BETTER LATE....: Lobsta

To hear Fran tell it, I cannot pass a road with the word "wharf" in the name without turning down. I really can't argue the point, as I have turned down innumerable roads that begin with "No Exit, Dead End, No Outlet, Pas De Sortie" and end in a wharf or small harbor.

I am enthralled by the people, the boats, the gear and the processes of harvesting protein from the sea: herring from weirs, swordfish and tuna from long lines, lobster and crab from traps, etc.. Judging from the longevity of the TV program Deadliest Catch, I am not alone. The sea has an element of je ne sais qua missing from the feedlots of Kansas City or the chicken houses of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

My engagement with the lure of the ocean and the lore of fishermen began during several summers when my mother took my sister and me back to the North Shore of Massachusetts where she grew up. Our family had followed my father's job opportunity to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My mother had a hard time adjusting. For a couple of summers in the late 50's my father woluld drive us up to Swampscott, Massachusetts where we rented the first floor of Captain Jack's house next to the The Fish House on Fishermans' Beach. After helping us settle in, he would then fly back to Pittsburgh and spend the Summer alone until he returned for his two week vacation at the end of August.

Lobster boats in Swampscott Harbor with Egg Rock in the background
(Looking much smaller than it did when I was a kid)

Captain Jack was a private yacht captain when we knew him. And his house was right next door to an active fish house. The beach was strewn with the dinghies of the lobster boats in the small harbor, the worn-smooth wooden rollers that rolled them and the few remaining Swampscott fishing dories down to the water and back up beyond the tide line.

The Fish House in the glory days

I never saw the fishermen go out as it was way too early in the morning for me to be up. But I often saw them come in. I especially remember the ancient (to me) men who slowly rowed their dories up to the beach. The men who had come in earlier would go down to the water line, admire the catch, then help get the dory up on rollers and push it up the beach. I was just big enough to peak over the low point of the gunnels and see the fish, some still expiring, in the bottom of the dory.

A Swampscott Dory

Every weekday trucks idled in the driveway between our house and the fish house. They dropped off bait and picked up the catch to take to market. Fish scales covered the driveway. It was always wet with ice melt and refrigeration water. The smell was constant and definitely of fish but not unpleasant.

I especially remember an afternoon in August. The moon must have been very full as the tide was very low. My summer friends and I were able to wade well out among the lobster boats and pleasure boats in the harbor. When we looked down into the water through our diving masks we saw that the bottom was crawling with lobsters. The lobstermen must have thrown old bait overboard and the lobsters had come in to get it. We got some buckets and began to pluck the lobsters off the bottom. When we had filled several buckets some adult came out to tell us that it was illegal to take lobsters without a permit. We threw the lobsters back! It turned out that, according to Capt'n Jack, it wasn't true that it was illegal. You can pick lobsters up from the bottom with your hand. I never trusted a grownup again.

Now the fancied-up home of the Swampscott Yacht Club

I think it only fair to add two additional, slightly more scholarly influences on my long-lived enthrallment to fishing. The late Marvin Harris was a social anthropologist who advanced the controversial theory that human culture and human conflict developed in response to the struggle for fat and protein. A few examples: the Indian Subcontinent land mass could never have supported the population if beef cattle had become a primary source of protein. Only the wealthy would have eaten and starvation and conflict would have been endemic. So cattle became sacred. Similarly, since pigs don't sweat and need shade and mud to wallow in to stay cool, trying to raise them in the deserts of the Middle East would not be a wise use of resources. Hence the pig abominable to Jews and Muslims. In places where Christians and Muslims live in close proximity, like, say, Bosnia, the goats of the Muslims eat the small trees and shrubs that shade the pigs of the Christians, an age-old source of friction between the two. Perhaps Mr. Harris took his theory a step too far when he posited the possibility that in ancient Incan society the 1% of those times had seats in the first row at the base of the sacrificial pyramids. When the bodies were thrown down, the rich got the choicest cuts. The more things change.....

Be all that as it may, can't you just hear Sam singing to Ingrid Bergman:

Its still the same old story,

A fight for fat and protein...

Before we get knee deep in lobsters, a passing nod to Linda Greenlaw, a second inspiration. If you saw the film, The Perfect Storm, Linda was the real-life person on whom Elizabeth Mastrantonio's character was based. Her book, The Hungry Ocean, recounts the day-to-day life of a long-line swordfish boat and her crew as they work to fill the world's insatiable appetite for protein. She was and probably still is one of the few women to captain such off-shore boats

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So that's my back story and I'm sticking to it every time I turn down a "wharf" road. And on PEI we turned down them from Cap Egmont to North Cape, Malpeque to North Rustico, Lakeville to Lauching Point, Georgetown to Graham Pond.

Part of the lobster boat fleet at Malpeque Harbor, PEI

Fish shack with shark tails

Buying lobsters off the Malpeque dock

Row of fishing shacks at Malpeque Harbor

Lobster are a big deal on PEI. Like a 27 million pound and $113 million deal. Unfortunately, it used to be a bigger deal for the 1300 or so licensed lobster fishermen on PEI. In 2012 the lobstermen got an average of $4.20 a pound for their catch. This year we got our first inkling of trouble on the wharf at Graham Pond. A buyer standing by his truck waiting for his last two boats to come in told us that the going price to the lobsterman for canners was $3 a pound and markets were paying $3.50 regardless of the size over 1 1/4 pounds.That 3 pound lobster that retails for $65, and, heaven knows how much in a restaurant, brings the fisherman who caught it $10.50. What was even worse was the buyers were setting daily quotas on what they would buy off the dock because their market was collapsing.

Graham Pond Lobster fleet

Lobsters on the wharf at Graham Pond

While Fran and I really loved the $5 a pound live lobsters and the $6 a pound cooked lobsters, the lobster industry on PEI is in real trouble. The season started with a strike. Shipments of lobsters from Maine and the Iles de Madeleine to processing plants on PEI have been intercepted by PEI fisherman and kept from the processing plants. Prices to the fishermen haven't been this low since 2009.

Monday morning rush hour at Launching Point on Boughton Bay. The boats
went out between 4 and 5 AM and were coming back just before noon. The traps had been
filling over the weekend. Buyers were waiting on the dock.

We noticed a fair number of women working the boats.
This boat is "manned" by a sister/brother team.

Me taking pictures of the catch still on board. I had just most unceremoniously fallen
into the boat and I was doing my best to mask the excruciating pain.

Haley to my left. Most people fall off boats. I fell on.
The sweater over my arm is hiding the goose egg swelling up.

Each bin contains 90 pounds of lobster. This Monday's catch

for the Haley N' Alban was 600 pounds. Tomorrow's catch, though, may not be saleable if the buyers on

the docks have no market. PEI has no lobster pounds where lobsters can be held alive and continue to grow

until the market returns and prices recover.

Canners on the dock bring $3.00 a pound These small lobster (carapace at least 72mm)
are processed into more than a dozen different frozen raw and cooked lobster products. More than
60% of the 27 million pound lobster catch is made into such products and shipped around
the world. A threatened increase in the minimum size of canners could devastate the canner industry on PEI.

This big fella's number is up. He weighs over 8 pounds
and is between 20 and 50 years old. He's too tough to eat but he
weighs too much to throw back at $3.50 a pound.