When Sandra Staples-Bortner set out to write Finest Kind: Tales of a Brant Rock Lobsterman, she wasn’t chasing a bestseller, she was simply trying to capture her father’s stories before they slipped away.

“My dad was always telling stories,” she said. “More about his Navy days, really. He was obsessed with those stories in his 80s, telling them over and over again. My brother, who lived nearby and saw him frequently, was getting overwhelmed. So I said, ‘Let’s write them down, if we don’t, we might actually forget them.’”

The simple act of preservation turned into a heartfelt, generational record of the South Shore fishing heritage in Massachusetts. The book is centered on her father, Donal Staples, a respected lobsterman from Brant Rock, and the connection between working waterfronts and the people who keep them afloat.

Staples-Bortner grew up in a family of five children, and her father was one of eight children whom he also helped support from a young age. He was born in 1927 and grew up during the Great Depression. He was often called away from playing to catch dinner for the family at the nearby harbor. By the age of 11, he was sent off on a skiff to haul ten traps in the summer.

“My grandmother ran a little store in the front room of their house and sold the lobsters he caught to summer people and collected and sold Irish moss, a seaweed, with his younger sister,” Staples-Bortner shared. “That was just their life.”

Welcome to lobstering

Years later, her father’s influence as a commercial fisherman would ripple well beyond their family and the little store. Known for mentoring younger lobstermen and maintaining a spotless boat, he was also deeply involved in the early days of the South Shore Lobster Fishermen’s Association and the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association (MLA), where he served for decades on the board of directors.

“I found a newspaper clipping from 1964 with him pictured at a South Shore Lobster Fishermen’s Association dinner. He was 36 and already a leader. He was president for a while, and then he moved on to help expand the group into the statewide MLA,” she said. “When the MLA founded the nonprofit boat insurance co-op in 1977 to help fishermen get coverage, I remember the family conversations. He was there for all of it.”

But even as he shaped state fisheries policy through associations, her father never stopped showing up for the next generation.

“There’s a chapter in the book called ‘Welcome to Lobstering’ that’s all about the younger guys,” Staples-Bortner said. “He always checked in on them, made sure they weren’t doing anything too crazy. He wasn’t the kind of old-timer who scoffed at the young ones- he respected them, and in return, they respected him.”

The sense of community, as exemplified by an older fisherman and the next generation of fishermen, is the heart of Finest Kind. It’s not just a portrait of one lobsterman, but a way of life rooted in family, independence, and coastal grit.

Staples-Bortner’s family roots

As a self-described “non-profit lifer” with a background in wildlife biology and communications, Staples-Bortner is no stranger to storytelling with a purpose. After retiring from her role as executive director of the Great Peninsula Conservancy in Washington State, she knew she wanted to keep writing. Her father’s passing during the COVID-19 pandemic, while in residence at the Maine Veterans’ Home in Scarborough, became the catalyst.

“He had been there a year before COVID, and really loved it, there were other men his age with Navy backgrounds, and he felt at home,” she shared. “But during the lockdown, he was basically confined to his room for most of a year. It was so hard on him. That period became the last chapter of his story, and I knew I needed to tell it.”

With input from family members and interviews with fellow lobstermen who knew her father well, Staples-Bortner began weaving a fuller picture, not just of his work on the water, but of his roots. The book traces deep family lines back to coastal Maine, from sea captains in Islesboro to fishermen in Southern and Mid-Coast Maine. Even the boats her father ran for decades have a Maine story behind them.

“He had two Bobby Rich boats, which were built in Bernard, Maine,” she said. “Marshfield, where he lived, had more Bobby Rich boats than almost anywhere outside of Maine. There was this whole web of connections between the Massachusetts South Shore and Mid-coast Maine.”

Staples-Bortner also remembers the long summer voyages they’d take as a family aboard the lobster boat. They travelled through the Cape Cod Canal to Buzzards Bay and the Elizabeth Islands, camping aboard the boat and swinging from yacht moorings in their working vessel.

“We’d go every summer,” she said. “And it was always just us, the lobster boat, and surrounded by all these yachts.”

Close-knit community

Those years spent bouncing between the working world and the water left a lasting mark that would come full circle decades later, as Staples-Bortner began connecting with others in the small, tight-knit fishing community.

“I started following people on Instagram, just trying to get a better feel for today’s fishing world,” she said. “There’s one woman I follow, That Salty Blonde. She’s taking on more than just lobstering. She’ll catch green crabs to sell and discuss bycatch and biology on her page. It’s a totally different take on what it means to be a fisherman today, and I give her so much credit for that.”

It’s a much different world her father entered as a boy with ten pots and a handmade gaff, or even the era when he rebuilt an old launch into a lobster boat after returning from Korea. But the underlying spirit remains to work hard, help others, and take pride in the boat and gear you run.

“My father always kept a clean boat,” she said. “He followed every regulation, worked a full day, and gave back to the community. And he danced! He was a phenomenal ballroom dancer. You wouldn’t picture it, but he had this whole life outside of fishing.”

For Staples-Bortner and her family, the book is a tribute to that life, but it’s also a way to hold onto something larger. Something that, in a time of shifting regulations, coastal gentrification, and environmental uncertainty, feels increasingly fragile.

“There’s so much change in the fishing world today,” she said. “But the community is still there, still strong. My hope is that people read Finest Kind and feel connected to that history, not just the past, but to each other.”

She’ll be visiting Maine for a book signing at Sherman’s in Portland on September 13 and says she’s looking forward to reconnecting with the state and meeting readers who may recognize their own fathers, uncles, or grandfathers in her stories.

“There’s nothing I’d love more than to sit around and swap fishing stories,” she said with a smile. “That’s what my dad would’ve wanted, just to be remembered, and to keep those connections alive.”

For those of us who grew up to the hum of an engine and the loud crackle of the VHF radio, that’s not just storytelling, that’s legacy.

Finest Kind: Tales of a Brant Rock Lobsterman is available at your local bookstore or any online bookseller. Find a link to a few options at https://www.SandraStaplesBortner.com. Follow Sandra on Instagram at sandra.staples.bortner.