You might have heard already about Dillon Harvey, maybe for his being awarded the Mid-Coast School of Technology’s Osprey Award in 2024 in recognition of his courage, honesty and respect. Or maybe it was for the memorial he completed in Waldoboro’s Marine Park in Dutch Neck, as part of his culmination of being an Eagle Scout. Upon graduation, less than three months ago, he left school and Scouting for real life. He’s a lobsterman now who is applying every day the lessons he learned in Scouting and from his leaders, family and teachers, of patience, service and family. And to me, that's remarkable for one so young. But he has another secret power, and that's his sense of wonder.
I was born a while ago, in 2007, to a fishing family. My dad lobstered and built boats, and my mom worked part-time as a secretary at the chiropractor’s office uptown. She was a part-time mom, but I was covered — I had two much older sisters who were my other moms.
Growing up in a fishing family is different. I was running rope and helping my dad rig his traps, or running down to grab a runner from there and grabbing a buoy from there. Painting buoys was my least favorite chore, sitting and getting eaten alive by mosquitos while the paint ran all over the place. By the end of the day, half of my jeans would be white, the other half black.
For many years, my dad’s buoys were white and black with a band of red. But when my grandfather Neil Harvey passed, the colors fell down a generation — so now my dad has black and white while I have his colors. And my younger brother James has adopted the colors from our Uncle Wayne who passed away about seven years ago. His colors are candy cane – white with four red stripes.
My mom got me into scouting. I think it was because she secretly missed it, from when my sisters were Girl Scouts. So, she found a troop in Warren for Cub Scouts, and then she sold me on it.
And it wasn’t a bad thing. I made friends. We had fun and a lot of times it was kicking a ball around or playing t-ball, not just camping. I look back and I think it’s helped me in my day-to-day life. They call it leadership skills, putting your head down when you’re in a tough pickle and saying, “Okay, what’s the next step?” I learned to take things one step at a time.
Leadership also means sharing responsibility and being able to ask for help when you need it. Also, being there to help someone else when they need a hand.
There was a group of five us that went all the way through to Eagle Scouts. We were all spread out…Warren, Whitefield, Waldoboro, and Jefferson (because their troop closed).
Our final projects were really good. Bruce Bossow made a bunch of shoe racks for the Waldoboro Clothing Closet. Drew Swindler made playground stencils for Warren Community School, and one of them was a map of the United States on which kids could jump from state to state. Josiah Hayes made a set of benches that he installed at Medomak Valley High School. And Eric Richmond made a couple of outside tables designed for handicapped veterans, and he designed them so they extended, with two short benches on the inside for two people each, plus blank space on each side so other vets could wheel right up to the table.
Seeing their projects made me want to do something that was close to my own community. I thought about my cousin Dale Boyington who lost his life on the river. And a few our family’s friend James Gupthill also lost his life there a few years before. They weren’t the only ones. There have been others before them, and further out, lobstermen and other clam diggers. Butd there was no memorial for them.
When I first started talking to my scout leader Bruce Bossow, Sr., I think he was thinking
of a small rock. But when I got to talking with John Daigle in Public Works, he said, “The town’s set to clear this great whole big circle out — this would be a great spot for the memorial.” And I looked at what he was looking at – this wide, hilly expanse of overgrown forest, thick with underbrush and little spruce trees six feet tall, covered in leaves with broken glass and dirty needles — and I said, “You know what? Challenge accepted.”
Well, it was probably 150 hours of clean-up. But family and people from the community reached out and said, “This is a great idea, and I want to help.” We had a fourteen-man crew in here for a whole day to clear and clean.
Later, my uncle Josh came and leveled it off with his tractor. Then I spent a whole weekend with Mr. Bossow dragging leaf piles on tarps into the forest.
I went before the town Select Board, and they came down here to see what I needed. They helped get the small stones that are set inside the gravel here. Public Works brought and installed the stone. After that, it was a whole lot of landscape work. Bear Hill True Value gave us the soil for plants, and Moose Crossing gave us a ton of flowers. The Dutch Neck Community Club and Bob Crist built this picnic table and donated it.
For the memorial plaque itself, people donated money, but mostly it was my own money. It wasn’t easy securing it to the rock, but in the end, we did what fishermen do best – putty it on with some glue. It’s been two years now, and it’s still holding.
I think Boy Scouts did a really good job readying me for what I do now, being on the water and lobstering. Earning those merit badges in finance, personal time management, budgeting, and having a food plan – those are the things that aren’t taught in school and that you don’t think about as a student – but they were the things I’ve needed to know for life.
I’ve had a boat since I was sixteen. I called it a project boat. My plan was to finish it off and launch within a month of graduating high school. Well, that boat was not what I thought it was, so I used a lot of my Scouting skills to take it step by step in finding and fitting the parts it needed. I used the carpentry I learned and built the wheelhouse myself. And I asked my dad for help – he’s built and rebuilt a lot of boats. My boat hit the water this August. I’ve named it “Papa’s Legacy,” after my grandfather. Lobstering takes a lot of leadership and having respect for other people.
Once I got the boat in the water, I had my first real-life jolt. I’d already set the traps and this was my first day of hauling. Well, I hadn’t gotten my fuel tanks clean enough, so I had some gunk in there. I’d plugged my field focus on the motor twice, so I stalled the boat out, twice. And my hauler wasn’t set up right, so I had to stop at midday to fix it.
I hauled 150 traps and sold only 40 pounds of lobster. And I realized: “This is getting real.” But I’m using some of my stubborn, hard-headedness to keep going. Now I’m hauling 500 traps off the boat, and my brother James is fishing his 50 traps off my boat, too.
And every day is different. We’re always moving the traps to where we think the lobsters are running. In the past few weeks, we’ve caught one blue lobster, two calicos and a green one which is less rare, but when you turn it over, it’s this really pretty emerald green.
There’s probably a lot to worry about in terms of the future. I think the strict regulations for protecting the right whale that they proposed have been postponed until 2035, but when they happen, I don’t know how they will work without making severe changes to the industry. All I can say is that I don’t know a single person who’s seen a right whale.
As for wind farms, well, they’ve been postponed, too. But when they come, the guys that are fishing around them will either fish further out or come in closer to the rest of us, and that will put some stress on the grounds here.
But I’m always optimistic. I’ll spend the whole night thinking about what might be inside my trap. It’s happiness that keeps me up at night. It’s like opening a Christmas gift every day that I go out to haul. I might catch a calico lobster, or I might catch nothing.
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