BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — With the Gulf oil spill capped and the huge slicks from it disappearing, the big picture of the environmental disaster looks better than it has for months.
Rita Merritt, a Boston fisherman's daughter in a family fishing business in North Carolina and a broadly respected two-term member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, has been dumped by the Obama administration despite overwhelming support for her reappointment up and down the coast.
Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, recently sold its 83-foot sardine carrier Jacob Pike to Jamie Steeves, who owns J&J Lobsters in Rockland with his fiancée, Joanne Campbell. Steeves will repair and maintain the historic boat in Rockland, near where it was built.
The Jacob Pike was built in 1949 by Newbert and Wallace in Thomaston, Maine, and worked between Gloucester, Mass., and the Canadian Maritimes, taking sardines from fishing boats and delivering them to canneries. In 2007, years after her retirement, she was given to Penobscot Marine Museum, which used her as a working exhibit of Penobscot Bay's fishing and boatbuilding industries.
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