Revisiting Charles Kuralt's America for August in Boothbay Harbor, Maine:
You can't appreciate coastal Maine without understanding the life of the lobsterman. Stan Coffin tried to help me understand.
"I got up at five A.M. and left the harbor before daylight. I used a spotlight to find my buoys. I would stay out all day, get in after dark, work until eleven o'clock at night building and repairing traps, and leave again before the sun came up the next morning. I did that week in and week out, and the year around.
"I had seventeen hundred traps, far more than the average lobsterman, and I could haul half of them in one day. I had eight-trap strings. I could haul 'em, empty out the lobsters, bait 'em and set 'em in six minutes, with the stern man doing the measuring and baiting. For bait, you need herring or porgy. Some might use mackerel, but it's no good, too oily. It physics the lobsters and they go to dying on you. If a lobster measures less than three and a quarter inches from the eye socket to the back of the body, you have to put him back, and you'll put back twenty for every one you can keep. A lot of your job is putting back shorts.
. . .
"You lose traps to storms, especially in shallow waters where I always fished, and you lose traps to other lobstermen cutting your lines. You can report that to the warden, but I never bothered with the warden. I just retaliated. If you don't react right away, you'll soon be out of business. A lobsterman might be jealous of you, think you're working too hard. He'll wait for a foggy day and go to rifling your traps. If there's one bit of fog out there, the courts will say you mightn't have seen him and throw it out. I didn't like doing dirty work in the fog, but I learned to do it. I had to, to protect myself.
"Anybody can buy a boat, build some traps, get a license, and go lobstering. But you'll never go lobstering unless you're accepted by the other men in the harbor. If I were starting now, I'd get me a string of thirty-five or forty traps, no more, and if I lost one, somebody else would lose two. If I lost them all, somebody with more than I had would lose them all. After a while, I wouldn't lose so many. And then I'd start adding traps. It's still a rough occupation. Many a lobster boat goes out with a shotgun aboard.
. . .
You cannot escape lobsters in Maine. They are on the raodside signs, on the license plates, on the menus. The McDonald's in Brunswick offers a McLobster sandwich, which I caution against. In Bar Harbor, I saw lobster ice cream, but I can offer no judgment, because after giving lobster ice cream a moment of thought, I ordered Swiss Chocolate Almond.
I have heard that lobsters were once so common in Maine that people picked them up on the beaches by the basketful. They were fed mainly to people on the poor farms and prisoners in the town jails. Now, everywhere in the country, a Maine lobster is considered an extravagent indulgence. Even lobstermen are impressed by lobsters.
Tags: Charles Kuralt, America, Maine, lobsters
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