All along the Maine coast, thousands of lobster boats rumble to life at 3:30 or 4 a.m. and head out into the North Atlantic. One of them belongs to Peter Miller, who’s been fishing in the tiny village of Tenants Harbor, about two hours north of Portland, since 1974. On a typical workday, he’ll motor 10 or 15 miles from shore and haul a couple hundred traps, returning to unload his catch at the small wharf his family owns in town.

It’s the same work his three brothers do — Dan, Hale, and Tad Miller — and one of his sons, and several nephews. “My two granddaughters have some traps out, too,” Peter says. “They’re 12 and 10, so it’s definitely in the family.” All of these Millers are offspring of Anne Whitehouse Miller, who graduated from the Northfield School for Girls in 1945. For decades, Anne ran Cod End, a gray-shingled fish market and restaurant at the water’s edge in Tenants Harbor, selling what her family brought back from the sea.

One morning last August, Peter navigated his boat through thick fog a few miles outside the harbor, stopping at the yellow and red buoys that mark his lobster traps. Working alongside him was Merritt Carey ’87, a marketing entrepreneur and former lawyer who lives in Tenants Harbor in the summer and has known the Millers since she was a child. Carey doesn’t fish for a living, but she often fills in as a “sternman.” On the back of Peter’s boat, she moves rapidly, skewering silvery herring and stuffing them into bait bags, extracting lobsters from traps hoisted up from the ocean floor, measuring each one, and tossing the small ones and egg-bearing females back into the water.

Carey is also moving rapidly on a larger mission: to protect the working waterfront in Tenants Harbor that Anne Miller helped build. In recent years, small-scale “day boat” fishermen like Peter Miller and the 100 or so others in Tenants Harbor have had to work harder to do their jobs amid shrinking fish stocks, stricter permitting regula- tions, and pressure from real-estate developers looking to buy up shorefront properties.

So a few years ago, Carey started talking to the Miller family about “alternative ways to earn a living from the sea,” she says, such as farming scallops, harvesting seaweed, and partnering directly with restaurants and grocery stores to sell their catch instead of selling to a distributor.

Change doesn’t come easily in Tenants Harbor, according to Peter, who says, “A lot of us are geared into ‘This is how I’ve always done it.’” But he and his brothers trust Carey, and other fishermen in Tenants Harbor trust the Millers. Because she’s been connected to the wharf and to the life of fishermen for decades, Carey says, “I could begin a dialogue with these guys that maybe someone else couldn’t.”

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In the late 1970s, Carey got her first job on the Millers’ wharf. Her dad had given her a used 13-foot Boston Whaler when she was 9 or 10 — “up here, that’s normal,” she says — and took her to see Anne Miller, who hired her to ferry orders of cooked lobster and clams from Cod End out to the recreational sailboats that moored in the harbor on their way between Portland and Bar Harbor.

Susan Miller, one of Anne’s daughters, says her mother was a “matriarch” on the small family wharf where about a dozen fishermen made their living. Anne and her husband, Red, met and married at Colby College and had nine children in 12 years. Anne was an early feminist, raising her kids in the 1950s and 1960s while also earning a master’s degree in education at the University of Southern Maine and launching a career teaching grade school. “She was more like a today person — she did things back then that most people didn’t,” says her oldest son, Dan. The family lived on the water in southern Maine, where Red fished in the summer and put his kids to work on the back of his boat. “We were never just along for the ride,” says Peter, who started setting his own lobster traps, in his own skiff, when he was 10.

One by one, the family migrated northeast after Red’s brother bought the small wharf in Tenants Harbor in the early 1970s. Peter and Dan went first, to fish full time; their brothers followed. Anne and Red came in the summers and eventually retired in town. Red joined his sons on the water, and Anne opened the fish market, which evolved into a restaurant — the Millers call it a “cookhouse” — and became an attraction for both locals and tourists.

“We’d come in with 5,000 pounds of fish every day, and my mother would be there to help unload the boats,” Dan says. There was lobster in the summer and fall, shrimp and scallops in the winter, and also groundfish such as cod, haddock, and flounder. In the summer, Anne took what she needed for the market, and the rest would get trucked down to the Boston Fish Pier by one family member or another. Anne spent long days cutting fish and running Cod End. “She had high standards and a strong will, and was not a wimp about anything,” says Susan, who worked alongside her mother. “The fish market was kind of like daycare for us when our dads were out fishing,” recalls Anne’s grandson Josh Miller — Peter’s son — who’s now chair of the Tenants Harbor Fisherman’s Co-op. Anne taught the grandkids how to cut fish and count out change for customers. “She was a good teacher,” Josh says. “She’d show you something once or twice and then you had to figure the rest out yourself.”

Meanwhile, Merritt Carey was growing up on the wharf under Anne Miller’s watchful eye, too. It was Anne who told Carey about Northfield Mount Hermon, who wrote a letter of recommendation when she applied, and whose high standards Carey recalls as clearly as Anne’s children and grandchildren do. “Mrs. Miller was steady and confident,” Carey says. “She modeled hard work, perseverance, dedication, and kindness.”

Carey went on to Brown University, started sailing competitively, having learned the basics in Tenants Harbor. She joined an all-women’s team for the 1993–94 Whitbread Round the World Race and the first all-women’s team to compete in the America’s Cup, in 1995. She says, “I have a high tolerance for risk. Not in a reckless way, but in taking chances. I’ve always been the kind of person who says, 'Let’s do this.’” After attending law school, practicing employment law, and starting her own family, Carey returned to her roots on the waterfront, working for the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI), and other organizations that focus on fisheries and rural economic development.

When Anne Miller died in 2007, her daughter Susan took over Cod End, and kept it going another six years, through the recession. But the Maine fishing economy had changed. The diverse catch of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s was vanishing. State regulators closed the shrimp fishery because warming ocean temperatures had drastically shrunk what fishermen were able to catch. Scallop licenses became almost impossible to get. Ground fishing quotas went to the fishermen who could afford to buy them, which increasingly meant corporations with fleets of boats, not small one-person day boats. And lobstering, which dominates fishing in Maine today, has gotten much more competitive and “industrial,” according to Peter. “I can haul a couple hun- dred traps in a day, but the bigger, faster boats with more people working on them can haul a lot more.”

Holding onto the wharf — one of the few places in town that was still owned by a local family — was getting harder, too. “Fifty years ago, you didn’t have people from out of town coming down to the water with $10 million to spend,” Josh Miller says. “Traditional places like us face higher operational costs, higher taxes,” Peter adds. “What can you do? You start to think about selling. It’s happening up and down the coast.”

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One of Carey’s first projects with the Millers helped solve that problem. The Millers applied to the Maine Working Waterfront Access Protection Program, which was administered by CEI, where Carey had worked. Her knowledge of the wharf and the Millers helped steward their application through. They were rewarded with a $250,000 grant to lower the wharf’s operating costs, as well as a guarantee that the wharf would always be used for commercial fishing. It can never be developed for another use, even if the Millers sell the property.

Around the same time, a group of about 10 local fishermen — led by Peter Miller’s brother, Hale — decided to form a co-op to pool their resources and split costs. Co-ops aren’t new in Maine, but the Tenants Harbor Fisherman’s Co-op was unique. Most co-ops sell their catch to a distributor, which sells it to a fish market or a restaurant, which sells it to consumers. The fishermen aren’t connected with their “end user.” But in Tenants Harbor, Carey joined the co-op’s board and brought in Luke Holden, the Maine native behind the international Luke’s Lobster restaurant group. He agreed to buy every lobster the co-op members caught to sell in his 32 lobster “shacks.”

He sits on the co-op board, so “the fishermen have access to him, which is fairly unusual,” says Peter. “We talk to him; he talks to us. It’s a good model for getting things done.” Holden also opened a Luke’s Lobster shack in the empty space on the family’s wharf where Anne Miller’s Cod End used to be, and gives half the profits back to the fishermen’s co-op.

To try to diversify fishermen’s income and move away from a complete “lobster economy,” as Josh Miller calls it, Carey and Peter started Maine’s first aquaculture co-op, farming scallops in Tenants Harbor with grants from the Maine Technology Institute and the Maine Department of Agriculture. (They’re working with Chris Cook ’82, who grew up in Tenants Harbor and has fished off and on his whole life.) Carey learned about Japanese scallop-farming techniques through work she did for CEI, and she persuaded members of the Tenants Harbor Fisherman’s co-op to try setting “spat bags” in their respective fishing territories. The mesh bags fill with spat — larvae — which grow into baby scallops that, in a few years, become a highly marketable product.

“Aquaculture is definitely change,” Carey admits. “But it makes sense if you want to develop a sustainable fishery. And a lot of people, fishermen in particular, are watching.”

“Whatever the barriers are, they don’t bother Merritt,” says Josh. “This is a small town, and she’s trying to engage fishermen, who are a pretty closed bunch of people. And she’s a woman. Most of the people she’s talking to are men. But she jumps in. She talks and she listens. She’s sincere about helping rural areas get better access to economic opportunity.”

The projects keep coming. Carey connected the fishermen’s co-op with Nature Conservancy researchers to test bait alternatives to the traditional herring, which can frequently be in short supply. She is helping co-op members pilot an initiative to fish mackerel to sell to Ducktrap River, the internationally known smokehouse in Belfast, Maine, and the Hannaford grocery chain, which wants to see more local seafood on its shelves. She’s collaborating with the University of Maine to gather feedback from small aqua-culture farmers up and down the coast, to ensure they have a say in how state policies are developed as bigger corporations enter the aquaculture market.

Most recently, Carey agreed to run the Luke’s Lobster shack in Tenants Harbor, returning to work on the wharf where she began more than 30 years ago. She says, “It’s both rare and wonderful to have your first work experience cut such a wide swath through the course of your life, and influence so considerably who you become.”

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What would Anne, the Tenants Harbor matriarch, think of all these new initiatives? Dan Miller says his mother would be all for the co-op and the working-waterfront program. “She’d like the idea of fishermen being able to keep a place of their own on the wharf. She’d like the aquaculture, too — science was one of her strong suits.”

Carey sees her myriad collaborations in Tenants Harbor and along the coast as a continuation of what her former boss helped start back in the 1970s. “Mrs. Miller was one of the first people to bring local, fresh fish directly to the consumer. We’re simply building on that idea,” Carey says. “I can’t go out and haul hundreds of lobster traps in a day, but I can get on the back of a boat and help out, and I can apply for grants, fire off emails, set up meetings, do a PowerPoint in a boardroom, and get people working together. I’m working with fishermen who have decades of experience, and we have the capacity to make meaningful changes along this coast.”