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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 5
January 2006
The Johnsons
Maine’s legendary swordfish couple
 HARPSWELL, ME - The demands of offshore fishing often require a couple to operate as a team, with the husband on the fishing grounds for days at a time and the wife tending family responsibilities as well as filling in with shoreside tasks for the business.
Over the years, Charlie and Gail Johnson have taken the husband/wife partnership idea to a whole new level and in the process have earned the admiration and respect of the US pelagic longline industry. In fact, to many, the Johnsons have acquired legendary status.
Charlie earned those honors for his single-minded pursuit of swordfish as one of the distant water fleet’s most experienced and still-active pioneer fishermen, and as a collaborative researcher. The distinction for Gail has come both because of her support of the family fishing operation and her ongoing advocacy work in the management arena to keep the often-besieged swordfish fishery alive.
“All Atlantic pelagic longline fishermen and support businesses owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Johnsons for their decades of work on behalf of everyone in the fishery,” said Nelson Beideman. “Gail and Charlie tirelessly donate their time and expertise to benefit commercial fisheries.”
Beideman, a former sword boat owner and operator, knows the Johnsons well, having fished the grounds with Charlie and worked alongside Gail in his capacity as executive director of Blue Water Fishermen’s Association (BWFA).
Family
Despite the fishery’s many ebbs and flows over the years and the personal sacrifices it demands, the Johnsons continue their teamwork, keeping their family, business, and the fishery going.
The Johnsons were married in 1965. They have raised three grown children, April, Sheila, and Chip, and are also grandparents to Katey, Stephany, and CJ (Charles Johnson IV).
The family’s home and base of operations has always been in Harpswell. Gail, the oldest of five children, has lived there since the age of 6. Her father was a teacher who lobstered summers.
“I met Charlie working at Allen’s Seafood in Harpswell Center. He sold his catch there,” Gail said.
Charlie Johnson grew up on Birch Island in Casco Bay. His father, a sawmill worker in Grey, lobstered summers, and his grandfather was also a lobsterman, as well as a clammer and charter boat fisherman.
Not surprisingly, lobstering was how Charlie’s fishing career started, but it wasn’t a perfect fit.
“After 20 years of lobstering, it got to me. It was like work every day,” Johnson said. “Then I made the mistake of setting a longline.”
The rest, as they say, is history. In the 35 years since Charlie hooked his first swordfish, he has spent days on end at sea, initially combining dragging and longlining before solely longlining, sometimes 1,000 miles away off a distant continent. For the last 14 years or so that fishing has taken place on the family’s 71' boat, Seneca.
Boats
Charlie Johnson’s first swordfish was hooked aboard a 42' Bruno & Stillman –named Pocahontas like his father’s lobster boat.
“The Pocahontas had a drum which held about 15 miles of longline. We were fishing out on the canyons (outside of Georges Bank). She didn’t hold enough fish, so I decided to get a bigger boat,” said Charlie.
His bigger boat was the 72' Aquarius, a wooden combination lobster boat, dragger, and stick boat based out of New Bedford, which Charlie described as “more or less a wreck.”
Charlie and Gail renamed the vessel Pocahontas.
“I made more money with that boat between swordfishing and dragging for groundfish and shrimp out of Portland than any other boat I’ve owned,” he said.
The couple replaced Pocahontas with the new 93' steel eastern-rig combination dragger/sword boat Powhatan. It was built at Washburn & Doughty Associates in East Boothbay and launched in February 1980.
Charlie and Gail sold the Powhatan nine years later, and Charlie leased the 100' offshore lobster and crab boat, 7Gs, to swordfish one season.
Seneca
The Seneca came along in 1990.
“Allan (Whipple from Plymouth, MA) called me up and said, ‘Why don’t you come down and look at my boat (the Sara T)’,” said Charlie.
Lantana Yachts in Lantana, FL built the all-aluminum, 71.3'x22'x11' western rig vessel in 1971. Powered by a 343 Cat that develops 365 hp, speed is not her strongest suit.
“If you put her throttle in the corner and her hull is clean, she’ll do 10.5 knots,” Charlie said.
But she has many qualities that make her ideal for Johnson.
“The Seneca is a lovely boat, she’s made well,” he said. “She’s got a narrow stern, a real deep hull up front, and her bow isn’t real high. Oh, she’s wet there at times, but she doesn’t bury herself up there.”
The vessel is outfitted with her own ice- and freshwater-making capabilities, and her pilothouse roof is equipped with a stability tank.
By now, Charlie knows every inch of the Seneca and how she should feel and sound under all conditions. He can also fix just about everything aboard.
“I’ve rebuilt the main engine myself three times,” he added.
With a five- to six-man crew, including himself, Charlie has been making 20-to-30-day trips, often out of foreign ports, with 3-5-day layovers in between. He follows the swordfish, primarily in the Atlantic from as far south as Brazil in the winter to as far north as Newfoundland – the Grand Banks – in the summer and early fall.
Most of the trips involve days of steaming to reach the grounds. Once there, the crew fishes about 10 days, repeatedly setting out, hauling back, and re-baiting approximately 40 miles of near-surface monofilament longline with over 1,000 snap-on hooks. The fishing days are about 19 hours long and the catch includes tunas, sharks, and mahi-mahi besides swordfish.
“Last winter, I steamed five days and never stopped,” Charlie said, to get to the fishing grounds 1,000 miles off Brazil from his Brazilian port.
“I’ve done the 1,200-mile journey from Portland to the east side of the Flemish Cap in six days many times,” he said.
Two-Moon Charlie
“I’ve been out there 45 days, no problem. You have to have fish when you come in,” Charlie said.
That attitude, which has sometimes forced him to fish into two moon cycles, has earned him the nickname “Two-Moon Charlie.”
“It’s a measure of time and not a vulgarity,” Gail said.
“Oh, Linda (Greenlaw) started that. She had the Hannah Boden at the time, and she was killing the fish,” Charlie explained.
Biedeman added, “Charlie prefers to seek out his own area even when it means going farther in order to lose the pack.”
“We’ve loaded the Seneca down quite often,” said Charlie, whose biggest trip, harvested at the Grand Banks, weighed out at 76,000 pounds. His heaviest dressed-out swordfish, an 800-pounder, “was caught in the warm water north of Brazil. It looked like a submarine coming up.”
Weather is an obvious issue when you’re several days of steaming time from land.
“It’s not hard to haul in rough weather,” said Charlie, who stressed, “When you see someone will get hurt, it’s time to stop.”
He’s been out in all kinds of weather – even the Perfect Storm on the Grand Banks where he talked with Capt. Billy Tyne on the ill-fated Andrea Gail just before the storm.
Charlie has had his vessel fall off the backside of a wave with nothing under it. “I don’t even think about all of the storms,” he said.
“When the ocean gets too rough, I just lay to. Otherwise you’ll take the waves over the bow and break out the pilothouse windows.”
Icebergs are his biggest fear on the Grand Banks in the spring. “You can’t see them on the radar when they roll over.”
Last April Charlie longlined halibut on the Grand Banks.
Supporting role
Since Charlie began swordfishing, Gail has simultaneously played out the roles of an offshore fisherman’s wife as well as that of a strong industry advocate.
She continues to travel to out-of-state and even out-of-country places to meet up with her husband when the boat’s in port, when Gail also often delivers repair parts and tallies the catch.
“I’ve never made a fishing trip with him. I’ve been the transit crew,” said Gail, who accompanied Charlie aboard the Seneca on the trip to Brazil last January and back from Newfoundland this fall.
The Johnsons now primarily communicate with each other by e-mail just about every day when Charlie’s at sea.
When she doesn’t get a message, Gail said that might mean one of three things: he’s busy catching fish; he’s having mechanical trouble; or there’s been a disaster.
While that may sound a little flip, Gail said that she has learned to cope with the risks over the years of separation.
“What happens, happens, whether or not you worry a lot,” she said. “Of course, I worry about him at times. I would like him to be home.”
The Seneca also has a vessel monitoring system (VMS) going continuously, which provides Gail with twice daily reports of Charlie’s whereabouts.
Advocacy
There have been many times over her years of involvement when Gail’s advocacy has made a difference for the swordfish fishery. Around 1989, for example, when she was holding a Maine obligatory seat on the New England Fishery Management council, the federal government proposed a 78 percent reduction in effort for the US fleet.
“It was such a ridiculous thing, the people proposing this didn’t have a clue what was going on out there,” she said. “There was growth overfishing and not recruitment overfishing.”
Johnson helped to convince the New England council to send a representative to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the international body that governs the management of Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS). That action ended up helping to make the point that swordfishing was an international fishery, and the US by itself couldn’t conserve the stock, she said.
“Gail is a matriarch in numerous commercial fishing organizations, including being an incorporating officer and the treasurer of Blue Water,” said Nelson Beideman.
Gail has served on the board of directors of the Maine Fishermen’s Forum and is one of the founders of the Maine Fishermen’s Wives Association. She continues to serve on the HMS Advisory Panel.
“She has sweated out numerous crises on behalf of the US Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico pelagic longline fishery. Despite being a volunteer, Gail works as hard and as long as the paid staff,” he said.
Conservation groups tried to shut down the US swordfish fishery on the Grand Banks around 2000 to protect sea turtles.
“If it wasn’t for Gail and Nelson working hard on it (the Northeast Distant Pelagic Longline Sea Turtle Bycatch Reduction Research Program), we would be out of the country fishing swordfish,” said Charlie.
That research program, which proved the use of circle hooks drastically reduced turtle bycatches, is why longlining on the Grand Banks for swordfish is an option for US sword boats today.
Future of the fishery
After making her final sword trip to the Grand Banks for the season, Seneca returned to Portland in late October for annual maintenance with a goal of resuming fishing in January. This break has given Charlie time to reflect on the state of the US fishery.
“The expenses are against us now. Bait and fuel are twice what they were, yet the price of swordfish nearly always stays the same. I used to get $5 a pound when I started, and there was no quality then,” he said.
Charlie continued, “It’s hard to get a crew around here. Nobody’s interested in this business any more.” This year, Johnson brought his crew, which came from the Caribbean, Brazil, Peru, and Indonesia, up from Brazil to fish the Grand Banks.
The Johnsons have seen the number of year-round US fishery participants shrink dramatically.
“We used to have well over 30 sword boats, including some from Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, fish the Grand Banks,” Charlie said. “This year, there were only seven of us (Seneca, Destiny, White Waters, Sea Hawk, Eyelander, Eagle Eye and Eagle Eye II).”
At 64, Charlie is still in one piece despite losing several finger tips to a wire leader accident and getting hit and gashed on his forehead by a leaded swivel. He knows he will be soon dropping the Seneca’s docking lines to start another trip.
“It’s always hard to leave (for another trip), but once you get clear, it’s OK. In order to make a trip, you have to leave.”
He admits with wry insight, “I’ll go wherever I have to go. Swordfishing’s a disease. Once you chase these things, you can’t get it out of your skin.”
Peter K. Prybot
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