THIS PROFILE APPEARED IN THE NOVEMBER, 2011 ISSUE OF ARKANSAS LIFE.
There’s fewer than 300 miles separating Portsmouth, NH, and the southern tip of New Brunswick, and well more than 3,000 miles of rocky coastline. For every mile north as the crow flies along the coast of Maine five miles of land retreat in, and another five turn around again. This craggy shoreline is rimmed by boulders representing the thinnest vanguard of a rocky sea bed, a perfect habitat for crustaceans. The waters here are the best lobster fields in the world.
Of course, it’s getting dangerous now for the lobstermen.
In Arkansas the sun is so warm and near, the ozonic whiff of icy air is still several weeks away. We are pardoned the wicked winds north of the 45th parallel, where on the coast the Nor’easters are organizing, storms that can sink a small trawler — the Andrea Gail was famously sunk on Oct. 28, 1991 — but what is it that accompanies risk? As the seas become increasingly prohibitive, the per-pound price of lobster rises, $5/lb., $6/lb., $7/lb.
Sound like the stuff of television reality shows? It is. Following the success of the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch,” a running documentary that follows the fates of five Alaskan king crab fishermen, the network this year premiered “Lobster Wars.” Conflicts revolve almost exclusively around storms — “snarls” — but there’s the one ship steaming through the Georges Bank some 150 miles off the coast, and the somewhat tongue-in-cheek quest for a 400-pound lobster.
Actual science suggests that 90 percent of the lobster haul is taken within three miles of shore, and nearly all the lobsters caught weigh less than two pounds.
The fact of these lobstermen is this: they put in long hours; they ain’t so serious about it, except where the rules are concerned; and their work-a-day lives are pretty much rote and monotonous as yours or mine. Lobstering is not unlike running a trotline for catfish here in Arkansas, except they run a few dozen lines a day, each one floated by a buoy, and below, tied to ten 30-pound steel cages.
To catch a lobster you need just two things, a capable trap and a hunk of dead fish. To do it from a boat, you’ll need a license, but like trot lines, there’s little else to it. On a blue-sky weekday earlier this season Lyman and his sternman Jimmy Linscott of Auburn pulled into Portland’s Back Bay, a tidal plain so muddy and shallow most lobstermen have too much pride to hit it.
“Lot of people didn’t think there were lawb-stah up in here, right, Jimmy? That’s why they call it fishin’ not catchin’.”
In select spots around Casco Bay, buoys bob like World Cup jerseys. Each is color coded to a lobsterman. With a boat hook, Kennedy plucks the buoy up and wraps the line around a hydraulic winch. Up come the traps, some crowded with lobster, perhaps a dozen, but half of these are
“shorts” — typically less than a pound, though they’re measured by length not weight — and maybe another is V-notched, another, an “egger.”
Now, there’s more than one commercial lobster fisherman in the state for every 3,500 miles of coast — about one every thousand yards — and still the state is experiencing the most sustained feast in recorded history. Two generations ago, a year-end tally of 25 million pounds of lobster would have been moderate. Today, because of conservation efforts and environmental changes (we fished their chief predator, the cod, right out of the food chain) the haul is more like 80-90 million.
Unlike fish, female lobsters keep their seed with them, so ones caught with a great colony of black roe under their wide tail are “eggers.” Certain females of good breeding size get a V-notch carved into their tail flippers. Lobstermen’s stewardship of breeding females — not all get V-notches, some get boiled — is serious, and Kennedy says along with a $500 fine those who would get caught selling a V-notch are subject to “the shunning of your peers.”
Kennedy talks to his catch. He says, “Everybody out,” as he pitches shorts over the gunwale. At one point he holds up a keeper with a busted rostrum, and says, “He got his nose broke.” Then, “He’ll be all right, just two black eyes in the morning.”
After the traps are picked and sorted the sternman loads a bunch of fish heads onto a bait line inside the trap. (This, and not the lobsters, is the reason some guys keep an odor about them that attracts seagulls and repels girls.) With the trap clean and freshly baited, it goes back into the water.
This is all there is to it. Yet, for 12 years Capt. Tom Martin has been running his Lucky Catch cruises off the same wharf as Kennedy, taking folks out by the dozen to yank their own lobster from the depths. “People get excited to see what comes up, because we’ll get different species of crabs, starfish. They like to see how we measure then, tell the males from females, the V-notches and the conservation efforts. People like to see it.”
The dance of sunlight on the water’s surface, and the life there — the puckish seals and swarms of gulls, osprey big as two eagles — is the stuff of vacation.
Of course, the tour’s over after 90 minutes. Anything longer begins to feel like real lobstering, and “they’ll be like, ‘Ugh, I’m done with it — they’re bored.” Like New York City police procedurals versus the work of real NYPD blue.
“We certainly meet an awful lot of people on the boat who are big fans of the ‘Deadliest Catch.’ I mean, I don’t think that’s good, bad, or indifferent … [but] I don’t think the show particularly educates people. More like a lobsterman soap opera.”
For $25 adults can, if they’re Lucky, Catch their dinner in lobster, and for another $10, they can walk it next door to the Portland Lobster Company and eat it in minutes. For Martin, it keeps him in diesel and oilskins. Lucky Catch Cruises quit selling tours after Columbus Day, and for the next six months he and his small crew will pound offshore — real lobster hauling, alongside the “Lobster Mobster,” and “Lil’ More Tail.”
“I had a thousand dollar check in my pocket!”
DINNER BELL
That night Kennedy returned home with a laundry basket filled with lobster, fired up the propane boiler, and fed his family and three out-of-towners their fill.
One of the first delicious lobsters to arrive was missing his rostrum. It had a “broken nose.”
Consider the lobster, the late author David Foster Wallace asked all of us. Is our method of consuming the crustacean not a hair inhumane? Because of some buried toxicity in the living lobster, it cannot be dead long before it is eaten, so the dominant preparation is to shove them living into a boiling pot. They thrash and, some say, cry out, for typically 45 seconds before they slip into the very liminal stages of death, and then they boil for another 15 to 20 minutes.
Most of us who love lobster get around this the easy way — we have someone else boil the bugs.
Still, Wallace has a point, and he made it in Gourmet magazine, August, 2004.
Remembering your dinner bucking and flipping hours earlier is a kind of reckoning.
“I been semi-retired all my life,” Kennedy said, when the topic of running tours was raised. “I never planned on getting rich, but just enjoying my life.”
