Essay: Whales or Livelihoods - Lobster Fishing in Maine

We spend a day working on a fishing boat with two lobsterman

We stand atop a dock, wet from the whitecaps we hit on our dinghy ride to Bass Harbor, Maine from our sailboat nine miles away. Alex sat at the front and is wetter than me. It is 4 o’clock in the morning and still dark. Dim yellow sodium light of the city lamps summon forms from the darkness.

Two lobster boats are idling at the docks. The crews are preparing the bait and lobster traps under the white floodlights. We hear another pair of diesels rumble, they rev and a thirty-five-footer speeds to the dock, too fast but the captain turns and stops it under the crane in a smooth maneuver. Perfection and grace. A working lobster boat.

An old man shuffles past us to the crane. “Nice day,” he says, though it is still night. His walk is staggering from injuries and age, but his hands are precise from decades of practice. He hooks the bait bins and guides them down, both hands busy, the cigarette clenched in his teeth. He taunts the men below. They talk back, laugh. The old man shuffles down to his boat, takes the helm, and idles out of the harbor for a day of lobster fishing.

Thousands of lobster boats will follow from this harbor and others, along the entire coast of Maine. We will join one of them as soon as our hosts arrive. This could be our last chance — lobster fishing in Maine is locked in a struggle for survival.

Today somewhere between 4100 and 5600 active lobsterman operate in Maine. About 20 percent fish year around. In the winter, the lobster migrates to deeper and warmer waters and lobstermen must follow it offshore beyond the three mile line. These are federal waters and require a federal in addition to the Maine lobster license. Jim and Joe, our hosts, fish offshore.

They arrive ten minutes late. “The gas station was closed, the guy was late,” Joe explains. “Could not pick up our stuff.” Jim gets the boat and guides her under the crane. Joe lowers the bins. In minutes, we are motoring out of the harbor.

“You can put these over you pants.” Jim hands Alex a pair of black Grundens overalls. “Martha Stewart left the small ones when they came out to shoot a show on our boat.”

Alex is slight. Martha’s pair fits just right.

We cross the Bay and head between the islands. Jim points at the field of symmetrical buoys. Salmon farms. I watch them recede at twenty knots behind our stern.

We are on Blythe Megan, and she is a fast boat. Jim built the boat himself and named her after his two daughters. This is common, both building and naming after family. Many boats carry clever, or funny names, but more are simpler: Jayne Mary, Ashley Kate, Blythe Megan. Boats are personal. They sustain families. They have family names.

Jim is past his forties, maybe past his fifties. Gray beard, short and well-kept, a weathered face of a seaman. He fished most of his life. After an accident at seventeen left him without the use of the left arm, he abandoned fishing to study accounting. But a corporate stint after college did not sit well with him. He worked to regain the use of his arm, and once able, he moved back to Maine to fish. He now lives in Bar Harbor.

“Can’t beat the office view,” he nods at the mountains on our stern — Acadia National Park is only a sketch in the early dawn light.

“How long do you want to keep going?” I ask.

“As long as I can. I love it. And while the industry is still here.”

“Where is it going?”

“Possible extinction, along with the whales.”

“The whales?” I am confused.

“The North Atlantic Right Whales. They are protected species, only about three hundred individuals left. The ship strikes kill them, big commercial ships. And they have died from entanglements with the lobster fishing gear.” Jim stops. “I mean there are other problems for the industry. Boats are becoming expensive to maintain, the price of herring — the bait. So many problems… But it’s the whales…”

“The whales? How does it work?” I tread lightly.

“They are endangered species and protected by the Endagered Species Act. If the fishing is causing too many deaths, the fishery will be shutdown.”

“That’s your livelihood,” I say. “What do you think?”

“The ocean does not belong to us. It also belongs to the whales, and everything else. We must solve the problem.”

“Other lobstermen think like you?”

“Maybe a third. Others are angry and irrational.”

I have many questions, but Jim glances at the chart plotter, looks ahead at the approaching lobster field, and steps to the helm.

A lobster field looks like skittles spilled over miles of ocean. Each skittle is a buoy bobbing on the ocean swell. The color and pattern define the buoy’s ownership. Greens, yellows, blues with white stripes, and the rest of the rainbow in endless combinations. Jim and Joe fish with a striped orange and white combo.

Alex and I join Joe in the back of the boat. “How do you find yours in all of these?” I ask him. He points at the chart plotter hanging above the helm. Theirs are geotagged, so they just drive to them.

Joe is a sternman. The boat the size of Blythe Megan often has two. They did once, Joe says, but he is too fast, and he is enough. I can’t decide if it is a joke. He says again that we don’t have to do anything unless we want to. We tell him we are here to work.

He shows us how to bait the bags. They are mesh with a rope that tightens the top and forms a loop to suspend the bag on the hook in the first compartment of the lobster trap, called a “kitchen.”

“Open the bag, stuff two pigskins on the bottom on top of each other, snap the herring in half, so the guts spill out — lobsters love that, stuff that on top of the pigskin — lobsters eat from the bottom up, and pigskin protects the bait.” Joe demonstrates. I stuff two pigskins in my bag, each the size of a birthday card and an inch thick, the skin side down, the fat side up. I snap the thawing herring; it yields easily, the blood and guts dripping on my protective gloves. I glance at Alex. She is stuffing her bag unfazed.

“If gloves get dirty, just stick your hands in the lobster tanks; that’s fresh seawater to keep the lobsters kicking.” The water is scalding cold.

I expect a leisurely day with the three of us at the stern doing the work of one. Then Rolling Stones burst from the speakers. Jim turns the radio down to merely loud. “Let’s go fishing,” Joe says. The boat banks hard around a buoy.

Jim catches the line with a boat hook and slots it around the wheel of the winch. In seconds, the winch hoists the two eighty-pound traps from the ocean floor, two hundred feet below. Joe grabs the first and, in a smooth motion, leverages it onto the wide rail, then slides it towards the stern. He grabs the second trap, slides it too. He flings the top door open, unhooks the bait bag, and throws it on the frozen herring pile before me. He opens the second door on the trap and pulls the lobsters from the “lounge,” two at a time, tosses the small ones overboard, and drops the potential keepers into slots by the lobster tanks.

There are a few crabs. They fly overboard, but Joe cracks the last crab on the corner of the trap and drops it into the kitchen. “Lobsters love crabs.” He repeats with the second trap. He shoves the first trap overboard, then shoves the other. Jim speeds away. Two hundred feet of line violently uncoil and whip off the boat. Don’t get caught is what I am thinking.

Joe steps to the tanks and measures for keepers. The lobster thorax, the section between the eyes and the start of the tail, must be longer than three and a quarter inches but less than five, roughly the size of a toddler’s hand. The juveniles need a chance to grow; the big and old lobsters are reproductive champions and are thrown back to sustain the species. Joe checks for a v-shaped notch on the tail of the females. The notched females reproduce and must be returned to the ocean. He checks females for eggs, sees one with eggs, and notches its tail. 

The lobster flies into the sea. About half of the potential keepers are thrown back. “Eight,” Joe yells. Jim records the haul from this buoy on the chart plotter. We band the keepers — slide a thick yellow rubber band around the claws. Joe does five while I finish one, but he leaves the other two for me as we are already at the other buoy. He steps to the rail.

Rolling Stones is only halfway through the song when the second set of traps is already on the rail. I am stunned by the pace. Onto the third buoy. The Doors come on. Joe sings along and cracks jokes. They fly over my head. My attention is consumed by the pace of the tasks and the effort of standing upright. Blythe Megan is a 25,000-pound boat. She makes a steep wake. Since she turns around the buoy when Jim reels in the traps, its own wake hits on the beam, rolling the boat from side to side. 

The natural ocean swell adds a roll or a pitch from another angle. The unpredictable motion confuses the senses. I am thankful Alex and I spent the prior weeks at sea sailing to Maine. I needed the preparation to stand upright, and for my stomach to stand the aggressive movement without emptying itself all over the bloody bait.

After a few songs, I catch up to the cadence of fishing. Alex gets there before me. I now see the details on deck and hear Joe’s banter. We joke and taunt each other with locker room comradery to the cadence of the 70s rock’n roll. It is fun. It is hard. Joe seems to love it.

Joe is why we are on the boat. We sat next to him at a local restaurant in Southwest Harbor and struck up a conversation. I was surprised he was a lobstermen, not because meeting lobsterman in Maine is a rarity, but because he wore fashionable Euro-style jeans. He had a look of a tourist from a city. After my hundred questions about lobster fishing, he asked if we wanted to come fishing. When he doubted my sincerity to join, Alex said it was my summer dream. True enough.

After checking a hundred traps, we move on to the next field. On the way, Joe hoses the wood floor of the stern to keep it non-slip. He piles more herring in the bait bin, next to the sorting station, then tosses a few crab claws into a 55 gallon open drum filled with recirculating hot engine coolant water. The claws cook in minutes. We eat them for breakfast. Meanwhile, Joe answers our questions.

Yes, when the traps go back in the water, the uncoiling line is dangerous. Yes, a nineteen year old just died a few weeks ago, was fishing alone — terrible idea, people found his boat, but not a sign of the body, probably pulled down by the line. Yes, he takes that danger seriously, wears a knife taped to his shoulder strap. He taps it. No, he does not like fishing on all days, the cold days with big swell are tough. He uses a stronger word. No, people don’t steal each other’s traps, there was a problem between two crews, ugly, but they were not involved. 

Why three traps per buoy? Right whales, he says, fewer vertical lines going through the water — regulation to keep a chance of entanglement to a minimum. Is it a big issue? He knows it is, but he has not personally seen it. It is big worry, he echos Jim. It may kill our livelihood.

For a few more hours, we check traps and haul in lobster. We banter and joke and make fun during the non-stop action of fishing. When we run out of bait, Jim hits the waypoint for home on his charplotter and the autopilot swings the boat around to bring us to harbor miles away.

Blythe Megan surfs the swell. She is comfortable on the waves in the way that only someone born on the sea can be. Jim is comfortable just the same. They wash the boat, pushing the fish scales and orphaned crab claws to the aft scuppers. The powerful stream from the hose kicks up the spray into a gentle mist, some lands on our faces, most rejoins the sea.

I think about these men doing their honest work. And I think about the dying whales losing to our shipping and insatiable need for delicacies of the sea. I think about this unintended fight, and I want the whales to win. But I do not want these men to lose. They care, they truly do. There must be a path around the zero sum, around the cruelty of killing the entire species or killing the livelihoods of people of the coast. There is. I know it.

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Watch for the follow up article on the story of conservation struggle…