One sunny afternoon in late July, 12-year-old Zachary Wallace stood on a float beneath the Eastport pier, fishing for mackerel. To one side of him, lobsterboats bobbed at their moorings, backdropped by the low buildings of Water Street’s downtown strip. To the other, the profile of the cruise ship Riviera rose 16 decks high and stretched nearly 800 feet long, a gleaming barrier between the boy and the wide expanse of blue water beyond.
The fishing, Zachary said, was okay — a few pollack, no mackerel. Nothing like the day a few weeks back when Riviera had left for 24 hours to distill potable water from seawater in the channel. He’d filled a 5-gallon bucket with fish. “It was drop ’em and catch ’em,” he said, pointing to a piling above him. “Right off that corner.”
“We’ve got trash bags full of them in the freezer back home,” Kristen Wallace, Zachary’s mother, said.
Riviera had arrived six weeks earlier by way of Miami, where it had been laid up ever since a federal no-sail order put the cruise industry on hiatus amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In June, with hurricane season coming on, the ship sailed north, toward calmer weather, and it tied up at Zachary’s favorite fishing spot.
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