Published: March 12, 2008 11:36 pm         

From fish to fiction: Former captain turns love of sea into first novel

ROWLEY, Mass. — Kevin McCormick has always been connected to the water.

From his youth lobstering and clamming in Rowley to his years as captain and owner of two fishing boats to his current work in the marine construction industry, his focus has been on the sea.

At college in Rhode Island — the Ocean State — he studied marine science.

He builds skiffs in his garage.

When he listens to music, it’s likely to be Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers, whose best-known songs were about the Maritimes. When he makes music, it’s as half of a duo called Leeward Rail, named after a piece of a boat.

And when he writes, it’s about men who earn their living from the sea.

McCormick’s first novel, “The Freedom Plant: A Novel of New England Fishermen,” was published last fall by a California firm that specializes in - what else? - maritime books.

It’s about what McCormick calls “the glory days of commercial fishing in 1970s New England,” although the “glory days” included cutthroat competition from Soviet factory ships, frustrating government regulations and the daily peril of bad weather.

The 54-year-old McCormick says “The Freedom Plant” is based on his own experiences aboard his fishing vessels, and the experiences of other fishermen he has known over the years.

In the liner notes of “The Freedom Plant,” McCormick says he has “done everything there is that can be done in a boat ... that’s legal.”

He grew up catching fish and lobsters, and digging clams in his native Rowley.

“It was just a natural progression” for him to be attracted to a career on the water, he says. At the University of Rhode Island, which has a department of fisheries and marine technology, he earned two degrees in marine science.

Just as important, while a student at URI, McCormick began getting jobs as a crew member of gillnetters, draggers and lobster boats, work that he continued after graduation in both “inshore” fleets - mainly day trips - of northern New England and the “offshore” fleet - longer duration trips - of Point Judith, R.I.

In the ‘70s, McCormick was the captain and owner of two draggers: the 65-foot Mystic Sea, the largest boat in Newburyport’s modest fishing fleet, and the 44-foot Northern Lights, which he based in Portsmouth, N.H.

He sold the Mystic Sea in 1982 and, although he still had the Northern Lights, he was looking to get out of fishing altogether by 1985. By then, the 200-mile limit had been declared, which kept foreign fleets out of U.S. waters, but the domestic fleet grew exponentially.

McCormick won a demonstration grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service to turn Northern Lights to alternative uses. He renamed the boat the Mariah and Megan, after his two young daughters, and did research projects, generating technical reports.

Later, he did a little of everything with the boat, he recalled, except catch fish. He used the Mariah and Megan to create a pilot coastal ecology school for middle school-age students and ran a whale watch tour.

“It was what can you do with a fishing boat when you don’t go fishing,” he said.

In 1997, he went to work for the Middlesex Corp., specializing in marine construction projects such as bridges and piers. He sold the Mariah and Megan in 2000.

McCormick didn’t set out to write a novel. He had continued to be a keen observer of the fishing industry and thought he might want to do some nonfiction magazine articles, “but it felt too much like doing a term paper.”

“The Freedom Plant” has its roots in a story from his wife’s family, who immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 1940s. His wife’s great-grandmother had smuggled a cutting from a small flowering plant into this country in her clothing, he said. The plant still blooms in his home.

In the novel, the children of a family attempting to flee Russian-occupied Finland are kidnapped and taken aboard a Soviet factory ship, which in turn encounters fishermen from Point Judith. The children, a brother and sister, are secretly carrying a cutting of a small flowering plant, which the Finnish family had hoped to plant in the free soil of America.

McCormick spent about a thousand hours in his spare time over four years penning the tale. Now, he’s planning his second novel, which will have a more local focus. It will be set between Ben Butler’s Toothpick, the breakwater off Black Rocks Creek in Salisbury, and Great Neck in Ipswich.

He plans to title it “The Sand Drogher,” a reference to an old, unseaworthy vessel used only for jobs close to shore.

Plots may take work, but McCormick said populating his novels is easy.

“I’ve worked in the fishing industry and the construction industry,” he said with a chuckle. “Believe me, I have plenty of characters.”



Victor Tine writes for The Daily News of Newburyport, Mass. E-mail him at vtine@newburyportnews.com