Off a nondescript wooded road is the unmarked boat hanger where Bruce Fernald is helping to construct his new lobster boat. I swung by the other day, parked my car in the mud by piles of melting snow, and wandered into the cavernous space, where I found Bruce clad in a white body suit and respirator mask to protect himself from filaments of fiberglass while he ground away at sections of the hull to prepare them for fusing to other sections.

The cabin unit had already been lowered onto the hull, although no windows had yet been cut out of the solid walls that held up the cabin roof. Underneath the fiberglass floor, a massive diesel engine had already been installed. Bruce is putting in seventy-hour weeks, trying to get the boat finished in time for spring lobstering. The construction process has been tough on both him and Barb, since he has to stay nights on the mainland and is almost never home.

Bruce sold his old boat the Double Trouble -- the boat on which I worked and which I wrote about in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS -- back in January, after twenty years of lobstering with her.