Miranda Shinn is helping helm Lift All Boats, a nonprofit that gives young Mainers the skills and access they need to take part in one of Maine’s most important industries.
PORTLAND, Maine — Mist curls over the lip of Miranda Shinn’s boat, the waves of Maine’s coastal waters getting more turbulent, as she and her crew search for the traps they hope were well-laid. Their real hope: those traps will be full of one of Maine’s most precious resources –– lobsters.
On this foggy July morning off the coast of Portland, those hopes pay off Shinn and her crew. They pull in more than 30 pounds of lobster, far from the norm at a time when annual lobster catches keep sliding. But that’s not the only thing that’s different about Shinn’s boat. Instead of a group of veteran lobstermen, it’s crewed by high schoolers and first-year college students.
As the project manager for the nonprofit Lift All Boats, Shinn hopes these young Mainers could be the next generation of Maine lobstermen. Founded by the Maine-based restaurant company Luke’s Lobster, Lift All Boats aims to give young people an entry point into lobstering while also giving the dwindling population of Maine lobstermen an injection of new, highly skilled talent to assist on their boats.
“You think of Maine, you think of lobstering,” says Shinn, who is getting her master’s degree in project management from Northeastern University’s Portland campus. “It’s so out there [in the public eye,] but when you really think about the industry, it’s so closed and it’s so difficult to get your foot in the door. … We want more people entering the marine economy, but we don’t know necessarily how to get from point A to point B to make that happen. I wanted to be a part of this group that made that accessible to so many people.”
Shinn is no stranger to Maine and its increasingly dire coastal economy. She has spent most of her life in and around Portland and Maine’s coastal waters. Prior to coming to Lift All Boats, originally as a Northeastern co-op, she had worked on local tour boats and the Portland ferry.
However, getting involved with Lift All Boats first as a co-op and now full time has given her a new understanding of how integral lobstering is for Maine –– and how tenuous it currently is, she says.
“In the lobster industry, it’s very generational,” Shinn explains. “We have a lot of lobstermen that love their work but can’t find good sternmen and good people to work on the back of their boat.”
At its core, Lift All Boats offers local high school students the opportunity to spend their summer break on a lobster boat. Students in the program learn every part of what it means to be a lobsterman, from rigging and setting traps to collecting lobsters from the water.
Shinn emphasizes that Lift All Boats is open to any student regardless of their skill level. Some students enter the program having thought about lobstering their whole lives, while others show up on their first day afraid of going out on water or even touching a lobster.
Now in his third year with Lift All Boats, Carlos Fra-Nero, a first-year student at Central Maine Community College, has gotten to the point where he is learning to drive the program’s lobster boat.
“The waves and the wind are pushing the boat in different ways, and when it’s high tide and foggy, you’re looking for boats and trying not to run over buoys,” Fra-Nero says. “You’ve definitely got to be very attentive.”
Regardless of their skill level, at the end of each day, every student gets to take their catch and sell it to Luke’s at market price. On one particularly fruitful day, Fra-Nero was able to earn almost $200 from catching 27 pounds of lobster.
“You really learn what it’s like to be a lobsterman because you’re not guaranteed a good day,” Shinn says. “That’s part of being a fisherman. Kids have to realize that this isn’t a land-based job where you get x amount of dollars per hour that you’re working or you get a salary. You are determining your own salary based on your knowledge, based on where you’re fishing and based on so many different factors that are out of their control.”
These kinds of experiential lessons are invaluable, especially for students in the most advanced skill level who are starting to look at lobstering as a career.
Part of that is ensuring every student in the program gets a student lobstering license, one of the primary barriers for young people entering the profession. Getting a student license past the age of 18 is “almost impossible,” Shinn explains, because of the rules and regulations around licensure and the amount of on-boat hours one needs to get in order to even be eligible for a license.
All of this work is wrapped up with a major emphasis on sustainability, a word that has started to dominate the lobstering industry as lobstermen contend with climate change and diminishing or migrating lobster populations. Shinn and her students will throw female lobsters –– and even lobsters that are too big or too small –– back in the water if they are covered in eggs to ensure they’re not hamstringing the population.
Since Luke’s founded the program in 2022, Lift All Boats has grown considerably due in no small part to Shinn entering the picture. In the first year of Lift All Boats running, four students took part in the program. This year, the program has its highest enrollment, 30 students, and has already fished over 300 traps.
“We were kind of running around like chickens with our heads cut off just trying to get kids out to fish safely,” says Ben Conniff, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Luke’s, of the program’s early days. “Everything that Miranda’s brought with her experience in project management has just professionalized the organization and made it feel like it’s its own standalone entity and not just a thing that we were trying to do on the side.”
Quick to brush off a compliment, Shinn says she and the program are only as successful as their students. The program has increased enrollment, but the best sign of its reach is how much students develop over the summer, or years, they spend on their boat and, hopefully, beyond. She notes that eight students have already gone out to fish on professional boats after the program.
“To see their growth, that’s one of the most gratifying parts of my job, seeing, even from the start of the season to now, the confidence changes in each student when they get better at fishing,” Shinn says. “We understand that this cannot be for everyone, but for the folks that are really interested and can work their way in, they deserve this chance just like everyone else. We’re just facilitating that for people and making it accessible.”