People of the Coast: Skip Connell of Spruce Head

“That’s why I go fishing. How else can I ride around in boats all day?”Gordon “Skip” Connell, 59, is a soft-spoken man most of the time. But when he starts talking about boats, the sound of his voice gradually intensifies. The Spruce Head lobsterman has sailed or fished on so many different vessels it’s impossible to name them all. His competence as a seaman and sailor is well-known among fishermen in the mid-coast area. And it all started when he was just a kid, sailing a 43-foot Nova Scotian schooner purchased by his father, Don, from Nova Scotia back to Maine.“The boat was built but not finished,” Connell recalled. “So my father and mother [Sally] took us [Skip, age 10, and his two younger sisters] up to Lunenburg. We lived on the beach there for a month putting her together.”

When the vessel, named Pan after the Greek god of wine and music, was ready to go, Connell’s father put him behind the wheel. They found themselves in thick of fog in the channel off Yarmouth, in southwest Nova Scotia, some days later. “We could hear diesel engines coming, draggers and sardine carriers passing by. One of them stopped and said, ‘Did you know that there’s a hurricane coming?’ We didn’t have a radio on board,” Connell said.Pan put in to the government wharf in Yarmouth, behind a breakwater that Connell described as a big concrete box. The schooner found a spot among dense clusters of fishing vessels rafted up inside and waited out the storm. “It was a long time before I saw anything like that again,” Connell said, shaking his head. “The hurricane ripped the water right off the top of the waves. The eye went right overhead and the wind switched around.”

During a lull, local residents called out to Sally that it wasn’t right to have children on board during such a vicious storm. So Connell’s mother passed her three children up to waiting hands on the dock. “I spent the second half of the storm in a huge mansion,” Connell laughed. Skip’s father was a Merchant Marine engineer, trained at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. He would ship out for five months during the winter and return home in the summer, when he would go lobstering. But he also had a certain wanderlust. During Connell’s freshman year in high school, his father packed up the family aboard Pan and spent a year sailing through the Bahamas. “There was some attempt at schooling by my mother,” Connell said wryly. High school was a difficult time for Connell.

Despite a deep pleasure in reading, he found himself “bored foolish” by his classes. Getting free of school and heading for Pleasant Island in the Mussel Ridge chain, an island that had been in his mother’s family for generations, was the highlight of the year. “I spent most of the summer on the island, lobstering,” Connell recalled. “At an early age I pretty much did what I wanted.”  That freedom led Connell “off course,” as he termed it. He had intended to go to Maine Maritime Academy as his father had done, but temptations all too easy for a young man to succumb to led him in a different direction. He went scallop fishing on the big boats out of New Bedford for several years, delivered sailboats, tinkered with motorcycles and raised hell. He landed a berth on one of the O’Hara Corporation groundfishing vessels and for many years made a lot of money. But by the early 1990s the life of a roustabout fisherman/sailor had taken its toll.“My daughter [Jacqueline] was three years old. She would cry when I had to leave on a trip. I realized that I was missing my kid growing up, so I came back to lobstering,” he said.

He also decided to give up smoking and, after the end of his first marriage, drinking as well. Through some motorcycling friends, he started exploring martial arts. “I wanted to get fit,” Connell says simply. “But it was more than that.” Twenty-five years later, he still continues some of the exercises he learned through karate, including regularly running up the Camden Hills State Park Megunticook Mountain trail and doing 400 or so push-ups.Connell is highly regarded not only for his seamanship but also for his skill in boat building and repair. He credits that talent principally to having grown up in a boatyard on Spruce Head. “Before my father built the house [where Connell lives today] it was a boatyard. So when I was a kid there was all sorts of stuff here, a crane, skids, welding equipment. I’ve never known life without a hook hanging from the sky!”

In the winter months now Connell works on boats, such as a 20-foot Herreshoff Fish class sloop he rebuilt last year. The rest of the year, he goes lobstering.“I’m not having much fun lobstering anymore,” he admitted, rubbing his hands together as he spoke. “I used to really like it and looked forward to doing it every day. Now everyone is pigeonholed.” He worries that since the lobsters are moving north and east, the catches within state waters, particularly on the west side of Penobscot Bay, will take a tumble soon. “The whole [economic] focus on lobsters is scary,” he said.When he’s not lobstering, or sailing Pan single-handed, or “hanging plank” on a local windjammer, Connell volunteers in the local literacy program. An avid reader, he had always recognized that some students around him had trouble with books. “They would fall through the cracks in high school, even in middle school. It always bothered me,” he said. So one night he was watching an episode of the show “207” on television which focused on state literacy programs. “There was a number on the bottom of the screen and I called it that night,” he recalled.

Now, nine years later, he is still working with local people striving to improve their reading and math skills. “When I first got there [the literacy office], the person kind of looked at me funny. She said, ‘So, you’re a lobsterman.’” Connell laughed loudly. “I said, ‘That’s what I do but I don’t let it define me.’”