Muscongus Bay, on the coast of Maine, includes the
lobster fishing communities of New Harbor, on the west, Friendship,
on the north, and Port Clyde, on the east. Lobstering is the principal
occupation of Friendship, the community most familiar to me. I
have spent summer vacations there for over thirty years. About
one hundred lobstermen put down as many as eight hundred traps,
each marked on the water surface by distinctly colored buoys. The
trap and the buoy are connected by a rope called the warp. The
color of the warp depends on the depth at which the trap will be
set.
Coils of rope, in their Lifesaver colors, are piled
in bundles on individual wharves. Six to ten traps are placed on
the sea bottom in a compass line, called a string. This allows
for easier retrieval in obscure weather. The lobsterman picks up
the first buoy with a gaff, while his idling boat turns in a full
circle. This maneuver provides the time to haul, empty, rebait
and to release the trap. With grace, skill and efficiency, the
boat is headed directly toward the next buoy of the string, fifty
or sixty feet ahead.
My interest was to capture the colors, the motion
and the depths of lobstering. I made a model to depict eighteen
strings of buoys which I then arranged in stepped layers around
the perimeter of a hollow cylinder. The candidate buoys were selected
from the collection in the Friendship Town Hall. There, a wall
case contains key-chain size, colored replicas of the local registered
buoys.
My composition depicts the taut warps behind the cylinder
of buoy strings. The blue banded background suggests the varying
water depths. By photographing the model in a simulation of slanting
sunlight, I could capture accurate shadows for inclusion in the
painting. On a calm, sunny day in July, the water of Muscongus
Bay sparkles with bright buoy colors, a purposeful decoration on
the ocean's surface.
Malcolm Montague Davis
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