By Charlie Pike
From our July 2025 issue
For eight years, Chris Cash captained a lobsterboat off Monhegan Island, where she and her family lived full-time. She was the town’s first assessor, her husband was constable, and their daughter was one of the community’s three schoolchildren. Then, in 2013, Cash suffered a career-ending wrist injury while hauling in a trap. “We never thought we would move, and then we found ourselves having to leave our home, our friends, and start over,” she says.
These days, Cash says she’s doing the next best thing to lobstering. Last year, she was named executive director of UMaine’s Lobster Institute, in Walpole, where she acts as a liaison between fishermen and researchers studying the sustainability of the fishery. Many of the issues she tackles, such as the impacts of climate change on the lobster population, are prickly, but Cash feels well-suited to the task. “As a commercial fisherman, I have an understanding of what might be on the minds of fishermen and am able to address the issues that concern them most,” she says.
She feels equally at home at the Darling Marine Center, where the Lobster Institute is based. “This summer, I get to go out on a lobsterboat and show students how lobsters are caught,” Cash says. “That wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t all thrown together at this beautiful marine field station.”
