How to Love a Lobster

You have to dress right for lobster fishing in Maine in late November. You need the entire outfit, starting with a one-piece insulated Dickies work suit from Reny's house of bargains in Camden, $39.99. Under the Dickies, a full set of thermals, flannel shirt and oiled wool sweater. Oilskin pants and seaboots. Thick socks, two pairs of gloves and a woolen hat pulled down over the ears.

Instead of seaboots I had felt-lined snow boots with buckles, zippers and drawstrings. Not very nautical, but so what? This is not a test.

Today's weather word is the same as yesterday's: frigid. My breath, hanging in the frozen air, is thick enough to write on.

Sitting on the dock of the bay: the town dock at Lincolnville, Maine, on Penobscot Bay. It's seven o'clock in the morning. The water is so still and clear it's like Jell-O. Every detail—the dock, anchored lobster boats, islands—looks as if it were stuck to the surface.

Friends had set me up with Mike Hutchings for my introduction to lobster fishing. We met on the dock. Mike got out of his truck and took in my new Dickies and snow boots with a quick twitch of eyebrow. Instead of hello, he said, "You ain't gonna come out there and puke on us, are you?"

He introduced me to his sternman, Kenny. Kenny didn't talk much. The two of us got on with the business of hauling bait from the dock down a gangway to the float while Mike took a dinghy out to the mooring and brought his lobster boat alongside. The bait was frozen salmon carcasses in flat wooden crates. It came from a nearby fish factory. It could have been just about any fish, but it was salmon that day because that's what was available. The lobsters in Maine eat better than a lot of people.

What else should we know about our friends the lobsters? They eat their shells after shedding them. They stay together for a week after mating—not out of sentiment but on the off chance the other will snuff it and provide a handy lunch. They can be left-handed or right-handed, meaning that the big crusher claw or the smaller cutting claw can appear on either side. They can regrow missing claws or legs. They like digging for clams. Females have been known to carry up to 100,000 eggs.

This highly prized and ever-delectable creature comes from a truly appalling family situation, incest and cannibalism being pretty much taken for granted in the lobster world. The lobster starts out life with every disadvantage—born with thousands of brothers and sisters, abandoned at a young age by both parents and set upon by voracious predators the moment its mother shakes free and goes off to mate with some other lobster smoothy.

As an egg, the offspring rises to the surface and is quickly eaten—more than 99 percent become fish food before they get the chance to sink to the bottom. If a young lobster makes it that far, it digs a hole and hides, and who can blame the poor bastard after what it's been through? As lobsters get bigger, they seek out smaller lobsters and eat them. They also eat worms, crabs, fish and anything else they can stuff into their mouths, especially decaying animal matter, since they are basically scavengers that would eat a dead elephant if they found one—or, come to that, a dead seafarer. In short, they have the same kind of senseless greed common to all fish and many people in corporate America. If very young lobsters weren't scattered by ocean currents and tides, they would have eaten themselves into extinction long before we arrived.

We, in a reversal of our usual role as scourge of the planet, help keep lobsters alive, even if it is for the purpose of killing them. It is not for us to judge which is preferable, either from a moral standpoint or from the lobsters' point of view: to be eaten by other lobsters, ripped to shreds by giant fish or plunged alive into boiling water for human consumption. (Some people believe that lobsters scream when you drop them into the pot. They don't. In fact, they are whistling for a taxi.)

Apart from having sex and eating, the main lobster activity is shedding. By the time it reaches commercial size—which takes anywhere from five to ten years—the lobster has changed shells 25 times, expanding in size every time it sheds. Luckily, most lobsters shed at around the same time, midsummer, and thus are less likely to eat one another when they are at their softest and most vulnerable.

They are sedentary, reclusive and deeply private by nature because of the abuse they suffered as children. They come out only at night, they hate to travel—one unusual specimen was tracked 138 nautical miles from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod on a journey that took a year—and though they have several thousand lenses in each eye, they can't see very well. They are also clumsy when it comes to swimming forward, though they've been clocked at 25 feet a second while going backward.

You find lobsters in all the world's oceans and seas, but there is only one Homarus americanus, and that's found between Labrador and North Carolina—and nowhere else. There are spiny lobsters in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, and off Australia, Florida, South America and South Africa, but those are bogus lobsters. None of them compares to the Yankee Doodle job, none of them sports the big, meaty claws and the distinctive sweet succulence of H. americanus—not even the European Homarus gammarus, which, like European cars, tend to be small, sleek and slender.

People don't want small, sleek lobsters, they want lobsters as big as rhinos, lobsters big enough to carry you to the office, like the ones they used to find on the New England seabed. All gone now, alas, but there was a time when the colonials routinely landed four-footers. In Canada they used crushed lobsters as fertilizer on the potato fields or fed them to the poor.

The largest lobster on record was caught in Canadian waters, weighed more than 44 pounds and was thought to be more than 100 years old. Some people would call this a wonder from the deep, but those of us who truly love and appreciate the noble lobby would call it dinner for six.

•

To catch the beast, you have to lure it into a trap. Every lobsterman has his own theory about which bait works best. In fact, every lobsterman has his own theory about every aspect of lobstering, nature and mankind, though he will change it if it starts sounding too much like someone else's theory.

Mike is not big on theories, at least not for general discussion. He's been fishing for lobsters for 20 years, since he was a boy. Mike figures that when you're dealing with nature, anything that you thought you knew yesterday means nothing today because everything changes in nature from one day to the next, if not sooner.

Even perfect days aren't truly perfect when you make your living taking fish out of the sea. Even on a good day, when the catch is OK, the weather's fair, nothing breaks and nobody gets hurt, you think about the days ahead and how this or that could go wrong: The weather turns, the fish aren't there, but that's too bad because you've already paid for the bait and fuel and you're stuck with them. Add to that the chance and cost of mechanical failure. Human failure. Mistakes of the kind that can wipe you out financially or just wipe you out, period.

Then people go into a restaurant in the city, see the price of lobster and say, "What the hell is this? Those guys have to be making a fortune." What they don't know is that between fisherman and consumer is an army of middlemen—wholesalers, cooperatives, truckers, dealers, airlines, packers, retailers, restaurants—each taking a cut and jamming up the price.

Mike is an independent. He fishes for himself, meaning he doesn't belong to a lobstermen's cooperative and he's not tied in with wholesalers, city dealers or any other formal setup. He sells to stores, restaurants and individuals for the best price that he can get. He has a live-storage tank in the water—it's called a lobster car—where he can hang on to his catch and wait out a slow market.

When the fishing drops off in the winter, he plows snow and takes his wife to Florida for a week.

"Fishing and fucking, that's what we do around here," said Mike. "There's not so much of the fishing in winter."

•

When I think about lobsters, I think of Paul Harvey, the radio guy who sounds as if he swallowed a piece of machinery and can't get rid of it. The first time I saw lobsters plucked from the ocean, Paul Harvey was doing a commercial on the radio. He was close to a breakdown. "Never have I been more proud to represent Buick," he sobbed, and that was when I saw my first lobsters, six of the beauties, along with two crabs and a starfish, hauled up in a trap from the bottom of Penobscot Bay and onto the starboard side of Mike's boat, Pot Luck.

To get to that haul, we had driven across the stillness of the bay, Mike at the wheel and Kenny sewing up bait.

My job was to put rubber bands on the lobsters' claws. I was the out-of-town floorshow on Pot Luck. Having never held a live lobster, I knew my performance would be watched with interest by Mike and Kenny. It's only human to hope that before the day is finished, you'll have the pleasure of watching a stranger throw up and run around with a lobster clamped to his face.

Pot Luck is a fiberglass 30-footer, built strong and stubby like its owner. There is an eight-cylinder 350-horsepower Chevy engine under the foredeck. The roar of the engine failed to drown out an ancient radio under the wheelhouse roof that was permanently tuned to an oldies station.

Apart from the engine room up forward, the rest of the layout is open, (continued on page 166)How to Love a Lobster(continued from page 130) including the wheelhouse. Crates for bait and lobsters take up the remaining space, leaving room for the crew to work.

Also in the wheelhouse are a radar, a loran and a VHF radio, none of them in use at the time. The only navigational instrument switched on was a depth-sounder. It has a brightly colored screen that shows the condition of the bottom of the bay: green and blue for soft bottom, red for hard. Depending on many variables, the lobsters might be on soft or hard ground, but since Pot Luck's traps had already been set, the screen wasn't used so much as a guide to lobsters as a map that, in conjunction with visible landmarks on nearby islands and on the mainland, told Mike where he was resetting his baited traps.

The Hutchings lobster kingdom contains close to a thousand traps laid out in pairs on the bottom of Penobscot Bay, marked on the surface with buoys painted in Mike's colors, red and yellow, and stenciled with his initials and license number. Each pair of traps, with line and buoys, costs him about $110.

Property and secrecy are two of the most important words in the lobsterman's glossary. But territory is definitely word number one.

"This is a wickedly territorial business," Mike said. "By law, people can fish where they like. Well, that particular idea doesn't mean a hell of a lot out here. You make the wrong move—fish where you shouldn't, haul the wrong traps—and it gets pretty mean. Fast. Some of those guys will threaten you first, maybe. More likely they'll cut your lines. Or they'll haul your traps and wreck them. Sink your boat if they have to. A lobster war is the same as a range war. It's all about territory. You have to protect your own. We haven't had much trouble up around here, but you look at Stonington, Vinalhaven, well, that's something else. In Casco last summer they were pointing guns at one another. Cutthroat, that's what it is, this business."

Whatever it is, the lobster-fishing business seems to work. Right now, there are more lobsters off the Maine coast than there have been in years. Although there was a slight decline in 1992, the 1991 catch was 30.8 million pounds, the biggest annual haul since records were instituted in the 1880s. In Canada they catch about three times that amount every year.

The marine scientists who study lobsters in the Maine fishing industry have theories about this abundance. As scientists engaged in the same work for the same reasons, some of them disagree with one another, some disagree with the fishermen and none of them pretends to know the true cause.

Theories include:

• Volcanic activity, which has temporarily changed the climate and increased water temperature. A warmer ocean has encouraged lobsters to think they're having a good time and thus breed in greater numbers.

• Lack of predators. The lobsters' natural enemies—cod, for instance—are disappearing because of overfishing.

• The fishing industry. If the industry had spent as much money on conservation in the past 50 years as it has spent on improved technology for hoovering the seabed, scientists say, there would be more cod. But it hasn't, so there isn't.

But there are lots of lobsters.

My personal belief is that while the population is booming, sensible innovations are needed to maintain it, such as forcing lobstermen at gunpoint to use fly rods and hypnosis.

In the absence of those controls, this is how to catch lobsters in Penobscot Bay:

Drive the boat up to the buoys that mark the traps, haul the buoys aboard and take a couple of turns of line around a hydraulic winch, which is driven off a belt from the engine. Then turn up the throttle until the traps surface, keeping fingers and loose clothing well clear of the winch, and let the spare line fall on the deck.

Loaded traps and a couple hundred feet of pot warp coming over the side and around the winch carry water, weed and bits of shell that spew in all directions. That's why you need oilskin pants. Mike's and Kenny's pants were bib types, while mine stopped at the waist. Within an hour I smelled as ripe as a clump of wet seaweed.

Lobstermen don't use the rounded wood-lath pots you see on postcards. The modern version is rectangular and made of plastic-coated steel wire, roughly 4'x2' and divided into two compartments, one for bait, the other to trap the lobsters after they've eaten. If they wanted to, the lobsters could get out the same way they came in, the dummies, but they are not known for deep thinking, so they usually blunder around inside the trap and wait for more grub. Undersized youngsters can escape through a special trapdoor if they can find it, but they're not as bright as they should be, either. Mike routinely catches and releases the same lobsters, recognizing them by marks or by the V-shaped notch lobstermen cut in the tails of egg-bearing females before they throw them back.

As each pair of traps came on board, Mike removed the inmates, then slid the trap along the starboard rail to Kenny, who took out the old bait and replaced it with fresh. This meant threading twine through the eye of a baiting iron, a thick, needlelike tool, and then through the eyes of a few salmon carcasses that he clipped inside the trap.

Every incoming lobster was measured, except those that were clearly too big or too small to be legal. The big ones go back because they make good breeders. To be a legal catch in Maine, a lobster must measure between three and a quarter inches and five inches from its eye socket to the back of its head, not that lobsters have heads as we know them. What they have is a carapace, which is the front end of the lobster. This is where you find the essential organs, including the lumpy slime that causes squeamish diners to cry, "I'm not eating that green junk!"

As all truly enlightened lobby lovers know, however, the only parts of a lobster you don't eat are the gills, the stomach and the vein—it's actually a waste canal—running down its back. The shell can be simmered in the water used to cook the lobster—this makes a base for lobster broth—or ground up and stored in a freezer for use in sauces and soups. The green junk is called tomalley and should be eaten along with the watery white meat inside the shell and all the other good bits that can be scraped off or sucked out.

I asked Mike how he liked his lobsters.

"My personal favorite," he said, "is the soft-shell. When you talk food, there's nothing sweeter on this earth than a soft-shell lobster."

•

Once the traps were rebaited, Mike dropped the buoys overboard and drove toward the next set of markers, leaving the line and newly baited traps to slide along the gunwale and over the stern. They don't slide gently off the boat, they go over in a great speeding rush, fast enough to take you with them if you get your foot caught in a loop. Nobody swims at their best while being dragged underwater by a pair of lobster traps and a couple hundred feet of wet rope.

There was no idle chat while we worked. I concentrated on sticking rubber bands on the claws. For this you use a tool that looks like a pair of pliers. You slip a band over the closed end and squeeze the handles to stretch the band so it fits over the claw. After a couple hours your hand feels as if people have been walking on it with hobnailed boots.

Here's how to hold a live lobster: Grasp it behind the claws—firmly, but don't use a death grip—with the claws roughly parallel to each other. If your grip is too flabby, the lobster will flex its mighty tail and spring out of your hand.

"This is better than I expected," Mike said when we stopped to eat our sandwiches. He pulled back the throttle to a low rumble. Out of the lunchtime sun a prop-driven silver monoplane swooped down on us and banked off the starboard side, just above the water. It was one of Mike's friends. "He usually drops by if he knows that I'm out here." Mike was grinning like a big kid. "We might as well stay out till the candle falls out of the sky."

The candle started falling around five. By then we had four boxes of lobsters and a bushel of culls—lobsters that have lost a claw. The culls end up at Chinese restaurants or in the pots of buyers who cook the meat and sell it. Chances are that when you buy lobster salad, you are exploiting a handicapped lobster.

As we unloaded at the dock, I asked Mike whether the fishing was always as good as it had been that day. You can ask a commercial fisherman that question in any part of the world and you will get the same answer, even if his boat is sinking under the weight of the day's catch: "I've seen better." Damned if I have, but what do I know?