Westport in Brief!
EverythingWestport.com
Sunday, February 7, 2016
photos/EverythingWestport.com except as
noted
The Rematch of David and Goliath
with speaker Cukie Macomber.
|
The
Rematch of David and Goliath with speaker Cukie
Macomber. ----------------------------------------------------- “Westport nonagenarian and raconteur
Carleton “Cukie” Macomber
took his audience back to a major confrontation between a local Westport lobstering company and the great Soviet Union, a tale
based on his personal experience. EverythingWestport.com Saturday, February 6, 2016
By Robert Barboza Special correspondent to EverythingWestport.com Photos
| EverythingWestport.com Carleton
“Cukie” Macomber, a 90-something
year old amateur historian and well-known raconteur from Westport, shared an
interesting chapter of his personal experiences along the local coastline
with members and guests of the Dartmouth Historical and Arts Society at a February
9th talk on “The Rematch of David and Goliath on the South Coast” at the Russells Mills Schoolhouse in Dartmouth. Macomber took the audience back to the
1971 confrontation between the Westport-based Prelude Corporation, an
offshore lobstering company playing the role of
David… and the giant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a Goliath of
a nation forced to back down from the courtroom challenge of a little local
company which felt it had been wronged by the Russian state’s fishing fleet
off the American coastline. His
tale was based on personal experience, as Macomber
was working as an engineer and mechanic for Prelude Corp. when what the The
story began a few years before the 1971 incident, Macomber
said, when the Rev. William Whipple turned his part-time summer lobstering job during divinity school into a full-time
vocation, and started his own lobster-selling business. “He bought a boat and
came to Westport with a pile of big wooden traps” and set up shop at Westport
Harbor around 1966, Macomber recalled. Whipple
needed an experienced welder and nautical mechanic for his new company, and
hired him to join the staff. Whipple’s plan was to “go fishing on the
Continental Slope, which was full of lobster… it was
not being done at the time,” he explained. “I went to work for him as a
maintenance man, to both outfit the new lobster boat, the Prelude I, and to
take care of the lobster-holding facility off Cherry & Webb Lane in
Westport,” Macomber said. Much
of his job entailed helping Whipple and his crew set up the automated
pot-hauling equipment needed to service the traps set in deeper waters than
usually fished by lobstermen. Whipple was a brilliant engineer, and designed
hydraulic winches and an onboard processing line “which pulled the traps
aboard, set them on a table to be serviced (lobsters pulled out and the trap
re-baited) and then returned to the water,” according to Macomber.
“It worked very well.” “Bill
Whipple founded the Prelude Corporation, and up until offshore lobstering, most
lobstering was done on a daily basis, and the
lobsters were kept on deck in water that circulated, or in the case of older boats, in a
well in a watertight bulkhead. The
water just came in from the sea and went in and out as the boat moved along.
The temperature of that water was the temperature the ocean happened to be
that day. It’s
very difficult to keep lobsters alive in warm water. The
ideal temperature is around 40 degrees. What happened when Bill Whipple and
Prelude started – what happened there – they brought forward the idea of
refrigerated water, of
a closed system where seawater was brought in a self-contained tank that was refrigerated and circulated. This way, a
fisherman could extend his fishing time from, say one day, to up to a week.
The whole thing is a game of economics. Prelude
was even on the stock market.” – Richie Earle, former Westport
Harbormaster and Westport Point resident The
patented automated equipment worked so well that the company kept buying more
boats to expand its fleet. First came a 101-foot steel hulled fishing boat
converted to a lobster boat, then the 98-foot Crystal S and the 101-foot Wily
Fox, a former research vessel also transformed into a ship suitable for
deep-sea lobstering. The final acquisition for the
rapidly-expanding business was the 125-foot fishing boat, the Mars.
A 1971
newspaper report on the company indicated that Prelude brought in 16 percent
of the total American lobster catch that year, making the Westport-based
company the largest single lobster producer in the country. Everything was
going well until a Russian and Polish fishing fleet appeared off the New
England coast and started working the same Georges Bank fishing ground as the
Prelude Corp. boats, Macomber recalled. “The
Russians sent a whole fleet of draggers to New England to catch fish,” which
were sent aboard an accompanying mother ship for processing and freezing, Macomber said. “They
were hauling their dredges right through our lobster gear.” Period accounts
indicated the loss of a single mile-long line of traps could cost the owner
about $20,000; appeals for help fending off the Soviet bloc ships went out to
the Coast Guard, with little result, he added.
Above: 1971 press photo of Russian factory
“mother” ship with 11 Americans on board for conferencing over the damaged lobstering gear.
Above: 1971 press photo of Russian
fishing trawl as seen from the New Bedford lobster boat, Wily Fox.
Above: press photo of a passing Russian
trawler entangling itself in the Wily Fox’s lobster gear, and laughing,
waving and yelling “Good fishing!.” “The
Coast Guard said because they were beyond the three-mile (territorial) limit,
they couldn’t do anything about it,” Macomber
recalled. “So Joe (Gaziano) decided he was going to
try to stop it. He got a good lawyer, and sued the Russian government; it
made newspapers all over the world.” It
also brought a visit from U.S. State Department officials, who suggested that
the lawsuit against the Russian agency controlling the country’s fishing
operations threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of Cold War relations
between the superpowers, and urged the lawsuit be withdrawn. “We
are in the middle of a Cold War and you are going to start a real one," Cukie remembers they told Prelude lawyers. The
response from the Russian government was simply that the offending trawlers
“were private ships, not controlled by the government,” Macomber
said. We all
knew that there were no private companies in Russia, Macomber
said. Eventually
the lawsuit sought $177,055 in damages to gear, and $200,000 in punitive
damages from the Soviets. The
skill of the Westport company’s lawyer was proven when he succeeded in
convincing the court to seize a Russian freighter, the Suleyman Stalsky, docked in San Francisco as
surety for the damages claim. That got the attention of the Soviets, Macomber remembered. “A U.
S. marshal held that ship for one week while the State Department became very
frustrated with us. Soon after, the Russians sent a message that they would
be in Westport on a certain day to try to resolve the matter,” Macomber said.
Above: 1971 press photo of the Soviet
ship, Suleyman Stalsky, after
a federal court released it. “A
Russian delegation arrived at our offices in big black limousines,
accompanied by local and State Police, TV trucks, and reporters.” “As a
result, we were quite famous,” Macomber said. “The
Russians stayed for two days and came to a settlement – they paid us $80,000
for the lost gear,” the lawsuit was dropped, and the Russian freighter being
held by the U.S. Marshals for six days was released from custody. Newspaper
accounts from the time said the settlement was for $89,000, but we can
forgive the 90-something Macomber for a few
thousand dollars recalled incorrectly some 44 years later. The
Russians refused to reimburse the value of the lost catches (several tens of
thousands) and we didn’t press the issue, Macomber said. “”it
would be impossible to calculate how many lobsters were in the traps,” Macomber joked. The
settlement meant that Cold War détente was temporarily restored, but the
landmark case had further-reaching ramifications. A Spanish-based fishing
company also paid some restitution for lost gear, and both Massachusetts and
Maine soon extended their territorial waters from three to 12 miles, and
shortly thereafter the federal government extended territorial waters to 200
miles. “After the settlement, Joe Gaziano wrote to President Nixon (about the problem) and
that letter started the machinery to develop the 200-mile zone (territorial
jurisdiction) around our shores. - Cukie Macomber
Macomber moved on to the company’s subsidiary,
Wickford Shellfish plant, retained when Prelude was dissolved, and stayed
there another seven years before quitting. He soon ended up working for
Whipple’s new company, High Seas Corp., setting up a Fall River crab
processing plant; meanwhile, his son Paul was working as a lobster boat
captain for another company. Macomber said his wife convinced him
it was time for the family to reap some of the big profits that could be
earned from the hard profession of fishing. The family bought The Glad One, a
55-foot steel hulled fishing boat, and he helped convert it into a deep sea
lobster-catching vessel, he noted. His
son skippered the family lobster for 18 years before retiring from the sea to
become a contractor. Macomber sold the boat to the
first mate, and as far as he knows, The Glad One is still out there
somewhere, he suggested, fishing for some salty bounty still to be gained
from the sea by men brave enough to sail out there and catch them.
Above: Westport’s Carleton “Cukie” Macomber with Dartmouth
Historical and Arts Society President Robert Harding.
Above: Cartoon courtesy of The Standard
Times © 1971. The Russian bear, stranded in San Francisco, whiles away the
time fishing while little Prelude Corp. (lobster) nips at his back! © 2016 Community Events of Westport. All
rights reserved. EverythingWestport.com |
