I have been water-adjacent most of my life. Born and raised in Harpswell to a mom with sailing in her DNA and a dad who built boats and worked as an island caretaker in the Bay of Fundy; my connection to the ocean and to those who make their living upon it has always felt like a given.
Though my work has taken me on the water - sailing for several years as a cook aboard the Robert C. Seamans and the Corwith Cramer for Sea Education Association - my career has never before led me to directly support Maine’s working waterfront and fishing communities.
In my new role as Program and Operations Administrator at MCFA, I am thrilled to finally be working in support of a mission I care deeply about: to sustain vibrant working waterfronts for this and future generations of Maine fishermen.
I came to this position via a somewhat circuitous career path. In college I studied music history and theory, with a concentration on 18th-century English musical identity, and classical flute performance. By all accounts not a particularly practical degree with which to enter the 2009-era workforce, I found myself in the food industry after graduation. Working as a bread and pastry baker awakened my abiding love for food and for the tightly knit community of food producers in Maine. After cooking and sailing around the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean with SEA, my passion for food eventually led me to launch my own small business.
In 2017 I started Mill Cove Baking Company, a specialty food business manufacturing and distributing crackers made with Maine ingredients to over 200 retail partners throughout New England. After five years running and growing Mill Cove into a viable business, I felt eager to engage in a new creative endeavor, and began writing freelance articles about the food producers, growers, and business owners that I had come to know through my work. When I was introduced to an incredible company in Rhode Island capable of scaling up the cracker business, I made the decision to sell Mill Cove in pursuit of a new path.
Now I welcome the opportunity to support MCFA’s many brilliant programs with the skill sets that I built while running my own business. I thrive on organization and efficiency, live by my obsessively made to-do lists, and love the chance to help collaborate, create, and problem solve. I still have a great deal to learn about the ins and outs of the fisheries and the ways in which MCFA works to support fishermen. I hope as I grow into my new role that I can make meaningful contributions to this work and this community.
In my spare time you’ll find me cooking and baking, paddle boarding, crossword puzzling, and adventuring with my 8-month old daughter Eliza and husband Willy, who is a boat builder, oyster farmer, sailor, and all-around lover of boats and the ocean himself.
You can e-mail Nina at nina@mainecoastfishermen.org.
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