As Lobster Move North, Canada and U.S. Clash Over Grey Zone Waters

David Abel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The Boston Globe, never expected that his career would lead him behind a movie camera. A print reporter by training, Abel had built his reputation through words, not visuals. But while on a fellowship at Harvard, he began experimenting with video storytelling, curious about how images could complement narrative. That curiosity soon collided with history.

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon in 2013, Abel instinctively reached for his camera. Amid the chaos, he realized he was in a position few others were — close to the scene with the ability to record it.

“I started to realize, ‘Oh my God, I’m holding a camera. I should probably document what is happening,’” he recalled. His footage became part of the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the tragedy and marked a turning point in his career. From that moment, Abel leaned further into film, finding a new medium to extend his journalism.

His 2018 documentary, Lobster War: The Fight Over the World’s Richest Fishing Grounds — now screening at the Fundy Film Festival — dives into one of the region’s most overlooked but consequential disputes: the battle over the “grey zone.” This 700-square-kilometre swath of ocean surrounding Machias Seal Island sits at the heart of a long-standing territorial disagreement between Canada and the United States. Canada operates the island’s lone lighthouse and maintains a permanent presence there, but sovereignty over the surrounding waters remains unsettled.

The tension has only deepened as climate change reshapes the North Atlantic. Warming in the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy is among the fastest in the world, driving lobster populations steadily northward. While lobster stocks in southern New England have collapsed, catches in Atlantic Canada have soared.

“We had seen a 95 percent collapse of the lobster fishery in the waters from Cape Cod to New York, where there used to be a thriving lobster fishery,” Abel said. “Now the lobsters are moving north, and that has shifted the balance.”

Historically, Maine fishermen dominated the grey zone. But as lobster populations migrated into those contested waters, Canadian fishermen — buoyed by their government’s presence on Machias Seal Island — began setting more traps. What followed has been an escalation of hostilities.

The film captures a world where livelihoods hang in trap lines, and territorial pride fuels conflict. Fishermen from both sides, known for their independence and toughness, have clashed at sea. Gear has been cut, traps sabotaged, and confrontations have at times turned aggressive. Adding to the friction are differences in conservation practices and national regulations: what one side considers sustainable harvest, the other may view as overreach.

Abel’s documentary doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. He situates the dispute within a broader geopolitical context, noting how trade disputes and diplomatic tensions between Ottawa and Washington occasionally flare up in the grey zone. What might seem like a small corner of the ocean has, at times, become a symbol of larger cross-border strains.

“My hope,” Abel said, “is that this relatively long-existing conflict doesn’t boil over into something worse.”

What surprises Abel most is how few people even know the dispute exists.

“Most Canadians, most Americans, have no idea about the grey zone,” he said. “But for those who depend on lobster, the stakes couldn’t be higher.” Those stakes are immense: the lobster fishery represents a multimillion-dollar industry that sustains small coastal communities in both nations, fueling economies that rely on the sea.

Lobster War also reveals an environmental subplot that Abel hadn’t anticipated. While filming, he learned about the fishery’s impact on the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, a species whose survival is threatened in part by entanglement in the vertical buoy lines used in lobster harvesting. That realization led Abel to create his follow-up documentary, Entangled, which explores the intersection of economic survival and species conservation.

“One of the major things that had an impact on me while I was making this story was learning about the dangers facing this critically endangered species,” he said.

Together, Abel’s films form a larger narrative about change — environmental, political, and cultural. In the grey zone, where Canada asserts its sovereignty with a lighthouse, the U.S. asserts it through tradition, and the lobsters themselves keep shifting north, those forces collide visibly and urgently.

For Abel, the transition from print to film has been about more thanthe  medium. It has been about capturing the stakes of conflicts too often hidden from public view and revealing how, in an era of climate change and global uncertainty, even a remote patch of ocean can become a crucible for survival.