There’s all sorts of slang for nonnative Mainers by Mainers, most of it pejorative—everything from “jughead from away” to “summer complaint,” with “transplant” and “straphanger” in between—and Captain Perry Wrinkle ran through a number of his favorites in his column in the September 2006 edition of the Fishermen’s Voice (“If your great grandparents were not born in Maine it meant that you were from away. If you were from away you were a Picked Ear. Like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. An alien from some other world.”). Being a Picked Ear myself, I wasn’t that fond of the pejoration, but I did enjoy Capt. Wrinkle’s definition of a real Mainer:

“A real Mainiac has a whole pocketbook full of Maine licenses,” he wrote. “Four or five for hunting, two or three for fishing, boat trailer, on and on and on. To qualify for Mainiac status you must spend most of your money on licenses and the rest on taxes. You must be part red neck, part ridge runner, and tougher than a bag of nails. You have to work 10 hours a day and seven days a week. No vacations, no sick days, no paid holidays and only a few liquid lunches. If you can do this until you are 65 you can retire on seven or eight hundred a month. This is why there are very few Mainiacs left, most have starved to death.”

Gizmo lovers—that is, fans of Ben Ellison’s regular column in this magazine, “Gunkholing with Gizmo”—got up and cheered when they learned that even though someone stole Gizmo, trailer and all, from Ellison’s Camden lot, Waldoboro police wasted no time in getting it back. The 14-foot catamaran was located right out in the open, sitting on its trailer by the Waldoboro town landing on the Medomak River. No serious damage to the boat; only a few scratch marks where the perp scratched off Gizmo’s name. And “Awanadjo Almanack” lovers now have more reading than they usually get in Rob McCall’s column in each issue of this magazine. McCall’s book, Small Misty Mountain: The Awanadjo Almanack was recently published by Pushcart Press and should be available at local bookstores. If they don’t have it, make them get it.

Being devotées of the fine art of classified-ad writing, especially for boats, we were especially taken by this one in the Village Soup Times: “1954 16 ft. Corson V-Haul with 1988 70-hp Johnson. Boat goes good.”

At a time when the federal government is having trouble finding enough money to pay for a crew to pick up trash by the side of the road in Acadia National Park, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust recently announced that it had surpassed its capital campaign goal and raised more than $100 million for land and coastline preservation. So far, the Trust’s Campaign for the Coast has protected more than 14,000 acres, including 125 miles of Maine shoreline, 750 acres of farmland along the coast, and 56 islands.

Speaking of the search for money, the town of Poland, Maine, has been looking in coat pockets and under seat cushions for all the spare change it can get since an audit showed that it owed the Poland Spring Water Company $2.7 million. Tax payments that should have been refunded to the company under a TIF (Tax Increment Financing) agreement were mistakenly put in the general fund and then spent.

Things looked grim last summer for the Marine Technology Center, a.k.a. Boat School, at the Washington County Community College in Eastport when the legislature failed to provide adequate funding. At the last minute Governor Baldacci came up with $210,000 from a contingency account to keep the program afloat. The school teaches boatbuilding and other marine trades.

Okay, this magazine has the Boatyard Dog®, but can that hold a candle to the New England Aquarium’s Whale Stool Canine? It seems that scientists at the aquarium’s research station in Lubec use Fargo, a Rottweiler, to sniff out whale dung on the waters so it can be scooped up and studied. DNA from the stools helps the scientists identify individual whales, and the presence of certain hormones can tell them whether female whales are pregnant or nursing.

And this magazine might have the annual World Championship Boatyard Dog® Trials (see page 6), but can that event compare to Boothbay Harbor’s International Rock-Skipping Championships? Top prize at this year’s third annual event went to Alex “Skip Masta” Mackay of Palo Alto, California, for 26 skips with one throw.

Mutant Lobsters in the News: An orange lobster (precooked) with yellow legs, caught off the coast of Washington County, and a yellow one looking as if it were plated with gold, caught off Great Cranberry Island.

The decline of the party boat business on the coast of Maine, whereby geezers in swordfishermen’s hats take geezers in Red Sox baseball caps out to the inshore fishing grounds after cod, haddock, and the like, has paralleled the decline of the inshore fishery. But every once in awhile we hear about someone hauling in a big lunker, such as the 27-pound cod, nearly four feet long, caught last summer from a party boat out of Boothbay Harbor.