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Last year was relatively calm, but the sinkings in Friendship are raising questions about whether this coming summer will be heated. For now, there aren't any indicators that tensions are ready to erupt, "knock on wood," said Marine Patrol Maj. Alan Talbot. "Hopefully it's just a random thing," he said. "But who knows what's to come." Gary Jones' boat was taken to a boatyard in Owls Head for repairs. His son's boat sits on boat jacks at Lash Boatyard in Friendship. Lobstermen in town are a reticent bunch, but they'll tell you they think the perpetrator was from somewhere other than Friendship. The Joneses are from Cushing and don't even fish the waters off Friendship, they say. "You might be able to say this was a Friendship thing if he fished here
-- but he don't," said lobsterman Kendall Delano as he sanded his trap buoys in a waterfront building. Wesley Lash, who works for his father at the boatyard, said the sinkings don't reflect well on this sleepy town, which has about 1,200 residents, just a single store and not even a traffic light. "It gives Friendship a bad name," he said. "People'll say Friendship, that doesn't sound like a friendly place." Lash's father, also named Wesley, said there have been feuds as long as there's been a lobster industry. "You go from Portsmouth (N.H.) to Eastport and it's the same thing," he said. Still, Friendship gets its share of feuding. Simmons remembers years ago when somebody slammed a crowbar through the hull of another boat, causing it to sink. This past winter, somebody fired a shot from a high-powered rifle into the hull of a lobster boat, Cloutier said. The shooting is under investigation. "It happened late at night, nobody saw anything and Friendship is a pretty tight-lipped community," he said.
[Associated
Press;
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