Why so few lobster boats?

lobster buoys on a calm morning

Come July and August, somewhere between six and seven a.m., the growl of lobster boats revving and calming as they move from trap to trap wafts in our windows on Muscongus Bay. A confetti of lobster buoys dots the water of the sound, and when going out ourselves, we have to keep a sharp eye out to avoid fouling our boat propellor in the rope that leads from each buoy to a trap on the bottom.

That's most years.

This year, buoys are scarce in the shallow waters near Hockomock Point.  Early mornings are quiet.  Even the gulls hush their raucous cries without the attraction of stinky bait being scooped into nets and tied into lobster traps.  And this is in a year when a glut of lobsters has driven prices paid to lobstermen down to a forty-year low.  What's going on?

eggs on the tail of a female lobster

First, the lobster glut. Lobster landings have been rising steadily for the past ten years, but this is the biggest year yet.  Why?  Most fishermen and scientists believe that lobstering in the Gulf of Maine is a well-managed fishery.  Lobster licenses are limited.  Only lobsters of a certain size--between three and five inches from behind the eye to the end of the back--may be kept. The others must be thrown back, the smaller ones to grow more and the larger ones to serve as (presumably robust) breeding stock.
Any egger--a female with 10,000 eggs clinging to her tail--must not only be thrown back, but her tail must be notched so that every fisherman forever knows that as a breeding female, she's off limits.

Another factor in the recent rise in lobster catches may be the decline in the population of groundfish, the major predators of young post-larval lobsters.  Only now, after years of vigorous management, is the population of cod beginning to rebound.  As for how cod affect young lobsters, I can vouch for that: this weekend we landed four cod, more than in decades, and three of the four had young, three-inch lobsters in their throats.

cod

In theory, a third factor is found by looking at lobster fishing as a great, opportunistic aquaculture project.  Most lobsters have moved in and out of traps, eating bait fish, many times before they're finally large enough not to fit out the special escape hatches built into each trap.  Most have probably been caught and thrown back many times before they're large enough to catch and keep.  Lobsters have even been filmed moving in and out of unbaited traps to check the kitchen.  Maybe we have so many lobsters because we're feeding them well.

But why the special glut this year?  The reason seems to be an especially warm winter. One effect was an earlier and more productive lobster fishing season in the Canadian part of the Gulf of Maine.  Coupled with that, plentiful shedders or soft-shell lobsters, those that come closer inshore to molt, arrived in Maine waters about six weeks earlier than usual, at a time when the Canadian processing plants, which take about 50% of Maine lobsters, were still full with the large Canadian take.  Soft shell lobsters, which are the usual summer variety, are difficult to ship long distances in the shell, so the local market is full, and lobstermen are getting only around $2 per pound.

Why then, are lobster boats so scarce in Muscongus Sound?  I can offer a couple of hypotheses.  One reason may be an unofficial lobster strike. Up and down the coast, lobstermen have organized hasty protests by staying in, not going fishing, in hopes that prices will go up.  It hasn't worked yet.

The problem with this hypothesis is that none of the lobster strikes have lasted more than a week.  Besides, in the next bay east, or farther out in deeper water, pot buoys are still numerous.

idle lobster traps with growing weeds

So my second hypothesis is that lobsters have moved offshore or Downeast to cooler waters.  I can't remember a year when jumping off our dock at Hockomock Point has been less chilling than this year.  Swimming off the dock used to be so cold that the only reason to do it would be to feel good when you got out.  This year it's just a pleasant cool-down on hot, muggy days.

So maybe the same warm waters that brought the lobsters in to shed early has now driven them farther north and east to escape waters that have become unseasonably warm.  Meanwhile, another lobster season is about to open in New Brunswick, and the Canadian lobstermen are already grumbling about the glut of Maine lobster driving down the market.

At a time when it's hard to keep up with what fish it's "green" to eat, which species are well-managed and which are in decline, it's good to know that this summer, at least, eating lobster as fast as we can may be a patriotic act.

Alewives on the Damariscotta River

Over Memorial Day weekend, Damariscotta Mills, Maine, held an alewife festival to help raise money for restoring the fish ladder that leads from the Damariscotta River to Damariscotta Lake.  I've heard about the alewife run for years, but this is the first time the family has ever attended.

Alewives are herring, and they are anadromous, meaning they spend part of their lives in fresh water and part in salt water.  Born in lakes, they spend several years at sea and return to their native rivers and streams to spawn.  Unlike salmon, who spawn and die, alewives can make the run to their mating ground as many as eight times, as long as they can avoid seabirds, fishermen, and exhaustion. Gulls, ospreys, and great blue herons feast on them, while fish that die of exhaustion feed scavengers like raccoons and bald eagles.


[These photos came from a blog by A. Phillippi http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/aphillippi/alwife.htm]

The fish ladder at Damariscotta Mills eases a 42-foot climb around a dam from river to lake.  It consists of a series of rockbound pools separated by small water runs about a foot high.  The pools wind through a wooded dell like the decorative stream of a miniature golf course.  The difference is that these pools and the runs between them are clogged with fish, resting and then swimming madly upstream.  The adult fish make the migration in late May, and around October or November, the fry let themselves return to the river, tail-first (I suppose they're swimming in place to keep themselves oriented correctly.)

In colonial times, villagers could scoop up enough fish in the two-week run to feed the village for the winter.  Alewives were preserved by smoking, and there is still a small, surprisingly sweet-smelling smokehouse. Today, alewives serve as bait for Maine's lobster industry, which brings in close to one million pounds of lobster in a good year.

To count the alewives, volunteers stand with a clicker at the narrow top chute into the lake. For the first ten minutes of each hour, a volunteer counts the fish as they shoot through the last opening.  Standing nearby, I counted 30 fish in one minute.  A fish every two seconds for two weeks would be just over 600,000 fish, but the actual estimate for this year is about 350,000.

Maine has long cold winters and rocky soil, but seeing the alewife run gave me an insight into the marine riches and steady protein source that might have made the midcoast an attractive place for colonists to settle.

Irene in Maine

Hurricane Irene has passed, dropping devastating floods in Vermont and parts of upstate New York; She only brushed against midcoast Maine. People here were prepared for tropical storm force winds and a downpour. By Friday, six or eight lobster boats had steamed at high tide into the Mill Pond, a quiet pool beyond a small inlet at the very most inland point of the bay. Normally the Mill Pond is known mainly for its clam flats, and the lobstermen beached their boats at high tide and presumably walked away through the marsh grass.

We decided to keep our two boats, a lobster boat and a fourteen foot sailboat, on their moorings. We brought the canoe up under the deck, hid the swim ladder under a small rowboat turned upside down and lashed down on the dock, and carriedin all the chairs from the terrace.

Saturday night it rained hard, and the wind rose, forming whitecaps on the bay. Sunday morning broke foggy but not raining. The wind roared in from the east, a most unusual direction. A large island protects us to the east, but the short still built up a chop. Over the course of the day, the wind slowly mounted as it veered from east to southeast to south.

Still no rain fell. High tide arrived at 10 pm. It was a moon tide, already the highest tide of the month; and on top of that came the two-foot remnant of the storm surge and the driving wind. Waves broke at the edge of the lawn. Spray flew over the top of the pier. The ramp leading down from the stone pier to the float, which varies between about a ten percent grade and a forty percent grade as the tide rises and falls, was now almost flat. In the middle of the ramp, a juvenile herring gull huddled against the wind, looking at us, too exhausted to fly away as we approached. Another hovered about six feet off the dock, unmoving in mid air, like an aerodynamic airplane hull passing standard in a wind tunnel.

The night passed, and the tide fell. Today dawned as bright and glittering as only a late summer day on the coast can be. A short chop and a long swell still agitated the water, while driftwood and rafts of rockweed littered the surface. Nobody seemed to be out lobstering. One of our floats and one of our moorings had shifted several feet downwind, and the lawn was covered with oak leaves--no birch, pine, maple, or beech leaves, only oak leaves.

Irene is gone, but if predictions of climate change are right, as the ocean warms, we will have more extreme weather events, as unexpected as a hurricane in Vermont. Fifty years from now, the ocean may lap the edges of the lawn at every high tide, and the trees that now line the shore may well have washed away, not just here, but all over the world. It's a sobering thought.

Wiscasset: most annoying village in Maine

Wiscasset calls itself "the prettiest village in Maine." The motto is emblazoned on a sign you encounter when entering the town along Route One. By the time you see it, however, you have already waited in stop-and-go traffic that stretches back along the highway three and a half miles. You're hot, bored, and annoyed as you creep down the hill through the two blocks of downtown.

And there you see it, the reason for your delay. Traffic immediately stops for every pedestrian who wants to cross the street. At high traffic times, there is one traffic cop at each of the two blocks, stopping miles of traffic to let a tourist walk twenty feet.

At least two thirds of these pedestrians are crossing the street to wait in line at Red's Eats, a lobster shack that has somehow acquired the reputation of having the best lobster rolls on the coast. The New York Times touts it for its lobster rolls and local color. People cross the street to wait in long lines at Red's even though there's another, somewhat larger lobster roll place on the other side.

What this demonstrates to me is that people who go to Red's Eats don't mind waiting in line. In fact, they seem to like it. Therefore, why not let them wait on the sidewalk until several groups have aggregated before stopping the traffic to let them pass?

When Route One was being constructed, the option was raised of having a bypass around Wiscasset. But according to the story I've heard, Wiscasset merchants didn't want a bypass. They wanted people to drive past their stores. And drive past they do, far too annoyed to stop. This is in contrast to the tactic followed by Damariscotta and Newcastle. The main highway bypasses them, but a loop called Business Route One passes through the two towns, which now have thriving businesses and crowded parking lots and restaurants. Local traffic passes through the towns, taking five minutes tops.

Sitting in traffic south of Wiscasset this afternoon, I had time to do a little math. Say that on average, for ten hours a day in high season, north-going traffic stretches back three miles from Wiscasset. I counted, and there are probably about 150 cars per mile. Because they're vacationers rather than commuters, let's conservatively assign two passengers per car. It takes half an hour for a car to move the three miles. That means that each day, Wiscasset annoys 18,000 people trying to drive north.

Ah, but what about the people who stop in the prettiest village and get to cross the street without ever having to wait for a WALK signal? How many of them are there each day?

Making a lobster roll probably takes thirty seconds, and Red's Eats isn't big enough to have too many sandwich makers. Plus there are drinks, making change, passing out napkins... So let's generously say 200 people per hour are delighted by the charm and deliciousness of the lobster roll experience. And let's double that for the fifty percent of visitors who may cross the street for other reasons. In a ten hour day, that means 4000 people are happy about Wiscasset's policy.

Now let's imagine that Wiscasset decides to implement a new policy, where traffic cops wait for three separate parties to gather on the sidewalk ready to cross the street before they raise their hands and stop the miles of traffic. A little thought convinces me that such a move would reduce the length of the traffic backup by two thirds. Instead of waiting thirty minutes to make it through the prettiest village in Maine, drivers would have to wait only ten minutes. 18,000 people a day would be twenty minutes happier, while 4000 people a day might be two minutes unhappier. The happiness advantage of the new policy comes out to 352,000 people-minutes. That's a lot of happiness.

Of course, maybe Wiscasset doesn't care about the happiness of those driving through. But it should care. Some of those drivers are people who stop and shop in places they like. Some are taxpayers. Some are philanthropists. Some are legislators. What village, no matter how pretty, can afford to annoy them all?

Katahdin II

Here's a guest entry from my husband Leo:

Damian & I took a quick trip up to Baxter State Park in Maine with Eric and Lian to climb Mt Katahdin. We arrived late Friday night, staying at a bunk cabin in Millinocket, then getting up at 4am to get to the park entrance in time to secure a parking space at Roaring Brook campground (since we didn't purchase one of the 40 parking permits in advance, it was first-come, first-served).

We set off on foot at 8:40am, hiking the Roaring Brook trail to Chimney Pond, then up the Saddle Trail to the Baxter peak plateau. It was a beautiful day - sunny, breezy, 65F - so different from the sleet conditions we encountered in summer 2007! We were up at the top by 2pm and treated to wonderful views in all directions, the leaves just beginning to turn in some areas.

Given the ideal conditions, we decided to hike along the Knife Edge to Pomola Peak. This was a hairy experience of clambering over boulders, with the average width of the crest only about 30ft, and in some sections as narrow as 12 ft, requiring hand-over-hand climbing for much of the way. Damian and Lian, despite their apprehension, were real champions, brave and mutually helpful. Eventually we got to the Helon Taylor trail, descending after sunset and using flashlights to get back to Roaring Brook at 7:40pm - in all it was a 10 mile, 4000 ft, 11 hour hike.

Katahdin

Leo and Damian are off to climb Mt. Katahdin this weekend. It's the highest mountain in Maine,



and I've climbed it with family three times: once on Rhianon's ninth birthday, once when the twins were ten, and once when Damian was ten. It's a tough climb, especially for me, with my lungs compromised by years and years of asthma. The five thousand foot climb starts off nicely enough among the trees, but then gets ever rockier and steeper until you're clambering over boulders or hauling yourself up among iron handholds.

Still, at the treeless top, it's beautiful. Crossing the high plateau the first time , walking among blueberries and mountain cranberries, I experienced a moment of pure elation, mixed of pride and fatigue and joy at the fresh, fresh air.

Two summer ago, along with our good friend and fearless woodsman Eric Harrington, we climbed the Hunt Trail on an August day that was predicted to be sunny and in the seventies. We set off in the early sunshine, but we hadn't gone the first mile before the rain began to sputter on and off. By the time we emerged from the trees, the rain had grown cold, and the boulders were slippery. On the plateau, sleet was blowing sideways, and the wind was gusting so hard I worried about Damian and his friend Lian, the two youngest and lightest of our party. Despite the cold and the falling visibility, we decided to cross the mile and a half of plateau to the elevation sign at the peak. The picture we took at the peak is grayed out and blurry: we look as if we're caught in a winter storm.

At that point our only concern was to get down before dark. We selected a more direct route down the mountain. It led down a steep slope of scree. All I could think about was one of us slipping and turning an ankle. Leo stayed close to Damian, and Owen came back to stick by me and give me a hand over the worst parts. We managed to get down out of the wind, and at 4 pm, standing in the pouring rain and the partial shelter of two leaning rocks, we tore into our lunch: packets of tuna crumbled by hand over pieces of pita bread. Then we kept walking.

Eventually we reached a bunkhouse, rested a few minutes, and set off again along the shallower, wooded trail, now soft underfoot. The rain finally petered out, and we meandered through the woods, among the ponds, and eventually down to the parking lot, where we borrowed a friendly couple's car to get back to our own campsite.

That was my last trip to Katahdin. Not necessarily my final trip - I didn't say that - just my most recent. Still, this weekend Leo and Damian are going without me.

Waiting for Earl

All week, we waited for Hurricane Earl with mild apprehension. Should we haul the boats? How high would the winds be? For a while there was a tropical storm watch, then warnings of winds 30 to 40 miles per hour, then only 20 to 30.

Yesterday was leaden gray and calm, though the wind rose slightly during the day. Damian and I went swimming off the dock so that someday we could say we swam in the Atlantic the day the hurricane arrived. The water seemed a few degrees colder than it has been, but maybe we just thought so because the air was cooler.

By evening, a thick fog rolled in. Still no sign of seriously bad weather. Damian wanted to swim again at midnight, and because it's so nearly the last day of summer, I acquiesced. We stayed up as late as we could, he belatedly finishing summer reading homework, I reading The Big Sleep.

Maybe the book title affected me, but I couldn't make it to midnight, so at 11:15 we changed into clammy bathing suits and made our way down through utter darkness to the dock, where the automatic floodlights sprang on. It had been raining intermittently, and the dock was wet underfoot. The fog hung at a distance, blotting out the stars and draping the far shore in gauze. The tide was dead low, and the water so smooth it looked almost greasy.

One after the other, we took the jump, a long pitch into dark water. The water was pleasantly cool. As we climbed out, rain began to fall in large, vigorous drops that glittered in the floodlights. Wrapped in towels, Damian and I congratulated each other for being extremely cool.

Earl arrived just before dawn, a gray and weepy old man with no bluster left in him. Despite the drenching rain, the leaves are hardly fluttering on the trees. We'll be bailing boats. I don't know about a swim.

Fairy Houses on Monhegan

I don’t know when the fairy houses first started appearing on Monhegan Island. Monhegan is the farthest east of the islands on Muscongus Bay in midcoast Maine, ten miles offshore and only a square mile in area. It’s one of the last Maine islands still inhabited year-round. The island economy is based on lobsters and summer tourists. A one-room schoolhouse contains eight grades. Next to the lighthouse, there’s an art museum; painters such as Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper have loved coming to Monhegan for over a century.

One of the many Monhegan hiking trails passes through Cathedral Woods, where towering conifers filter the sunlight, and it’s there that the fairy houses began to appear: little houses built of sticks or bark, decorated with fragments of shell, bits of string, or patches of moss, surrounded by pebbled walkways and tiny walls. The fairy village grew each summer, sprouting new houses overnight. Passersby were inspired to innovate, with houses built in the hollows of trees, decorated with berries and flower petals, furnished with acorns.

But the surrounding ground was being denuded of moss. Bar peeled off trees. The village was unsustainable. Eventually, the residents posted signs prohibiting the construction of any more fairy houses, and for the most part, the fairies complied. I didn't get out to Monhegan this summer, so I don’t know what’s left.

Still, in a limited place like your own backyard, there’s nothing wrong with starting to construct a fairy village. Just a house or two here and there. After all, people plant butterfly gardens to attract butterflies, and fairies are much more rare.

Jumping off the dock in Maine

Over the years we've developed a tradition that whenever people arrive at our Maine house for the first time that season, they have to jump off the dock into the ocean. Depending on the time of day, the tide, the month, and the weather, that can be a pretty daunting challenge. Last summer a French family we'd never met before visited. When they immediately trooped down to the dock in their bathing suits and jumped, any smidgens of doubt about French fortitude receded.

The dock is actually a stone wharf, with huge granite blocks held in by pilings. At high tide the drop to the water is only about six feet, but at low tide it's more like fifteen. That means a lot of time on the way down to think about how cold it's going to be when you hit. Once you're in and paddling as fast as you can back to the float, a new challenge looms: heaving yourself out of the water without looking too much like a walrus.

The past few summers, though, the water in Muscongus Bay seems to be getting warmer. It's often quite pleasant to peel away from work or cooking or tennis to plunge into the water and get a good salty sinus rinse. We often play the game of "Categories." Just as the jumper takes off, another person calls out a category, and the jumper must shout out a member of that category before hitting the water. Examples of easy categories are "Colors!","Girls!" or "Sports!" More difficult ones might be "Muscles!" "Ice Cream Flavors!" (the jumper has almost hit the water by the time you finish the question), or "Brands of tandem bicycle!"

For Categories, low tide is an advantage.

Every summer we take our old lobster boat out to Monhegan Island, the farthest east of any land in Muscongus Bay, and about ten miles offshore. The water is probably ten degrees colder there than by our house, but the girls still dare us all to jump off the town wharf before departing at the end of the day. It's like throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain: it ensures that you'll return. People fishing for pollock off the wharf, tourists waiting for the ferry to return them to the mainland, and fishermen rowing ashore from moored lobster boats, all watch with something between admiration and incredulity.

All that attention--maybe that's what the girls are really after.

Goldfinches at Sunset

Goldfinches gathered at my friends' bird feeder last night as we sat after dinner. You don't have to know much about birds to notice goldfinches in summer, with their flashy yellow and black feathers and their quick swooping flight. They fluttered six and eight at a time around the thistle feeder, then shot back to a crabapple tree overhanging my friends' yard.

I commented that I've always loved the arrival of goldfinches as a signal of spring, but Bruce told me that they're here all the time. It's just we don't notice them, because their color is drab until they molt in time for the breeding season. You can see the changes here. Then he pointed out a female, clad in an unassuming greenish brown with faint yellow highlights.

I suppose there's some sort of moral here, about how we tend to overlook the everyday in favor of the garish, but I didn't worry about it. As the sun sank lower, the goldfinches waltzed in formation overhead, dark against the sky--until they twirled, and their feathers caught the sun, sending a bolt of yellow to us who watched below.

Puffball, an Invented Game

Damian has invented a summer game called “Puffball,” a fun, silly outdoor game for family or friends. Two to four may play, on grass, sand, or pavement. Required equipment includes one beach ball, tennis racquets (or badminton racquets) for each player, plus something to indicate the corners of up to four squares. We used old tennis balls.

Mark off a Puffball playing square for each player. The squares should be about eight feet on a side and should meet at the corner. (Or you can set them a bit farther apart from each other. All the rules of Puffball are negotiable.)

The game is similar to four-square. The point is to hit the beach ball into your opponent’s square. Each player begins with five points, and when you knock the ball out of bounds or it lands in your square you lose a point. Whoever is closest to the ball at the end of a play gets to serve the next play. Overhead serves are not allowed, and you must stand in the back half of your square to serve.

When a player’s score falls to zero, that player steps aside until the end of the round. The last player with points remaining in a round is that round’s winner and gets to move the back two corners of his square either forward or closer together. Of course, having a smaller square (now a rectangle or trapezoid) gives the person an advantage in the next round.

A ball that lands on a line is re-played. In our family we have passionate arguments about what’s in, out, or on the line. Some may find it helps to use string or chalk marks to delineate their squares rather than imaginary lines between tennis balls.

Those are the basic rules of Puffball. Of course, you can invent your own embellishments. That’s sort of the point. One of our embellishments is that if you “save” a ball that was clearly going out of bounds and manage to hit it into someone else’s box, making them lose a point, then on that play you also gain a point. This motivates people to go after some crazy balls, and they usually miss.

Enjoy Puffball, or write back with your favorite summer game invention!

Visting the Heron Rookery

Great blue herons nest on Wreck Island, just a few miles offshore. About once a summer, once the most delicate part of the nesting season has passed, we visit the rookery, riding out in our old converted lobster boat, the Granny II. This time we anchored fifty yards off the rocky beach, and the kids ferried us ashore in the round-bottomed dinghy.

The path to the rookery is inconspicuous in the underbrush at the edge of the rocks, but the raucous calls of the herons revealed the way. Soon we were among white-spattered bushes, looking up at dead tree branches spiking toward the sky. One tree had five nests, another three. The nests were a yard across, and in them the adolescent birds sat, hulking and entitled, grumbling loudly as they waited for their parents to come home bearing fish.

On the way home, we saw a minke whale, twenty feet long, arc out of the water. Farther on, twenty harbor seals hunted in a pack. In ominous silence, they slid toward a sloshing patch of water disturbed by jumping fish and jostling gulls.