Inside The Lobstering Life

The Deadly World of Lobstering

1/6/2011

If this article tells you anything, lobstering is right up there with Alaskan crab fishing as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. 155 people died in the last decade on commercial fishing vessels nationally. Vessel disasters and crew members falling overboard were the leading causes of fatalities in this latest report. And at the end of this year, we just lost another one of our own Maine lobstermen when he got entangled in lobster line and was pulled overboard.

Maybe what I'm saying is patently obvious, but for so many people who came up this summer to specifically have their Maine lobster, I continue to post stories like these to show you exactly what goes into that steamed crustacean on that plate. It is a backbreaking, perilous profession and the men and women who are born into this life, work at it every day and put their lives at risk for this status symbol dish deserve a little attention for their efforts now and then.

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90-Year-Old Grandmother Lobster Fishes Every Day

8/16/2010

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As promised, I will continue to feature the more fascinating Maine lobstermen that keep this industry alive and well. Meet Ginny Oliver. She'll give your grammy a run for her money. Story courtesy of The Free Press.

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Nothing’s Perfect In Maine, But This Day Was

6/21/2010

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photo: K. Stephens

A Day in the Life of Maine Lobster Boat Racing
K. Stephens

Moments before the annual Rockland lobster races start, people are lined up on the Rockland breakwater waiting for some kind of signal designating the kickoff. All kinds of spectators—parents with babies strapped to their backs, dogs, locals and tourists—wait patiently. This is the first year in several that it has been a bright hot day with perfect visibility. For the moment, their only distraction is several hundred feet away. Parallel to the breakwater, dozens of lobster boats are rafted up together. From the breakwater you can hear the cheers and laughter across the water. This is a flotilla of locals, the tight-knit lobstering community known for working hard and partying harder.

“Wow, how much fun would it be to be hanging out on one of those boats?” a spectator says thoughtfully.

Aboard the Total Eclipse out of Owls Head, ME, this is how much fun it is. It's finally summer here in Maine. It's finally hot out. No one lobsters on a Sunday, that's just the rules—so everyone is making the most out of the day off, chatting and laughing or climbing over the rails to socialize on neighboring boats nestled alongside one another. These are people who have grown up together. Everyone here is someone who lobsters in the area, who has married into it, who works in the community or who has some kind of connection to lobstering. The vibe is Key West friendly. Coolers of every size line the stern. A picnic table and a grill has been set up. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” blasts out of the speakers as girls in bikinis and shorts dance and air guitar. A variety of drinks are in people’s hands: wine, Jell-O shots, Bud Lites, a special cider from South Africa. Clayton’s gripping onto a two-gallon cooler of vodka and grape juice like some one might rip it away from him.

A sharp whistle pierces the air. “Everybody quiet down and turn to Channel 10,” yells Scott Herrick, one of the organizers. The noisy crowd passes the message from boat to boat until everyone settles down. Sandie Galvez, a petite mom of teenagers who could pass for a 25-year-old, gets on the VHF radio and begins singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” A former lounge singer from L.A., her voice comes clearly over the mike as she nails the high notes at the end. This particular song produces goose bumps, especially in this charged atmosphere. At the conclusion of the song, a roar of cheers spills out of the rafted boats.

Now it’s officially party time.

More than 110 lobster boats from all over the state will race at this event. This lobster boat race competition takes place in a variety of locales from Portland to Winter Harbor in the summer, but here in Rockland, considered “The Lobster Capital of The World,” the races are particularly exciting. As the first boats of the lobster races spray rooster tails, there is a deafening engine blast from one of the boats as it takes an effortless lead. The cheers from the rafted lobster boats go up along with hands holding red plastic cups. The racers circle around and cruise on by the flotilla to get their accolades as sea gulls decide at this very moment to suddenly swoop in and do these crazy zig-zig aerials. At once it is a confetti of birds, like a ticker-tape parade.

The grills are cooking full throttle. “Who wants a meat stick?” The cooler lids open and close. A couple of girls dive into the bottle green ocean. Some do front flips off the stern. Clayton is bobbing in the water, his vodka grape juice cooler his only personal flotation device. A couple of boats over, where the kids are a little younger, people get yelled at for letting their Jell-O shot cups litter the water, as someone from the older crew dives in to collect debris. These are people who protect their waters fiercely. “You know better!” someone yells. Then, the mood goes back to playful as another cry rings out: “Survival Suit Contest!” Within moments, five guys are frantically wriggling into full body neon orange immersion suits designed to keep someone warm and protected in the water in case of emergency. To the crowd’s delight, they don their suits in less than 10 seconds and launch themselves over the side of the boat.

Soon, a recognizable boat comes around the bend. With a half dozen people on board, the 40-foot lobster boat The Instigator approaches and everyone knows who Ryan Post is. Largely credited for organizing the earliest lobster boat races, Post is a rising voice in the lobstering community. Given the cheeky nickname “Captain Hollywood” by his friends, he is the creator of the educational lobstering DVD Maine Buggin, and is regularly consulted on public lobstering matters in the news. Right now he’s got radio personalities Tom O. and Mr. Mike from WTOS’s The Morning Mountain Show on board and the crowd whoops it up every time The Instigator passes by. Also on board is a video crew. Word is that the Portland marketing company, Aura360, was on board to get footage to turn into a pilot that it can pitch to television networks. The idea is to produce a television series based on the races similar to the hit show “Deadliest Catch.

In the end, Galen Alley, of Beals Island, has won the race, setting a new speed record. He was clocked at 68.1 m.p.h. in his 30-foot fiberglass boat, Foolish Pleasure, breaking his own record of 64.5 m.p.h., which he set last summer.

“This has been such a beautiful day,” said Stacy Campbell, in her bikini and beat-up straw hat gazing out at the water. “Everybody you’d ever want to spend time with is right here.” There is no such thing as a “Perfect Maine.” But today, living, working and celebrating in a lobster community is about as close as it gets.

To see more pictures of the day, fan "The Ghost Trap" on Facebook and view "Photos"

photo: K. Stephens

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Get Ready To Catch a Piece of This

6/7/2010

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Captain John Ready

Captain Brendan Ready

The next few posts are going to be about Maine's people, about lobstermen and sternmen (and by the way those titles encompass both genders) who have a story to tell. The Ghost Trap isn't about lobsters. It's about the characters who work hard, live hard and inspire us not to complain about an 8-hour day. Summah time is heating up. Let's see who's up on the docket.

Meet cutie pie brothers John and Brendan Ready, owners and operators of Catch A Piece of Maine. Recently featured by US Airways Magazine (which I happened to recently see on my flight home ) the Ready Brothers have come up with a fresh solution to Maine's morass when it comes to marketing the lobster brand. According to the US Airways article, "The Ready brothers graduated with degrees in business from Boston’s Northeastern University and Stonehill College in nearby Easton, Massachusetts. And they both knew they were coming home to Portland. 'You can walk down the street and still see fishing boats, and on the other side, boutiques,' John Ready says. 'It’s the best of both worlds.' "

What they're doing is they're allowing customers to own and receive their very own “share” of the catch direct from their crew of personal lobsterman. This model is very similar to CSAs, which is a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. We're in a global trend where a lot of people want to know local food comes from. We're in a social media culture where we also want to know who butchers it, grows it, farms it, catches it. The Ready Brothers understand this. That's where they bring the "personal" in. For example, they offer a "Premium Partnership, where you actually own a lobster trap in Maine and all of its catch for the entire year to be shipped to any destination of our choice, or a 'Lobster Share' entitling you to a gourmet dinner for four delivered anywhere in the country." Their promise entails: "Most importantly, we are bringing you closer to the dock allowing us to sell direct so that we as lobsterman earn a premium and effectively preserve the traditional working waterfront."

This more than anything, makes them my heroes. We have a lobstering industry that is breaking its back. There are plenty of lobsters to be caught, but Perfect Storm of a double dip recession, encroaching government regulations, an exorbitant rise in bait/fuel and shockingly low (some say price fixed) boat prices are devastating the livelihood of so many of our lobster fishermen. The rising voices of the lobstering industry have been calling for innovation in terms of branding and marketing and these guys have simply taken what is fascinating (the lives and hard work of lobstermen) and turned it into a viable market.

According to their website:

Catch a Piece of Maine was created, with the help of family, friends, and fellow lobstermen, in part as a response to the financial realities of the lobstering industry and as a means to introduce you to our traditions, trade and the sea. Through Catch a Piece of Maine we have toppled the barriers between lobsterman and consumer, allowing those who love to eat the freshest most delicious lobster a chance to get to know the dedicated lobsterman who harvests their dinner. Bringing the consumer closer to the dock allows us to sell direct so that we as lobsterman earn a premium and effectively preserve the traditional working waterfront.

We as lobsterman are all stewards of the sea; always making sure today’s catch is available for tomorrow’s lobsterman. Our industry exemplifies hard work, tradition, heritage, and sustainability. We pride ourselves on our eco-friendly manner of harvesting, producing little to no by-catch and enforcing strict laws to allow the release of all lobsters too small and too large. Lobstering is hard work and capital intensive, requiring boats that cost as much as a house, on top of equipment, traps and fuel. In the past several years the price of bait and fuel has tripled while we’ve watched our working waterfront slowly disappear.

Stay tuned for more stories of people who exemplify the word True Mainer.

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Behind Every Good Lobsterman is A Woman With a Sharp Knitting Needle

4/15/2010

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This month's guest lobster blogger (loblogger?) is Monique Coombs, an author and blogger for Lobsters On The Fly. Often the image of the lobsterman as a single, solitary guy hard at work doesn't take into account that many women are either lobster fishermen themselves (never lobsterwomen--never!), as well as sternmen. Often the wives, sisters, and mommas do their part to keep the industry going--kind of like Rosie The Riveters...with varnish and knitting needles.

By Monique Coombs

This time of year, in a corner of our living room, there is a stack of heads (not human) and a bucket of string. We're all thankful that the weather is warming up here in Maine but cursing the mud and rain. I am also cursing the heads and string that are strewn about my living room. Every spring, lobstermen go through their traps and replace their trap heads, sell some and repair others. My husband puts together everything that he can himself because it is cheaper. It is cheaper because I do some of the work and I am free labor.

He cuts the heads into the sizes he needs and then cuts out holes for the hoops. Then, we work together to insert the hoop into the head, which will later be what the lobster travels through in order to get into the trap... and not get out! The strings are laced around the outside of the head with a large knitting needle.

It's tedious work, but a very important part of the trap. By helping him do this, I give him more time to bend traps, move more traps around and continue fishing (even though it sucks right now). Every year, my husband says we'll just do as many heads as he needs at a time and we won't have to sit and do them all. But, our "done" pile is empty and our "to do" pile is growing. I have to wonder if the folks at Discovery Channel run their Deadliest Catch marathon at this time of year, knowing that it coincides with everyone's head-knitting and hooping marathon.

Fishermens' wives have been helping their husbands in this way forever and will continue to do so until fishermen make enough money to hire someone, which they probably won't anyway because they all like things done their own way. Or, traps are suddenly made differently, which probably won't happen either because... did I mention, fishermen like things done their own way?

Right now, we have a little 10-month-old boy crawling around. He has only gotten stuck a couple of times. It would piss us off if he wasn't so damn cute and looked so freakin' funny stuck in a pile of heads.

Next time I drop in on this stitch and bitch, girls, let's have a discussion on the best ways to mask the stench of fish. If it weren't for me would my husband ever not smell like bait???

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Spring Time: Setting Traps and Making Squat

3/14/2010

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By Ryan Post

Our family has designated April 15 every year as the day we all go to the island and set our traps, 100 at a time. And this isn’t any random, “toss ‘em wherever” method—if anything it’s like the way my aunt orchestrates Christmas—everything is hyper-organized, from how good a shape the traps themselves are in (none can be what we call“stove up”) to the exact length of rope tied to each trap. And the area where each trap will be dropped is already pre-arranged before we even get on the boats. Yep, it’s a little OCD. But it has to be, because if you drop a brand new $65 trap into shallow water in the spring, what’s going to happen is, it is going to continuously get rolled over by the tide. And in a matter of weeks that $65 trap turns into a $5 trap.

Every year, I put out 800 traps, which is the Maine state limit and I’ll steam out 35-45 minutes a day to my designated fishing area and haul about 300 traps per day. Spring is a notoriously tough time to catch anything. It’s a little bit like planting a row of seeds. You don’t go out the next day and expect waist-high flowers. We’re the farmers of the sea and when you work with lobsters you’ve got to know their quirks. They’re real picky and you can’t blame them. They know how to work those traps better then we do. First of all, they burrow down into deep waters in the spring. They don’t like the cold; they don’t like any fresh water runoff coming from the shoreline and they don’t like old salted bait that time of year. You’ve got to coax them with fresh herring or alewives. Beyond that, they won’t start migrating inland to shallower waters until the temperature of the ocean gets up to about 43 degrees or higher.

Still, it’s the chase that makes me go to work even if I’m not making a dime. Last spring I put a couple of 13-hour days in, and went $300 in the hole. Got up the next morning at 3 am—and did it all again. But that’s okay. It’s a great thing we don’t catch all the lobsters that go in our traps—or else there would be none left. That’s the way we do it in Maine. We are the original conservationists when it comes to lobster and we treat it as it should be--a sustainable resource.

And if you want to call me an environmentalist….go ahead!

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Forward>>

The Deadly World of Lobstering

90-Year-Old Grandmother Lobster Fishes Every Day

Nothing’s Perfect In Maine, But This Day Was

A Day in the Life of Maine Lobster Boat Racing
K. Stephens

Get Ready To Catch a Piece of This

Behind Every Good Lobsterman is A Woman With a Sharp Knitting Needle

Spring Time: Setting Traps and Making Squat

Author

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The Deadly World of Lobstering

90-Year-Old Grandmother Lobster Fishes Every Day

Nothing’s Perfect In Maine, But This Day Was

A Day in the Life of Maine Lobster Boat RacingK. Stephens

Get Ready To Catch a Piece of This

Behind Every Good Lobsterman is A Woman With a Sharp Knitting Needle

Spring Time: Setting Traps and Making Squat

Author

Archives

Categories

A Day in the Life of Maine Lobster Boat Racing
K. Stephens