March 18, 2021 — In 2005, Randy Cushman spent two days trolling through the Gulf of Maine, searching for Gary Thorbjornson’s body. Thorbjornson was family—not by blood, but in all the ways that really count. The men had grown up together, fishing the gulf’s waters since they were kids, and the intervening decades had sculpted their lives into similar shapes: careers in commercial fishing, marriages at about the same time, children of about the same age, and a tight-knit fishing community around Port Clyde, Maine.
While fishing on a foggy day in mid-July, the distress call came through: Thorbjornson’s boat was flooding, and the crew were panicking. “We have to get the fuck off this boat,” Thorbjornson yelled. By the time Cushman arrived, the crew, including Thorbjornson’s own son, were alive and safely aboard a rescue boat, but their fishing vessel was at the bottom of the ocean and Thorbjornson had vanished. The search began, hours lapsing into days as teams traversed the waters, looking for a body that might offer the Thorbjornson family a scrap of closure.
“His father called me, told me to stay,” Cushman says. “The coast guard gave up and then the other boats. I stayed like four to six hours longer and I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. It’s killing me.’”
In Brunswick, Maine, 90 minutes west of Port Clyde, Monique Coombs has watched this silent stoicism play out over and over again in fishing communities. Coombs is the director of community programs for the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association (MCFA), a nonprofit trade group dedicated to restoring commercial fishing in the Gulf of Maine. She’s seen fishermen just like Cushman endure the pain of lost loved ones, life-changing injuries, economic hardships, and the barrage of stresses endemic to the commercial fishing industry without seeking help, and she’s seen the legacy of depression and substance abuse that often follows. These problems have gotten worse, she says, ever since COVID-19 disrupted the state’s US $674-million seafood industry, shoving already unstable families even closer to financial collapse. But Coombs has a plan to fight back. Just over one year ago, her team won a grant to launch a pilot program aimed at addressing mental health in commercial fishing communities. The grant, awarded by the Fisher Charitable Foundation, is small—only $5,000, all of which goes to producing informational materials on managing anxiety and depression. But Coombs has much bigger ambitions.