Reposted from Maine Lobster Festival

A snapshot of the “Perfect Storm” challenges facing the industry

Unless you’ve been closely following the news in Maine, you probably don’t realize that lobstering as an industry is getting assailed on all sides — and it is deeply and negatively impacting nearly 5,000 lobstermen and their families up and down the coast.

In early September, the environmental group Seafood Watch assigned a “red rating” designation, which discourages individuals and organizations from purchasing Maine and Canadian lobster. The group claims that lobster gear may be responsible for harming the endangered North Atlantic right whales.
This rating system has influenced retailers and food service providers since 1999.  Since this designation, several national companies have stopped buying lobster for their products, which has negatively impacted lobstermen already having a rough summer with high fuel and bait prices, as well as low prices per catch.

This is on top of the National Marine Fisheries Service rule implementing new regulations under the federal government’s whale protection plan. The fishermen implemented the new regulations in 2022, but NMFS is in the process of developing additional regulations that will go into effect within the next two years. Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) sued NMFS, arguing that NFMS acted arbitrarily and that the plan doesn’t utilize an objective assessment of the best available data. They maintain that the plan will all but eliminate the lobster fishery, yet still fail to save the endangered whales. On Sept. 8, a federal judge rejected MLA’s lawsuit challenging the data, a ruling that MLA and the State appealed in federal court. MLA submitted a motion for expedited consideration of its appeal, which the federal court granted on Oct. 18.

FACT: There has not been a single known right whale entanglement in Maine lobster gear in almost 20 years.
FACT: Maine lobster gear has never been linked to a right whale death.
FACT: Maine lobstermen have been implementing whale conservation efforts for the last two decades, including modifying and developing innovative gear solutions — at their own expense.

In compliance with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) regulations, lobstermen have, “applied gear markings; implemented sinking ground lines; have moved to weaker lines; inserted ‘weak links’ into vertical lines; and increased the size of their trawls to reduce the number of vertical lines in the water. Through these efforts, the Maine lobster fishery has removed an estimated 30,000 miles of line from the water in order to protect whale species,” according to a statement by Maine Independent Senator Angus King.
For generations, lobstermen have committed to the long-term sustainability of the ocean and the fishery, and care deeply about the preservation of the right whale species. They know their territories like the back of their hands and use colored markings on their lines, so if a right whale ever became entangled, federal officials would know where it occurred.

Except it hasn’t. That’s the point Maine lobstermen like Scarborough lobsterman Greg Turner recently made in a WGME article: Maine lobster gear has never been linked to a right whale death.
“I’ve seen gear that they’ve retrieved from these whales,” Turner said. “And I’ve gone and looked at it. And none of it come from anything that we would use.” Turner pointed out what most lobstermen have been telling officials and at public hearings, “that most right whale deaths are from ship strikes and entanglements in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence.”

According to a statement by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, “NMFS has overestimated the lobster industry’s risk to right whales by cherry-picking the science by using unsupported assumptions and ‘worst-case scenarios’ to justify its mandate for Maine’s lobster fishery to reduce its already minimal risk to right whales by 98 percent. MLA claims that NMFS also failed to follow mandatory legal requirements to assess the economic and social costs of their action.”
While the litigation is ongoing there are ways you, a private citizen, can help preserve this industry from a catastrophic shutdown.

How Can You Help

1. Donate to the Save Maine Lobsterman Fund through the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. As of September 2022, NMFS is now fast-tracking the plan that will require Maine’s lobster industry to implement an unachievable 90-percent “risk reduction” as quickly as possible or the federal lobster fishery could be shutdown. MLA is working to raise $10 million to lead this fight.
2. Sign the Change.org petition to push the Monterey Bay Aquarium to reconsider the “red-rating” decision based on accurate scientific data. This petition had nearly 23,000 signatures in late October with a goal of reaching 25,000 signatures to be one of their top-signed petitions.
3. Buy Maine lobster directly from lobstermen, co-ops, restaurants, seafood providers, and Maine lobster shipping companies any chance you get. Our blog has a ton of creative recipes.

The threat is real. Mainers and the Maine lobstermen want to do everything they can to save the endangered North American right whale, but need the federal government to acknowledge that Maine lobstermen aren’t the real threat. If you love and care about the Maine Lobster Festival, pay attention to this one — we want you to enjoy MLF and our iconic industry for years to come.

THOMASTON—On Thursday, Dec. 24, a crowd of 30-40 people gathered in a line at noon, plastic bags in hand, in an empty parking lot off New County Road.

Standing at the back of his pick up truck, Matinicus lobsterman Noah Ames played the proverbial role of Santa, giving away crates of live lobster for free that he and about six other Midcoast lobstermen caught, banded, and transported so that people in the area could have a good Christmas Eve dinner.

During an unprecedented Christmas season, with Americans across the nation suffering economically awaiting a long-delayed $900 billion coronavirus relief package that has still yet to be signed by President Trump and with unemployment benefits set to expire in a matter of days, many people have had to choose between buying food and paying bills.

Ames, with his friend, assisting, chatted with folks as they stepped up to the truck, bag in hand. Given how many people were standing in line, he announced he could only give away four lobsters to each family, with extra to veterans, in the form of a Hannaford gift card he additionally handed out.

Ames started this tradition in 2014. In former stories Pen Bay Pilot has written about Ames over the years, he said, “It’s about teaching my sons the spirit of Christmas. It’s important to learn how to give back.”

Many grateful people left with their bags of lobster, parting with sentiments of “Merry Christmas” and “You’re doing a wonderful thing.”
At a time when every bit of kindness and generosity is coming from Mainers helping Mainers, Ames and his lobstermen friends are an example to the leaders in this country.

This story originally appeared on www.penbaypilot.com

STONINGTON—My neighbor, a long-time lobsterman, told me the other day: “There’s this guy you gotta check out, named Leroy. Friend told me about him. On YouTube, old guy like me whose been in the business all his life. He’s answering people’s questions and I hear he’s pretty funny.”
He was talking about Leroy Weed, 79, a Deer Isle lobsterman who is getting some statewide and national attention as a spokesman for the lobstering life in an online video series by the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, where he answers any and all questions about fishing and commercial fisheries in Maine.

Last summer, the Center hired Leroy to be an educator in their interpretive center in Stonington Harbor called “Discovery Wharf.” Leroy greeted visitors, answered questions, and told stories to more than 7,000 visitors. You could say Leroy was one of the Center’s biggest attractions. He loved his role and told Executive Director Paul Anderson it was the “best job he ever had.”

But with COVID-19 changing the Center’s summer plans, they decided, instead, to ask their visitors to call in questions for Leroy and sit him down in front of a camera with a microphone to answer them. The results have been a viral hit on the Internet called “Ask Leroy.”

The big part of Leroy’s appeal is his dry and cheeky humor. In Episode 5, the video starts with Leroy pressing the wrong button on an Amazon Echo speaker, when Alexa pipes up with a complaint that she can’t connect to the WiFi network, to which Leroy answers: “Is that a question or what? You send Alexa down there and I’ll straighten her out. She’ll be connected to sumpin–I don’t know what.”

Weed grew up in a family of 10 children on Deer Isle, which he explains in Episode 10.

“Growing up was very rural, a lot of big families on the island, six to 10 kids per family was common,” he explained. “Everybody worked for the group. You worked for the good of everybody and working the water was our mainstay. Scalloping was a winter project and most of the lobster fishermen stopped in November and then went scalloping. Lobster wasn't worth a whole lot back then, maybe 30 cents a pound. We worked year-round—daylight at 3:30 a.m. until it got dark. It was hard work, but we learned how to be self-sufficient. We knew how to dig clams, catch scallops, mussels. Important staples. And we built our own traps, half rounds. We learned and how to work on the house, how to butcher animals, pigs, chicken, ducks, geese, and goats. We could hunt...could pick blueberries, blackberries, apples. There was never a shortage of something to do. You never forgot the lessons because they were hard lessons, and you stayed at it until you learned it.”
We decided to ask Leroy a couple of questions of our own.

Q: Some lobstermen are annoyed by tourist questions—after a lifetime of them, what made you want to jump right in and answer them?
A: Well, I don’t tell them how much money I make, and that’s the only one I won’t answer. Some people will get upset if you ask how much money they earn, and then they’ll just stop answering questions. They’ll say ‘Yup, I gotta go, can’t be bothered, and that’s the end of that.’ So, if you want to know what’s involved in how lobstering works, we can answer that. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but I’ve been doing it for 58 years, so it’s a learned profession—learn by doing. We’ve had questions on how boats are designed, how a trap works, how to cook up a lobster and get the meat out. Well, wouldn’t you know, we had all kinds of calls from restaurants too! Some chefs don’t know how to get all the meat out of a lobster. They just rip the claws off and throw the rest of it away. We’re gonna do a video to show them how to use the whole lobster. You grow up the way I did, you eat everything but the eyeballs.

Q: Speaking of, I was most interested in learning how you grew up on Deer Isle...
A: Well, I haven’t growed up yet—I’m still a kid! If you grow up, you get serious, you see? And then you won’t have any fun...

Q: I was going to say, with the pandemic and even before then, there’s been this resurgence in learning self-sufficient outdoor and homesteading skills—what do you think of that?
I think that it’s a good thing—if it drives them, go for it. My son goes fishing and tonight, he brought in a big cusk. That’s what we’ll have for supper tomorrow night. I got seven grandkids. And my grandson went lobstering with me. He wanted money for college, so he got on the boat and earned it.

Q: What’s the craziest questions you’ve ever gotten from the public?
A: Well, some of ‘em have asked me, ‘How do you know there’s lobsters in the traps?’ so, I tell ‘em, ‘We got this fiberoptic line; we look down the line and see if he’s in there.’ The other question we get a lot is ‘Why are the boats all parked in the same direction?’ And I just say, ‘So, they can all get out and not run into each other.’ But, then, I follow up with them and explain it and say ‘It’s the way the wind and the tide turn them.’

According to the Anderson, the Center just completed Episode 11 right now and plan on continuing through October. They have the videos posted on their website, on their YouTube channel, and on Facebook. The series has been very popular with some episodes racking up nearly 20,000 views and their YouTube channel gaining more than 500 subscribers.
To see the individual episodes visit: https://coastalfisheries.org/media/videos/

This story first appeared on www.penbaypilot.com on 9/16/2020 by Kay Stephens

“Why isn’t that lobster bright red?’ So many visitors who come to Maine have asked that question when viewing live lobsters in a tank thanks to a century of postcards, children’s books and illustrations that depict Maine’s famous crustacean as bright crimson.
The fact is the natural colors of most live lobsters are a mottled greenish brown to blackish brown, which helps conceal them on the ocean floor from predators. They get their shell color from a class of red and yellow pigments called astaxanthin. Without getting too scientific, when lobsters are cooked, the proteins that astaxanthin bind to are destroyed, changing the shell colors to a red pigment. That’s why so many people think Maine lobster is naturally red.
That said, imagine how surprised a visitor to Maine might be to see a lobster that is electric blue? According to oceanographers, only an estimated one in 2 million lobsters is blue. In 2016, a Massachusetts lobsterman found one in his traps, which caught the attention of ABC News. In this case, a genetic abnormality caused the lobster to produce an excessive amount of a particular protein. Most of these rare lobsters are spared the boiling pot and sent to aquariums, but even if a blue lobster is cooked, its shell changes to red.
Rarer than that, if you can believe it, is a naturally brilliant red colored lobster -again, a genetic abnormality - which occurs in one in 10 million cases.
But hang on, the blue and red showstoppers have nothing on the yellow and calico lobsters (with mottled orange and black shells), which oceanographers estimate are one in 30 million.
Want to up the odds even more? Try finding a “split” colored lobster, that is, a lobster whose coloring is split evenly down its entire body and claws with one half orange and one half brown. The last time one of those was discovered, it was caught by a Maine lobsterman in 2006, who gave it to an oceanarium. The oceanarium said in 35 years, they’ve only seen three split lobsters. The chances of catching one is one in 50 million!
So, that’s got to be it, right? Nope, there’s one more lobster that is rarest of them all – one with no color at all. An albino lobster, of which there are one in 100 million, was just caught by another Maine lobsterman last summer. Albino lobsters are the only ones without pigment, so if it had been cooked, it would have still been white when done.
But true to the conservation methods of Maine lobstermen, this “ghost” albino lobster which was female and had a V notch in her flipper (a previous marking to signal that she’d been already caught once and was carrying eggs) had to be tossed back into the ocean. Let’s hope, because she stands out like a sore thumb to predators, that she still roams free today!

Blog and photo courtesy Maine Lobster Festival

There is a scene in The Ghost Trap where the characters talk about some of the more outlandish questions tourists have ever asked lobstermen...such as "why do all the boats point the same way?" and "What time of year do the deer turn into moose?" True stories, all of them..and that's why they made it into the book.

Well I belong to a private FB page for lobstermen and they shared this photo, along with more stories in the comments. Note: Names have been left off to protect the members' privacy.

"I was once asked if I set all my traps in the morning and then bring them all home at night."

"Lololol I was pulling a half tote of cod up the dock one time and a tourist looked in the tote and asked what kind of fish is that??? I replied codfish... her lady friend told me I was wrong... those are Trout 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂"

"My wife overheard a conversation between two tourist that went like this. "What are the painted objects floating in the water?" "They're lobster buoys, see how some are laying down and some are standing?' "Yes" "When a lobster walks in a trap it causes the buoy to stand, that's how lobstermen know which traps to haul." True story."

"Lmao... I was eating at the weather vane once and the guy in back of us was saying he knows everything about lobsters... so I listened he told his girlfriend for starters they don’t go any deeper than 20 feet... I stopped listening 😂😂😂"

TENANTS HARBOR—When Scotland beachcomber Martin Gray went walking along one of his favorite beaches, Billiacru last week, about two miles from Stromness, the little fishing port where he grew up, he spied an orange plastic tag with the name C. Morris and the number #167 on it. An avid beachcomber since he was a teenager, he knew immediately what it was. 
“We find lobstering gear from all along the eastern seaboard of North America, from Labrador to Rhode Island,” he said. “Maine gear is probably the largest single cohort (followed by Newfoundland/Labrador and Massachusetts) and includes escape vents, trap tags, TopMe tags, buoys, Plante sticks and pot heads.”
The little piece of plastic, was in fact, a dislodged trap tag owned by Corey Morris, 35, a lobsterman from Tenants Harbor. It had traveled roughly 3,000 miles through the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Drift that spins gear out across the Atlantic to Europe.
Excited to locate the owner of his find, Gray posted a photo of the tag on his Facebook page Orkney Beachcombing.
“In many ways, Facebook is an almighty pain in the backside full of bland truisms, peoples’ dinners and soppy kittens,” Gray said. “But, for finding connections, it is unsurpassed. I posted a photo on my Facebook page of a Massachusetts float found here yesterday. I had the owners name in seven minutes. I find that absolutely staggering!”
As for Morris, he was just working in his garage, repainting all of his buoys and getting his gear readied for the season when his Facebook notifications went crazy. Maine followers of Gray’s Facebook page notified Morris that Gray wanted to get in touch with him so he did.
What makes this find special is that this tag “C. Morris #167” was also his grandfather’s initials and original license number. Charles "Charlie" Morris was the 167th person in the state of Maine to be issued a lobster license. The year before Charlie passed away, he transferred his license number to his then-six-year-old grandson, Corey. If he hadn't done that, the license would have been considered a lost or retired license.

”I was already in an outboard with my dad at that age,” said Morris. “I couldn't even haul the trap then I was so little. I can remember going home in the evenings and hauling 10 traps with my dad. He's now held his lobster license for 29 years. Current regulations don't allow lobster fishermen to transfer tags to family members any more, so #167 will retire with Morris. "If I wanted to give my daughter mine, I couldn't,” he explained. “She'd have to go into the lottery and get a five or six digit number."
"I noticed in Martin's picture that the holes of the tag are intact, so it didn't look like the hog ring ripped off," said Morris. He declined to say how it could have come off but every lobsterman who has had his gear molested, and tags ripped out to keep the trap (which runs around $100 per trap) knows it's a distinct possibility that the tag was deliberately cut out and discarded into the ocean.
Asked about his grandfather would have handled that, Morris said, "They didn't have tags when he was fishing. Back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they would've shot somebody if someone stole a trap. They took care of it themselves. They didn't need Marine Patrol and you wouldn't have the wording on the tag about imprisonment (for molesting gear.)"

Things have really changed since his grandfather’s day, he said. "Everything was built from scratch, wooden round traps, knit heads. They were happy to catch a crate a day and today, we have to catch several hundred pounds a day just to earn our living, but you know the money was different back in those days too.”Gray has seen more trash float in on his beaches from the U.S. than he cares to, but when it comes to fishing gear, that’s different.
“The finds from Maine fishermen are special because I know that what reaches us from there isn't really litter,” he said. “Almost all of it was lost against the wishes of the fisherman, with very little casually thrown away. The escape vents float free but that is a conservation measure to render lost ghost pots nonlethal to marine life. A brilliant plan! We have nothing like it here. There's no such thing as ‘good litter,’ but escape vents come very close! I make clear distinctions between plastic in the sea that has been willfully dumped, lost by neglect or mismanagement and lost by accident. Maine pot gear is almost all lost by accident.”
Gray has been working the last five years to display the best of his beach finds into finds over the last few years into a museum.
“Finding Corey’s tag has been the highlight of my beachcombing winter,” Gray said. “It has a very special tale behind it and I can see it being a star exhibit one day.”
-Story and photos by Kay Stephens

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