Chasing Monsters Beyond the Six-Mile Limit

Story by Colin Sargent

 

Photographer Hugh Chatfield is no longer afraid of the dark. He nearly lost his life in a terrible automobile accident. He knows what it’s like to slip into a black unconsciousness so close to the flickering edge of his own mortality that a safe return is in serious doubt.

Perhaps that’s what has lured Chatfield 100 miles straight out from Portland Pier at night, to snap pictures of the unknown. Because out here is where the wild things are.

“I convinced Cameron Mclellan, an eighth-generation fisherman, to let me shoot for a week aboard his 72-foot stern dragger Adventurer,” Chatfield, 45, who lives on Park Street in Portland, says.

In this weather, such an undertaking was something of a rough caprice.

“I hear fishing is the most dangerous profession there is,” Chatfield told Maclellan.

“Yeah,” Maclellan said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Pacific Northwest or the Gulf of Maine, a 30-foot wave is a 30-foot wave.”

“The night before we left, I went into Brian Boru, talking with the bartender and a lobsterman,” Chatfield says.

“I’m going out with Cameron Mclellan,” he told them. “But I shouldn’t worry or anything, should I? I mean it’s a big boat.”

“Not that big,” they answered.

The morning Chatfield departed for the waterfront, I left a slip of paper on my kitchen table, on which I’d written, ‘In case I don’t come back, I’m doing what I love.”

As proof against seasickness, “I wore a transdermal scopolamine patch behind my ear for seasickness, like a cigarette patch. I’ve heard in different concentrations it’s used as a psychedelic drug or an epidural to relieve pain for women giving childbirth. After the first day, it worked.”

The Adventurer steamed “eight hours at eight knots” straight into the blue until it was night and the glow of Portland had disappeared beneath the horizon. “Then we started fishing, 24/7.”

Between 80 and 100 miles from shore, things got real simple real fast. “The two activities are set out and haul back, the terms being both nouns and verbs,” he says. “The nets are set out for seven hours. Haul back takes half an hour or so.”

At night, a nightmarish practicality set in. “I shot hundreds of photos of Bertie Powell of Port Clyde, just cuttin’ and guttin.’ A monkfish has a big head and a long tail. Bertie cut the heads off monkfish before removing their livers—which are prized in Japan for their medicinal properties.” With hypnotic regularity, he dropped the livers, “one by one, in a white plastic bag. The monkfish tails are meat,” Chatfield says. “The head and guts are thrown away.”

Then, “the seagulls appeared out of the night, as if the word had gone out. There were always a dozen around, but maybe they had somehow learned the pitch of the motor during the haul back.”

Over the next hour and a half the flock increased from 12 to 3,000 gulls, luminous around the transom of the Adventurer. “Who knows where they’d come from this far out? Maybe they heard each other’s cries—word of beak.”

The gulls perched on top of the nets, crying out. At other times in the flash-interrupted darkness they seemed eerily to be in an aquarium, behind a giant wall of glass. “I used a hand-held recorder to catch their sound, but the engine noise is so loud it’s all you can hear.”

The fish had brought the gulls, and now the gulls prompted tales from the crew of stowaway rats they’d seen running through the scuppers and jumping into the nets after haul up to eat the fish. “Gulls pick the rats up and carry them out to sea,” Chatfield says. The gulls have found a way to eat surf’n’turf 100 miles from shore.

Naturally, the birds were an analog for madness: “I shot down into the gulls. They are a squirming mass of wings, beaks, boiling—you couldn’t even see the water. It was an Italian Renaissance picture of hell—you know, with great devils eating people.”

The stars too were very close under the sky’s pitched darkness. “But the sky was not the issue. It was the sea, and an overwhelming sense of joy” at being close to the edge of the destructive element. “Photography is my great love, and the constant motion of the vessel puts me in full contact with reality.”

Again and again the nets surged up, pulled in by the Adventurer’s spools, full of fish and Maine’s answer to Alaskan king nightmares. “The lobster in this photo is 20 pounds easy, a male,” Chatfield says of our cover photo, which shows Capt. Cameron Mclellan wrestling with the rascal.

“We threw him back, not just because that’s the law but because we’d have needed a hydraulic pair of lobster crackers to eat him!”

Maybe cuttin’ and guttin’ should be a photographic term, because Chatfield’s images—an invitation to the world ruled by the law of tooth and fin—are remarkable. Legendary photographer Berenice Abbott once told Portland Magazine that nobody has ever taken a good shot of Portland because they let the lighthouses and lobster boats get in the way.”

We think she’d be pleased with the atavistic quality of these images.

Night after night it got darker out there. Surely during this full-contact adventure, Chatfield was connected to the darkness of his accident, too, however far these lonely wastes were from the screech of tires: “I’m surrounded by enormous fins—a pilot whale, I think,” and claws. “Then you get it. You’re out here, beyond the pale. You’re not going to shore right away.”

But this darkness—was it the very same as before? Chatfield takes a deep breath. “It was 1987. I was two years out of theater school at UCLA.” In his mind he keeps trying to pass “a long tractor trailer on the right. I was in a coma for a month, rehab for five years.”

He shrugs. “I went out to sea for artistic purposes. I remember thinking of that as a wave came over the stern and for a flash I thought, ‘Art sucks!’”

There are times in life as well as art when you must fish with your fear.

“We know now there are no sea serpents, but the Elizabethan or Jacobean idea of the sea serpent is that there’s a monster out there, the monster you don’t know, the monster of your not coming back.”

Chatfield adds, “Every moment is extraordinary, and I try to capture that.”