Story by Colin Sargent<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Photographer Hugh Chatfield<\/strong> is no longer afraid of the dark. He nearly lost his life in a terrible automobile accident. He knows what it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s what has lured Chatfield 100 miles straight out from Portland Pier<\/strong> at night, to snap pictures of the unknown. Because out here is where the wild things are.<\/p>\n \u201cI convinced Cameron Mclellan<\/strong>, an eighth-generation fisherman, to let me shoot for a week aboard his 72-foot stern dragger Adventurer,<\/em>\u201d Chatfield, 45, who lives on Park Street in Portland, says.<\/p>\n In this weather, such an undertaking was something of a rough caprice.<\/p>\n \u201cI hear fishing is the most dangerous profession there is,\u201d Chatfield told Maclellan.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d Maclellan said, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re in the Pacific Northwest or the Gulf of Maine, a 30-foot wave is a 30-foot wave.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe night before we left, I went into Brian Boru<\/strong>, talking with the bartender and a lobsterman,\u201d Chatfield says.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going out with Cameron Mclellan,\u201d he told them. \u201cBut I shouldn\u2019t worry or anything, should I? I mean it\u2019s a big boat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNot that big,\u201d they answered.<\/p>\n The morning Chatfield departed for the waterfront, I left a slip of paper on my kitchen table, on which I\u2019d written, \u2018In case I don\u2019t come back, I\u2019m doing what I love.\u201d<\/p>\n As proof against seasickness, \u201cI wore a transdermal scopolamine patch behind my ear for seasickness, like a cigarette patch. I\u2019ve heard in different concentrations it\u2019s used as a psychedelic drug or an epidural to relieve pain for women giving childbirth. After the first day, it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n The Adventurer<\/em> steamed \u201ceight hours at eight knots\u201d straight into the blue until it was night and the glow of Portland had disappeared beneath the horizon. \u201cThen we started fishing, 24\/7.\u201d<\/p>\n Between 80 and 100 miles from shore, things got real simple real fast. \u201cThe two activities are set out <\/em>and haul back,<\/em> the terms being both nouns and verbs,\u201d he says. \u201cThe nets are set out for seven hours. Haul back takes half an hour or so.\u201d<\/p>\n At night, a nightmarish practicality set in. \u201cI shot hundreds of photos of Bertie Powell of Port Clyde, just cuttin\u2019 and guttin.\u2019 A monkfish has a big head and a long tail. Bertie cut the heads off monkfish before removing their livers\u2014which are prized in Japan for their medicinal properties.\u201d With hypnotic regularity, he dropped the livers, \u201cone by one, in a white plastic bag. The monkfish tails are meat,\u201d Chatfield says. \u201cThe head and guts are thrown away.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next hour and a half the flock increased from 12 to 3,000 gulls, luminous around the transom of the Adventurer.<\/em> \u201cWho knows where they\u2019d come from this far out? Maybe they heard each other\u2019s cries\u2014word of beak.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI used a hand-held recorder to catch their sound, but the engine noise is so loud it\u2019s all you can hear.\u201d<\/p>\n The fish had brought the gulls, and now the gulls prompted tales from the crew of stowaway rats they\u2019d seen running through the scuppers and jumping into the nets after haul up to eat the fish. \u201cGulls pick the rats up and carry them out to sea,\u201d Chatfield says. The gulls have found a way to eat surf\u2019n\u2019turf 100 miles from shore.<\/p>\n Naturally, the birds were an analog for madness: \u201cI shot down into the gulls. They are a squirming mass of wings, beaks, boiling\u2014you couldn\u2019t even see the water. It was an Italian Renaissance picture of hell\u2014you know, with great devils eating people.\u201d<\/p>\n The stars too were very close under the sky\u2019s pitched darkness. \u201cBut the sky was not the issue. It was the sea, and an overwhelming sense of joy\u201d at being close to the edge of the destructive element. \u201cPhotography is my great love, and the constant motion of the vessel puts me in full contact with reality.\u201d<\/p>\n Again and again the nets surged up, pulled in by the Adventurer\u2019<\/em>s spools, full of fish and Maine\u2019s answer to Alaskan king nightmares. \u201cThe lobster in this photo is 20 pounds easy, a male,\u201d Chatfield says of our cover photo, which shows Capt. Cameron Mclellan wrestling with the rascal.<\/p>\n \u201cWe threw him back, not just because that\u2019s the law but because we\u2019d have needed a hydraulic pair of lobster crackers to eat him!\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe cuttin\u2019 and guttin\u2019 should be a photographic term, because Chatfield\u2019s images\u2014an invitation to the world ruled by the law of tooth and fin\u2014are remarkable. Legendary photographer Berenice Abbott once told Portland Magazine<\/em> that nobody has ever taken a good shot of Portland because they let the lighthouses and lobster boats get in the way.\u201d<\/p>\n We think she\u2019d be pleased with the atavistic quality of these images.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cI\u2019m surrounded by enormous fins\u2014a pilot whale, I think,\u201d and claws. \u201cThen you get it. You\u2019re out here, beyond the pale. You\u2019re not going to shore right away.\u201d<\/p>\n But this darkness\u2014was it the very same as before? Chatfield takes a deep breath. \u201cIt was 1987. I was two years out of theater school at UCLA.\u201d In his mind he keeps trying to pass \u201ca long tractor trailer on the right. I was in a coma for a month, rehab for five years.\u201d<\/p>\n He shrugs. \u201cI 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, \u2018Art sucks!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n There are times in life as well as art when you must fish with your fear.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know now there are no sea serpents, but the Elizabethan or Jacobean idea of the sea serpent is that there\u2019s a monster out there, the monster you don\u2019t know, the monster of your not coming back.\u201d<\/p>\n Chatfield adds, \u201cEvery moment is extraordinary, and I try to capture that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photographer Hugh Chatfield chases monsters aboard the Adventurer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[494,496,495,497,127,126],"class_list":["post-16792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classic-maine-stories","tag-adventurer","tag-cameron-mclellan","tag-fishing","tag-hugh-chatfield","tag-maine","tag-portland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16792"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17986,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16792\/revisions\/17986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}