“…Staying up, sometimes we’d be up all night.You’d have to go a long distance was. You might not even have hardly have any fish in your hold. This was like purse seining. [We’d go] purse seining at night. We would leave the factory and chase these seiners around. Several times it’s been all night long—Not see anything and not even have anything all day. You might be loaded, you might not be —any amount in between. It got hard to stay up all night and all day— go up to the bay and fall asleep. That’s bad. If you go to sleep, you don’t know if you’re on a ledge, you’re going to or run ashore or what. You almost had to force your eyes to stay open. I did, anyway… I could get so tired I could fall right off the stool. I could just almost pray for a few minutes just to close my eyes.”
Cary Lewis captained a sardine carrier, delivering sardines to the canneries on the Maine coast.
Read the full interview transcript
July 29, 2011
Southwest Harbor, ME
Interviewer: Keith Ludden
Recommended citation: Lewis, Cary, Oral History Interview, July 29, 2011 by Keith Ludden, Page #, Oral History and Folklife Research. Online: https://www.oralhistoryandfolklife.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Cary-Lewis.pdf.
Permission to quote from this transcript must be obtained from Oral History and Folklife Research. Please contact OHFR for further information.
Lewis was a sardine boat captain working for the Stinson Cannery in Prospect Harbor.