Vol. 2, No. 3 Contents
Headline Back Issues
Summer 1998
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Isles of Shoals hold lifetime lure for NH boat captain, teacher By Suzy Fried Rye, New Hampshire - Stepping aboard Uncle Oscar, cup of coffee in hand, dressed in sneakers, sweatshirt, and shorts, and squinting into the fog of a June morning, Susan Reynolds looks as at home on her boat as most people do on their back porch. Only, instead of scattering seed for backyard birds, she brings along bread for the gulls.
Reynolds moved from Massachusetts to the New Hamp-shire seacoast town of Rye 30 years ago and began teaching in nearby North Hampton Elementary School. She makes the most of local natural resources, bringing her students out to investigate the coastal environment. "I always like to get the kids to be hands-on," she says. "We have such a nice estuary here," that includes a salt marsh, stream, mud flats, and a barrier beach. "You can get all the different parts of the estuary displayed very vividly for them." Once school is out for the summer, Reynolds closes up her classroom and moves to another venue, spending seven days a week running cruises into Rye Harbor for an hour-long lesson on lobstering in the mornings, and afternoon trips to the nine-island cluster known as the Isles of Shoals. For awhile, Reynolds brought her cruise passengers out to the Shoals in a 37-foot/11-meter, six-passenger sailboat. But that wasn't profitable enough for a single parent with a son in college, so in 1995 she bought a lobster boat that can carry 20 passengers at a time.
Since the days when she and her brother and sister would take their sailboats out to the Shoals, Reynolds has been fascinated by them. She wrote her master's thesis on the islands. Her boat, Uncle Oscar, is named for Oscar Laighton, a lighthouse keeper's son who lived there for 99 years and became an institution to summer visitors. His sister, poet Celia Laighton Thaxter and her husband, Levi Thaxter, founded a writers' and artists' colony on Appledore Island - the biggest of the group - that drew the likes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and impressionist painter Childe Hassam. Hotels once dotted the Shoals. Now, Shoals Marine Lab leases most of Appledore Island. Star Island is home to a Unitarian Universalist church organization that has a conference center there. Seavey Island is the site of a tern restoration project overseen by the New Hampshire Audubon Society and the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. And Duck Island, formerly a target bombing area for Pease Air Force Base, has since recovered to become a prime breeding and pupping area for harbor seals. Lobstermen's summer homes can be found on some of the islands as well. Reynolds says New Hampshire history began on the Shoals, evidenced by the fact that a year round fishing settlement greeted Captain John Smith when he happened upon the islands in 1620. She helped develop a program that brings North Hampton School's fourth-graders out to the islands each September aboard the Granite State, a whale watch boat operating out of Rye Harbor, to spend a couple of days learning about the islands and their role in history. The students dabble in impressionism after Childe Hassam; learn lessons in applied science and marine biology, measuring salinity and collecting plankton samples; and try out some practical math applications, such as calculating fishing catches. They also write poetry in the spirit of Celia Laighton Thaxter, and read historical fiction about the islands. One story tells of the pirate Blackbeard's abandoned yet hopeful fifteenth wife, who's said to roam the shore crying out, "He shall return!" Lessons in lobstering
Sometimes, Reynolds brings one of her students on board to help, but at least one day a week her son, Peter - a college junior and also a licensed boat captain - crews for her, occasionally manning the wheel so his mother can talk with passengers or demonstrate how to measure and band lobsters. The two make a comfortable team. When Peter was 11, they took a two-month boat trip to the Bay of Fundy, and have made several boat deliveries together, cruising from the Bahamas to North Carolina, and from Long Island Sound to New Hampshire. "It's interesting, though sometimes a challenge that we're so much alike," says Reynolds, finding the resemblance in their persistence, self sufficiency, and analytical natures. During the summer, Peter crews most days on another Rye Harbor captain's whale watch cruise. For now, mother and son get along better that way, laughs Susan Reynolds. Peter agrees, though he's considering the idea of joining the family business after he graduates from the University of New Hampshire. Reynolds isn't holding him to it just yet, as she figures that someone his age is seldom sure of his course in the long term. Reynolds is sure of hers, however. It's the course that has brought her out to the Shoals for as long as she's been able to handle a boat. But as much as she loves visiting the Shoals, even mooring her boat and staying for a week at a time, she doesn't want to become a resident. "To live there year round - it's too remote and lonesome for me. I'm too social." Sharing her love of the Shoals with others is the whole point. |
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"I've always, always had a real love of the ocean," Reynolds says, recalling childhood summers with her family boating and exploring along New Hampshire's seacoast. In her adulthood, she's spent much of her time as a schoolteacher, naturalist, and local history devotee, sharing that enthusiasm with people of all ages. She is also a licensed boat captain who runs her own business, Island Cruises Inc. 
Painters and pirates
Reynolds, who has a commercial lobster fishing license, had learned the trade one winter more than 20 years earlier with a seasoned lobsterman named Harold. "I wanted to learn how he navigated with a watch, a compass, a recording depth sounder, but no chart," she says. She went with Harold on weekends as he set out his 12 eight-trap trawls. "That was the extent of it, other than being childhood friends with lobstermen's children and hauling a trap in a dory," she says of her previous lobstering experience. As she empties her dozen traps, Reynolds shows observers how to measure a lobster to see if it is of legal size. She baits the traps using frozen bait (it's less smelly and offensive to passengers than unfrozen) and sets them again. Fishing single traps with buoys rather than trawls with several traps allows her to "talk with passengers without having to worry about gear in the water." Her customers, she says, have ranged from the "just curious," to people considering starting their own small-
scale lobstering ventures. "It's been real popular."