them. I enjoy watching the seals. Sometimes a bald eagle will be on a ledge. There's always something different.”