Confessions of a Recreational Lobsterman

Years ago, I applied for a Maine Recreational Lobster License. I was a Maine resident, owned a boat, and figured my back was strong enough to pull a few traps by hand. On Peaks Island, where I live, the recreational and commercial lobstermen seemed to co-exist reasonably well. What could possibly go wrong?

First, I needed to pass a test.

Mistake #1: Don’t drink beer while taking an open book test.

I downloaded the lobster license test study guide from the maine.gov site. The test was open book. I was uber confident and filled out my answers while eating a bag of Doritos and drinking Baxter beer with my son-in-law, Dan.  A few days later, a letter arrived: I flunked. Luckily, my incorrect answers were circled in red. What a gift. I passed the retest. A week later, my lobster tags arrived in the mail.

A commercial lobsterman friend of mine gave me a few of his old traps and a pile of line and threw in a few used bait bags. I purchased 5 buoys and painted them red-white-and green (while commercial lobstermen can fish up to 800 traps, recreational lobstermen are limited to only 5).

Next, I would need to purchase bait. This was intimidating. On the Portland waterfront is a bait business. It works like this: A lobster boat ties off (At low tide this is 12 feet below the wharf), the captain shouts out a request for, say, 10 barrels of salted herring or pogie and the barrels are lowered by crane onto the vessel. Payment is placed in a container and this, in turn, is hauled back to the seller.

For my part, I estimated that a barrel of bait would last me six years, so I brought a 5-gallon bucket into the warehouse and asked, “How much do you charge for a bucket of bait?”  The man I spoke to didn’t react. “Excuse me, is this where I can purchase bait?”

Finally, he answered with a question, “Are you a R-E-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N-A-L lobsterman?”

I nodded, “Yes,” and to be honest, believed he was going to confiscate my bucket and place it on my head.

“See Eduardo over there. That’ll be forty bucks.”

Mistake #2: If there are no lobster buoys nearby, there’s usually a good reason.

 On my first day lobstering, I put on my yellow slicker, a cool cap and rubber gloves, and pointed my boat Da SAKAMO Jo towards Portland’s inner harbor. There, I plunked my traps near some rotting pilings. It looked promising. I wondered why there weren’t other buoys nearby. When I returned 3 days later and pulled my first trap, it contained 3 undersized lobsters--which I dutifully threw back after doing a little dance. The second trap contained a “berried” female, laden with thousands of greenish eggs hidden beneath her tail. She too was returned to the sea.

My third trap seemed to be stuck on the bottom. I pulled hard. It didn’t budge. I pulled harder. No go. Then I had an idea; I wrapped the line around a sturdy cleat on the stern of my boat and gunned the motor. That should do it. The trap didn’t budge. Abruptly, my stern was nearly pulled under as the line stretched taut. Seawater flooded over the engine. Whoa!

In this case, the rotting pilings above the water were a dead give-a-way that rotten pilings littered the bottom, ready to hold a wayward line. I cut the line, bailed out the boat, and called it a day.

Mistake #3: Hold onto the buoy until the trap settles on the seafloor.

Eventually, I got the hang of it. I kept a log of where I was catching lobster. On a good day, my five traps yielded 3-5 legal-sized lobsters. And other creatures found their way into my traps. Crabs? I caught them by the bucket-load. A flounder wiggled in and nestled next to my bait bag. Another day, an eel caught me by surprise. I gave away lobster to friends. I learned how to make lobster pie. Even so, for large family gatherings I made sure to purchase lobster at our local lobster shack at the ferry landing. This seemed to be a good way of maintaining a civil relationship with the full-time lobstermen.

There was a learning curve, but I was keen on making new mistakes.  One afternoon I pulled a trap with two keepers, tossed the re-baited trap overboard, and confidently flung the buoy over the side. The line followed the trap. The buoy, well, the buoy followed the line, and disappeared in a blink. My entire rig was gone. Poof.

Repeat after me: Release the buoy only after the line goes slack and the trap is on the seafloor. It makes sense. Between the time you pull, empty, and rebait a trap, your boat may drift over deeper water. If you are fishing with short lines in shallow water this is a good way to lose your gear.

Mistake #4: You can’t swim a buoy topside but if anyone can, Dan can.

My son-in-law Dan and I hunted for that buoy nearly every day at low tide. I figured it was lost. On the lowest tide of the summer, I was idling in the general vicinity of my lost buoy with Dan on the bow peering into the water when he shouted, “I see it!”  In the blink of an eye, he stripped down and dove into the water. I shut down the motor and watched as he wrangled with the buoy like an alligator wrestler. Because Dan is stronger than stink, he was able to reach up and grab onto the stern while holding onto the buoy.

I grabbed a boat hook and snared the buoy, not Dan. Inside the trap were a collection of sea squirts and whelk, rockweed and sea-lettuce, but no lobsters. That afternoon, I baited the trap, and reset it. In the coming weeks, it was my most productive trap.

Mistake #5

Lobster lines are evil. When they aren’t pulling lobster buoys beneath the surface, their mission is to entangle the propeller. One beautiful, finest-kind summer day, I reset a trap, held onto the buoy, and tossed it off the side. Normally, I immediately engage the motor, but this time, I answered a phone call. Big mistake. The line drifted. I engaged the motor, and before you can say, no, not again! the boat shuddered to a stop with five loops of line hopelessly wrapped around the propeller.

After cutting the free ends of the line, the tangle persisted, the motor unusable, so I paddled towards my dock, a quarter of a mile away. It took 30 minutes. A little boy quietly watched me approach, and as I tied up my boat, asked, “Why didn’t you use your motor?”  

Mistake #6: Don’t get lazy. Respect the lobstermen who fish Casco Bay for their livelihood.

Into the fall I fished the shoreline along Cushing Island and Peaks. Late one afternoon I pulled a trap and it was a load. Hand over hand I raised it to the surface and muscled it aboard. Inside the empty trap were four heavy bricks. I looked around. I was close by several buoys belonging to one of the Peaks Island lobstermen.  

I’d tried hard to avoid entanglement, but not hard enough. Forget the picture-card image of a lobsterman on a warm summer day. Think October and wind-blown spray and three hundred more traps to pull before calling it a day. Up comes a tangle with another man’s line wrapped around yours. Do you take the time to untangle the knotty mess and leave a “message” with a few bricks in the guilty party’s trap? Or do you slice the line? Thankfully, my line hadn’t been cut. Next time I may not be so lucky.

There’s enough room on the coast of Maine for both commercial and recreational lobstermen but only if people like me remember that our hobby is another man’s (or woman’s) livelihood. I appreciated the bricks.

Lesson learned.