BILL CROWE: GONE FISHING from page 1                                 February 2006

Family and friends at home in Gouldsboro, 1990’s.
He was known to hop in his runabout and motor over from Gouldsboro to Bar Harbor to meet with friends for a bite to eat, passing fishermen mooring for the evening who shouted, “Hey, there goes Bill Crowe of Fishermen’s Voice!” He taught friends who were afraid of the water to sail, lent a bedroom many times, and would answer the phone at midnight for a chat. One friend whose husband was on the night shift called late, panicking over a snake in the house. Bill riposted, “Well, who is it?” and shortly after showed up in a cowboy hat to lasso the critter. His pilot friend took him up summers so he could photograph the lobsterboat races. When he wanted someone to work for him, he wouldn’t quit bugging them, whether they had the skills or not; he trusted their intelligence and they worked it out. His house was a hive of activity where people always dropped in, the phone always rang, and vehicles were always just pulling in or leaving.

His own calls could tingle nerves. Bill could dissect fisheries issues day or night and just as easily gossip about his fishery friends and occasional enemies, brag about his new copy editor, fret about what to slap on the front page, and describe his latest shot at competitors. But he was also prone to late-night panics over a new freelancer’s skimpy research, a veteran’s usual late filing, writers not answering their phone, and last-minute sidebars that just had to be written, preferably by dawn.

Bill produced the first issue of Fishermen’s Voice in 1995, after many colorful adventures that took him from his college years at the University of Massachusetts, where he majored in business when he wasn’t minoring in social life, and straight into a back-to-the-land hippie style and something of an underground life. Back in the ‘70s, with his brother, he bought 95 acres near Moosehead Lake and decided to go all-natural. They built a cabin on a mountainside, using recycled lumber from a tumble-down barn. Not wanting to mar the land with a road, they hauled the beams and boards up themselves, on their backs. As they were building, they lived in a makeshift plastic-over-frame structure with zero amenities. An excellent horseman, he erected a World War II Army command tent big as a room to keep his horse nearby. One day, after an interminable spell of rain when they stayed at a friend’s house, they came back to find a moose sheltering under their plastic.


Christmas 1999.
After four or five years of roughing it, Bill craved something completely different, so he headed to San Francisco, where he ran a rough-and-ready vehicle-rehab operation — buying cars and parts, hooking up with mechanics and bodywork specialists to fix them up, then reselling them. Lacking an auto lot of his own, his hallmark was to park the vehicles all over the neighborhood as though they belonged in front of people’s homes, being sure to switch them around so he wouldn’t get caught.

All that got tiresome and he moved back to the Bay State, continued the car thing a bit, then hooked up with friends to build timberframe homes and play drums in a band called the Battered Boyfriends.

But he missed Maine. So in 1990, he moved to Gouldsboro, not far from where his ancestors had settled after they were shipwrecked off New Brunswick in the 1840s, hoofed down the coast, and became Aroostook County potato farmers on land that is still in the family. Bill bought a rambling, tumbledown farmhouse and barn hidden from the road by a tangle of brush but having a fine view of the bay. Inside, old timber frames, hardwood floors, and quirky nooks were the aesthetic draw that trumped the years of hard work that would obviously be needed to replace just about everything else.

In the meantime, he was willing to try just about anything to earn a living. He started out with carpentry, then gave fishing a try. The latter was less than successful; he once said he went out 13 times as sternman and got sick 12. His carpenter friend says Bill was thankful he always got the chump jobs, because it pushed him to try something else.

A seafood dealing business he started worked out better, and he enjoyed being around the water. He also got a pretty good sideline going making coffee tables out of lobster traps. The internet was coming into its own, so he called up a friend to help him design a home page for his various endeavors.


Bill left, on a friends seaplane while taking aerial photographs of the lobsterboat races in the summer of 2005.
While tinkering with the computer one day, and quite out of the blue, the friend suggested they start up a fisherman’s newspaper. This seemed like an interesting venture and they soon got off their first issue.

A couple of months later, his friend disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Bill wasn’t sure what to make of the situation but, after a brief stint with another small publisher, decided he’d found his niche in life and struck out on his own, building up and distributing the paper midcoast and Down East. For many years, his dining table was his office, a sunny alcove that could seem like an oversized trash bin, overflowing with piles of illegible notes and layouts.

It was the perfect occupation for him. He liked people, liked to talk, liked being busy, liked being on the phone, liked driving, and liked being a center of activity.

And he liked his new mission, which, he once said, was “to have a forum for fishermen, let them air their grievances, let them know what’s going on and give them a platform for their opinions.”

He recruited fishermen and others to create a mix of writing that went beyond news stories and into humor, commentaries, reviews, recipes, anecdote, health and safety tips, and historical features.


Bill and Frank Donnelly at the Rockland waterfront festival in August, 2001.
But Fishermen’s Voice became more than the accumulation of its pages. Bill Crowe and Fishermen’s Voice became synonymous. He was a well-known face at fisheries meetings anywhere in Maine and New England, loaded down with a couple of satchels and a notebook, marching up front to the presentation table, setting up a microphone and tape recorder, unleashing his camera and snapping away. He constantly networked and began the expansion of his market into Massachusetts. He sped up and down the coast in search of the latest hot topic, contacts and great photos. His editorials, “From The Crowe’s Nest,” were highly opinionated, blasting what he considered stupid policies. He went on about the “injustice and arrogance” of federal managers and the “ineptitude” of government researchers dealing with groundfish, a “vicious” cycle involving “rogue nations fishing [tuna] under flags of convenience” in a “toothless political farce,” the prospect of the fisheries left to “major fishing corporations with enough money to buy politicians off and chase the lawyers,” the “bureaucratic idiocy” when politics meets fishing, the midwater herring fleet’s “travesty of justice,” the LNG industry’s “doublespeak” (opining, “maybe these guys have been inhaling too much gas”), the “sell-off” to vested interests and corporations of working waterfront, enough imported shrimp to choke on, and the “near-sighted corporate, the blind-eye political, and the loophole legal system that lets a million gallons of crude [destroy] a fishing ground and yet busts a guy for throwing a beer can overboard.”

Bill’s eye-spit editorials were tempered by his gregarious, good nature. No one minded — in fact, it seemed to become a sought-after honor — when Bill capitalized on his natural camaraderie through the signature photo series he developed for the paper, which shows prominent industry figures, politicians and bureaucrats reading the latest issue of Fishermen’s Voice.

Bill never strayed from the initial concept. He was a champion of fishing interests, much appreciated by most fishermen who were happy to chat with him as a buddy and give him the inside scoop. These days, the paper is seen from Canada to Cape Cod, with a solid following in Maine.

Although it may seem to be uniquely his own, Bill had every hope the paper would continue after him, which it now does under Mike’s stewardship. And although folks around town and on the water will no longer be able to shout, “Hey, there goes Bill Crowe of Fishermen’s Voice!” they will surely remember, when they see future issues of Fishermen’s Voice on the stands, the passionate voice of Bill Crowe.

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